Eco Blogger Call to Action: Make your own Chevy Advert

I just recieve an email from the Guy behind the Total Tactics blog. Apparently Chevy have decided its a great idea to get the public to design adverts for there new enorous SUV which they are currently trying to destroy the planet with. It does roughly half a mile to a gallon. Basically the e-mail suggested that we set up a Chevy carnival, create our own subversive eco-adverts and create links to all the others.

Carnivals of this kind are great...please join in if you have a blog.

Anyway, i had a go...Here is my attempt

• Heavy on the Chevy #1

Grist:

1. Heavy on the Chevy #1
2. Heavy on the Chevy #2
3. Heavy on the Chevy #3

Network Centric Advocacy:

1. Heavy on the Chevy #1
2. Heavy on the Chevy #2
3. Heavy on the Chevy #3
4. Heavy on the Chevy #4
5. Heavy on the Chevy #5
6. Heavy on the Chevy #6

Eco-Geek:

• Heavy on the Chevy #1

There is also a website specifically set up to collect these videos now! http://heavyonthechevy.crispynews.com/search

I should also point out as this post seems to have a lot of traffic flowing through it that there is actually a whole website here about climate change. You might like to have a look, comments in the past range from 'ok' to 'quite good' ;-P

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

See where everyone in the 'Climate Change Action' Group is on a map!

I sent out this email bellow and amazingly enough, i had 35 people on the map in the first 24 hours. Feel free to add you own name, plug your (hopefully climate related) website and have a look at what everyone else does and where they come from. I really like this feature.

'Climate Change Action' now has a Group Map on Frappr so we can all see each other on a map!
Come put yourself on the map, too!

To see the 'Climate Change Action' map, click below or paste the URL into your browser

http://www.frappr.com/?a=showmap&gid=608891&giv=1

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

My Climate Change Report has Just Had its Thousandth Download

My Report has Just Had its Thousandth (offical) Download.

A while back when i was working part time, not volunteering full time, i had plenty of spare time to spend on projects, such as my four part report "Climate Change: Facts and Impacts". This report has been available for some time on http://www.thewatt.com that site was hacked a while back so the record of number of downloads was reset to an earlier date...now for the first time it record over a 1000 downloads for my report--which probably equates to around 1300 in reality. This makes me think it was worth writing, i`m glad if i've educated a few people, i certainly educated myself.

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

Marginalise this! Climate Change Goes Mainstream.

Its a start....

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

Video of the Week: James Hansen on the Bush Administration

This week's video of the week is from CBS News. In this episode of '60 Minutes' Jim Hansen makes his views quite clear on how the bush administration deals with science and on how important it is that we act now to limit climate change.

"In my more than three decades in the government I've never witnessed such
restrictions on the ability of scientists to communicate with the public."

Postscript: Climate Change, VideoA, ScienceA

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

General Update + Progress Report (Climate Change Action)

Just a quick update on where things are at with the blog and with my work.

The blog is likely to be in competition with work for my time...and it will lose! The way in which it will lose is that it will have less original content. Regular updates are continuing but original content takes serious time.

Hello new subscribers, good to have you on board, hopefully i can keep you current with climate change news and events and you can keep me informed on climate change news and events! Suggestions for stories and comments are always wellcome.

Having said that current articles i am working on include:
1. Chunks of progress and theire defficiencies. (inspired by wedges)
2. "Asian Perspectives on Climate Change", A Review.
3. "Meeting the UK energy and climate needs: The Role of Carbon Capture and storage", a Review.
4. How do we engage people on climate change? My personal thoughts.
5. (The UK Climate Change Policy Review + Responses) My summary.

At work with CCC.

Currently i'm dealing with the info i collected when calling around our local groups, i`m also phoning some people again who didnt return my call first time around. I also attended out 'media group' meeting and have several things i need to do as followup from this. Leaflet design and templates for future events may feature quite prominantly in my schedule, although much of this may be in my 'spare' time. I also need to update the CCC Aberdeen website, talk to some of the people in scotland, confirm a talk by Jonathan Neale. Go back and look at the minutes for the last london and officers meetings and find out what i commited my self to do and what everyone else commited them selves to do and then do what needs to be done.

