#Green

How embarrassing for us all internationally. Not just a Fossil of the Day award, but we beat out all the other shamed attendees to win the overall Colossal Fossil of the Year award (dead link). Will someone please call an election and his ridiculous, lame duck Bush-esque government out of office, please ? It’s making us look like schmucks internationally.

‘Fossil of the Year goes to CANADA, for bringing a totally unacceptable position into Copenhagen and refusing to strengthen it one bit. Canada’s 2020 target is among the worst in the industrialized world, and leaked cabinet documents revealed that the governments is contemplating a cap-and-trade plan so weak that it would put even that target out of reach.

Story of Stuff author Annie Leonard presents her reasons that Cap and Trade is flawed and that the most important thing we need to do is agree on the global cap. Great animation: plain speaking, clear, concise and most of all, understandable.

More info at her website .

This is so many kinds of awesome.The guy who put this together is a genius.

And please remember to slap a climate change denier today. Hard. Really… you’re doing them a favour. I’m offering a bounty on Stephen Harper.

RAP NEWS - Copenhagen: Gore v Monckton

Great animation on the “we know that we don’t know” dangers of global warming. Really well done.

You can hear more about this campaign from Leo Murray on the site.

Meant to this a while back from an email that went round at work.

Love the idea. Simply… Offer to bring in a whack of business for one day to one business if they’ll pay for environmental improvements to their business with the proceeds.

Seems like the first run went well (and you have to love the Lil Wayne video spoof). Have to see whether it’s sustainable, but it is an interesting idea in crowdsourcing.

I just got through cleaning up and prepping my old 12" G4 Powerbook (quite seriously, the best computer I have ever used), to give to a friend whose 1st generation iBook is starting to wheeze with the things she needs it to do (and who is giving it to her Mom whose computing needs are relatively modest in comparison).

Now, as a preamble, I try to live quite greenly. I use low power appliances wherever I can, use public transport, take the train whenever practical instead of flying and in general, think of myself as a (compared to most people I know) as quite an easy-on-the-planet kind of guy. My problem is computers. I know they are horrendously toxic and everything about them from manufacturing to disposal is the anti-thesis of green but I make both my living off manipulating and making them more effective.

Just big props and a huge, hearty congratulations to my very dear friend ZA, the hottest greenpeace toxics campaigner and evil genius behind the Green My Apple campaign.

Steve Jobs’ announcement yesterday in the change in Apple policy (GPI’s take on it ) basically addresses many of the major points in the campaign and is a victory all round for the Greenpeace campaign, and most importantly, people and the planet.

Well done Ze! You kick ass!

I’m sitting here a spoiled brat compared to this woman. I am smack on the doorstep of the world’s largest urban park whereas this woman fought a hard battle of urban renewal to not just bring the first piece of green space adjoining the river to the polluted, overindustrialized and woefully badly urbanly “planned” South Bronx in sixty years (try and think of living someplace with nothing green for 60 years), but has also led an entire “green the ghetto” movement which has revitalized the area proving that not only is green sustainable, it’s also commercially profitable and good for the inhabitants.

Without question, one of the worst things for the environment is air travel.

Air travel is the world’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which cause climate change. Globally the world’s 16,000 commercial jet aircraft generate more than 700 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂), the world’s major greenhouse gas, per year. Indeed aviation generates nearly as much CO₂ annually as that from all human activities in Africa. One person flying a return trip between London and New York generates between 1.5 and 2 tonnes of CO₂.

While I find it hard to believe that there can still be sceptics on the climate change front, the fact is climate change deniers are on the uptick as the mighty PR machines that fuel lobbyists and crackpots swings into line against solid scientific evidence, major environmental campaigns and movies like An Inconvenient Truth (check out for instance, these very scary ads from a fossil fuel funded lobby group (dead link unsurprisingly).