OK I`m Busy.

I`m also moving flats tomorrow.

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

Report of the Week: UK Climate Change Policy Review --At Last!

Its quite hard to believe that it is here at last! The loooooooonnnnnnnnggg awaited climate change policy review. I havent read it yet so its purely here because of its significance rather than its brilliance or interesting nature.

Have a read and if you have any comments then they are more than wellcome; i will be going through it during the next week. The BBC summary article is here.

Postscript: Climate Change, ReportA, UKA

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

e-Action of the Week: e-Mail New Scientist

As many of you will be aware New Scientist (NS) is a UK based science magazine with reports sourced from the top science journals. It provides low jargon science news reviews without simplifying stories so much that they become meaningless. Many of the major stories about climate change reach the public domain through NS so it does a great job. However they do accept advertising from some non to climate friendly businesses. This person suggests that we write and express out views on this...i have done, my letter is here. It's a five minute job to write a basic e-mail, please do!

"New Scientist magazine regularly reports and features the results and outcomes of climate change, However, I have noticed that the magazine regularly promotes high polluting cars and air travel. This is hypocritical in my view.

I have written to them regarding this issue, but I feel my loan voice will have little impact on changing their policy.

My view is that if a major worldwide voice for the scientific community can't resist the financial lure of promoting high polluting corporations, how can they, in turn, convince governments to act on climate change.

If you would like to help me to pressure New Scientist to change its advertising policy please email letters@newscientist.com.

Here is a copy I sent the editor today which will give you a good idea of what I mean...

Reference: New Scientist, 18 March 2006 issue"

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

Video of the Week: Climate Change and Agriculture in the USA

The video of the week is about climate change and its likely effect on agriculture in the USA. I highlight this video as the agricultural community in the US may be another party with an interest in climate change mitigation. The video is split into two parts which can be streamed here and here.

"While some farmers in the U.S. growing certain crops in some years may prosper because of warmer temperatures, more precipitation, and CO2 fertilization, U.S. agriculture in general is likely to become increasingly unstable, and farmers may find it hard to plan what crops to plant and when"

Background information relavent to these video clips can be found here.

A general overview of all the videos that Harvard Medical School have produced is available on this post which is on my other blog "Climate Change Resources".

Postscript; Climate Change, BusinessA, VideoA

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

Website of the week: CRed (Carbon Reduction Project)

The website of the weeks is that of CRed this is a project based at uea which is focusing on what communities can do about climate change. It is quite a high profile organisation whch has been involved in a couple of recent stunts such as getting the fron light at number 10 changed to an energy efficent model, and getting the thermostat turned down by one degree as part of the "click for climate change" project.

"CRed Challenge is to reduce the number of hot air balloons of CO2 we produce from five to two by 2025 - we call this The 60% challenge and we invite you to explore our website and to join us in meeting the challenge."

Postscript: Climate Change, WebsiteA, RenewablesA

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

Report of the Week: Meeting UK Energy and Climate Needs

I have been posting articles less frequenmtly for the last few weeks, this is because i`m now working full time with Campaign against Climate Change, i`ve also been having financial issues and been trying to sort out accomidation as i`m now in London working on a voluntary basis.

Anyway, this weeks report of the week has been refered to by me previously, it is a product of the house of commons science and technology committe and takes a good hard look at what we have to do in order to cut our emmisions by 60% by 2050. The focus is largely on carbon capture and storage, a somewhat contencious technology that i wish my fellow envirtonmentalists would get behind.

"It is expected that fitting a power plant with CCS could reduce associated
CO2 emissions by around 85%, so the application of CCS technology to power
plant could have a dramatic effect on CO2 emissions. BP told us that if CCS
was “applied to only 5% of the new electricity generating capacity which the
world is projected to require by 2050, the world would have the potential of
reducing global CO2 emissions by around one billion tonnes [1 Gt] a year”.

Postscript: Climate Change, ReportA, UKA

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

News Highlight: Budget Day Lameness

On Wed the 23rd the UK Chancellor, Gordon Brown, released what has widely been described as a green budget. This claim is verging on the ludicrous. For example although the differential between low emmisions cars and large 4*4's has been increased, the maximum rate of road tax is now £220 rather than £1200 as the govornments advisors had suggested. Why do they insist in tinkering at the edges, the UK are falling behind in there progress on climate change, we have actually been in reverse gear for the last few years. Its not clear to me what the govornment hope to achive with this tokenism. Its largely the wealthy who tend to drive enormous 4*4's around the city--apparently just to proove how much car they can afford! Bearing this in mind, raising the top level of road tax by 30 or 40 pounds a ear is hardly going to have an impact.(more...)The most-polluting cars on Britain's roads are to be subject to increased duty payments, the chancellor has announced today.


Confirming the heavily trailed aspect of this year's Budget announcement, Gordon Brown revealed that duty rates of £210 will be levied on the one per cent of vehicles with the highest rates of emission.


So-called 'Chelsea tractors', 4x4s and other off-road vehicles used in urban areas, have long been termed the most-polluting on the road and the chancellor's announcement would have been aimed at pleasing environmentalists.


But many campaign groups are unhappy that Mr Brown did not go further, with Stephen Joseph, director of Transport 2000, saying he has listened to environmentalists with only' half an ear'.


'Clearly this is a well intentioned step on the road to influencing car choice but for it to work we need to see a much greater tax difference between small and large cars,' he said.


From today duty rates will be zero, £40, and then £100, £125, £150, £190 up to the new top band of £210, Mr Brown said today, claiming that this will help pay for five million more fuel efficient cars to have their duty cut.


'As a result of our decisions, and at an eventual cost of £10 million a year to the exchequer, the duty paid on 50 per cent of cars will be frozen or reduced from tomorrow,' the chancellor added.


'Instead of just 300,000 motorists paying £100 a year or less, three million will now pay £100 or less.'


But rural campaign groups have criticised the chancellor for unfairly penalising farmers and rural dwellers, who they claim need to drive cars which fall into the higher tax bracket.


Countryside Alliance chief executive Simon Hart said: 'While we welcome the concept of environmental care which the government is trying to address, we are extremely concerned that this measure directly discriminates against rural Britain with no significant environmental impact.'


He added: 'An extra £45 on a tax bill will make no difference to those in urban areas who can fork out £50,000 on a leisure vehicle.'


'It will have a direct impact on farmers and rural workers who depend on their 4x4 vehicles to go about their daily business, and use them through necessity rather than choice. We are talking about people with battered four-wheel drives and real tractors rather than brand new immaculate Chelsea tractors.'

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

News Highlight: Shell CEO, Science is clear we need action now!

Saying science is 'clear,' Shell's chief urges action on emissions

Greenwire, 8 February 2006 - The head of Royal Dutch Shell said the "scientific advice is now clear" that human activities are causing climate change, calling for less carbon-intensive ways to use traditional energy rather than aggressive moves toward alternatives.

"Most scientists agree that carbon emissions, human-produced carbon emissions, impact climate change," Jeroen van der Veer said. "Of course, there are uncertainties.

But I think the risk to delay action is too great." Speaking at the Cambridge Energy Research Associates conference here, Van der Veer called for capturing carbon from fossil energies, adding that in the medium term this is cheaper, more convenient and flexible than alternative energies.

He said the priority should be on capturing carbon from power plants, noting a typical 1 gigawatt coal plant in China produces as much CO2 yearly as 1.5 million cars. Van der Veer said Shell is working on technologies for combining coal gasification with sequestration, and also said the company is exploring capturing carbon from Canadian tar sands operations for sequestration or use in enhanced oil recovery.(more...)Later, Van der Veer said the scientific debate may not be to a "very final conclusion" but said governments are increasingly realizing the need to address the carbon issue and that industry must "face the reality" of this view. "In most countries in the world, politicians of nearly all political parties are convinced that they should do something to reduce CO2. You better face the reality of that perception," Van der Veer said, adding the industry should find ways to capitalize on it.

Van der Veer stressed that the company supports and is exploring alternative energy sources but cast this as a longer-term goal. Elsewhere, he said the world is not nearing "peak oil," especially when unconventional sources are taken into account, adding the border between conventional and unconventional oil and gas sources -- which include oil sands, heavy oils and others -- is starting to "blur." The company is already developing oil sands in Canada and is experimenting with a shale oil development technique in Colorado.

Postscript: Climate Change, BusinessA, NewsA

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

News Highlight: India to promote carbon market for GHG reduction

Followng up on my recent report of the week, i just found a series of reports about the state of the worlds carbon markets. If you read my report of the week you will know that the political climate in india has been described as largely against the implementation of an ETS due to economic issues perculiar to Italy. Conversely, India seems very keen to promote the CDM, an entirely unidirectional process.

I think this article may be of interest to those of you with an interest in either carbon markets per se , or global stratagies. A global ETS is becoming more and more the way of the future, as i see it. There are going to be formidable environmental integrity issues to deal with, and this will, i believe become the challenge for environmentalists of the future. On a posotive note, an ETS with a cap has one huge advantage, the global cap can be set by science! Contraction and Convergence here we come!

Postscript; Climate Change, BusinessA, NewsA, InternationalA

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

News Highlight: Carbon Capture and Storage...Progress!

With the worlds fastest growing economies, India and China, having some of the worlds largest reserves of coal it seems impossible to forsee these reserves not being utilised. This impression is futher hightended when we look at the issue of energy security. Currently the vast majority of oil in both the aforementioned nations is sourced externally. Conservation and efficiency, societal, and technical will surely increase the units of GDP created per tone of CO2, in economies growing at around 8% however, this will never be sufficent to curb emmisions sufficently.

Bearing all this in mind, and bearing in mind also the extrodinary qauntities of carbon that are about to be consumed, it is vital that we implement carbon capture and storage rapidly.

Thankfully the technological constraints are comming to an end, now the only limits are economic-and in the end-policy ones.

The construction of the worlds first comercial scale power station with carbon capture and storage has just got underway. The article on this 480MW can be found here. An article i wrote about carbon capture and storage, around the time of the IPCC special report on CCS can be found here.

Postscript; Climate Change, NewsA, ScienceA

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

Report of the Week: climate change in the long term.

The vast majority of litrature on climate change focuses on the centenial time scale. There are, however, several effects take place over longer, melenia time scales. As you dont see enough of this when reading about climate policy i thought it would be worth highlighting a recent report on the topic by the Tyndall Centre for Global Climate Change.

The report can be downloaded from here.

Postscript; Climate Change, ScienceA, ReportA

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

Campaign against Climate Change: International Demonstrations

This is our first version of a leaflet for the Nov 4th Demo, being organised by the Campaign against Climate Change. The UK focus will be on the London March but things will be happening all around the world.

More information on our group can be found on our website.

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

Video of the Week: An average guy investigates--just how serious is climate change?

I really love this, my latest video of the week. A random joe is basically picked up off the street and given help to investigate climate change. Initially thinking of environmentalists as a bit wierd and not very relavent he soon realises the true magnitude of the threat we face through climate change.



Postscript; Climate Change, VideoA

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

Is your MP doing enough about climate change? Video

postsctipt; climate change, videoA, comedyA

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

Audio of the Week: Sustainable Development Commission; No to Nuclear

The Sustainable Development Commission has recently launched a report on the possibility of using new build nuclear for producing the electricity that we in the UK require.

The result is that we need greater energy efficiency, more distributed energy systems and more large scale renewables such wave and wind power.

To hear an interesting interview with the Chair of the SDC, Johnathan Porrit talking about climate change click on the title of this post.

Postscript; Climate Change, RenewablesA, UKA

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

Campaign against Climate Change: The year ahead

Now that I`ve been working in the Campaign against Climate Change for a few days I thought it was time for a brief update. Bellow is a list of the activities that we have in mind for the coming year.

Apart from thinking about what the group are doing as far as activities go, and considering how we work better with our groups I`ve been quite occupied with many far more prosaic activities (which are what have got me thinking). I`ve added a long backlog of contacts to our mailing lists, both from previous events and from the website. In the next few days I will probably be largely creating new materials and editing old ones so we have something to work with to promote the 3rd June and 4th Nov events at upcoming marches/meetings/talks that we are involved with.(the plan for the year is below...)I`ve just been talking to Phil about what the group are upto over the coming year, here are my findings. Some of these are provisional and purely intended to let you know that 'this event will most likely be happening during this part of this month'.

16th-19th: Greenparty Conferece (Scarborough)
18th March: Stop the War March (London)
19th March: Phil talks to IFEES (Islamic environmental group)
23rd March: London activists meeting
24th-29th March: Karachi WSF (?)
xxth April: Nairobi Meeting
19th April: Stop EXXON Protest
20th April: London activists meeting
4th-7th May: ESF Meeting ( particularly useful for organizing events with eastern European countries, several western NGO's will also be represented)
29th May (Kingston Green Fair)
3rd June: NATIONAL CCC CONFERENCE: INVITE EVERYONE ITS OUR BIG GET TOGETHER!
4th June: Camden Green Fair
17th June: FOLLOWUP TO THE FRANKFURT MEETING
(assessing progress of organizing the march and outreaching to more groups)
17th June: SANE Energy march, promoting green energy, protesting against nuclear
17th June: FOE Big Ask and Day of Action for local groups and protest against nuclear power.
26th Aug-4th Sep: Camp for Climate Change
8th-10th Sep: Foe Conference
21-24th Sep: Greenparty Conference
11th Oct: FOE Lobbying MP's on the Big Ask
4th Nov: THE INTERNATIONAL DAY OF PROTEST
11th Nov: Protest in Africa

Anyone got any comments on this? I`ll start with a few of my own.

I was under the impression that we had decided to hold a national day of action before Nov 4th, and in addition to the Conference. I believe this is vital as an intermediate goal for the regional groups to focus on. On a broader note I would like to emphasise the vital role that these groups have to play, I think engaging with them more closely is vital. We need to start coordinating at home, as well as internationally.

I think the conference seems awkwardly placed, would a national event happen before or after this? I think ideally we would do something in 2-3 months, that would place the date on may-june. That is when our conference is, is 2months to soon, and conversely 4 months to long to leave the groups.

Phil is suggesting something in September, while I entirely agree that something 2-3 months after June 3rd is a great idea I`m not sure that we will have active groups if we leave them to there own devices that long!

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

What does 2006 have in store for climate change policy?

2005 is a notable year in relation to climate change for many reasons.
1. Kyoto entered into force.
2. The conference "Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change" gave us a clue as to our collective future.
3. Katrina occured, the publicity touched on climate change.
4. The first meeting of the parties was held in Montreal, there was some progress, and some protest!

What will be the significant developments if 2006-Mark Lynas takes a look.

Click on the title of this post for Marks` article.

Postscript; Climate Change, NewsA, InternationalA

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

Video of the Week: Lester Brown-Climate Change, Agriculture and Water

This weeks video of the week is about the impacts that climate change will have on agriculture as a result of water scarcity. Lester Brown, one of the worlds leading environmentalists and agronomists gives a facinating and and informative talk on what climate change has in store for the people on the planet and describes some of the approaches to the problem that he thinks will be required.

Click on the title of this post for the video.

Postscript; Climate Change, VideoA, ScienceA

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

Report of the Week: Asian Perspectives on Climate Regime Beyond 2012

This weeks report of the week is an interesting one for those of you working on international climate policy, or campaigning on related issues. Alternatively if you are just a boring bastard like me who finds such issues interesting then read ahead.

The report can be downloaded as a pdf by clicking on the title of this post above.

Postscript; Climate Change, InternationalA, ReportA

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

Website of the Week: Renewable Energy Access

Things just don't work as they should when I'm not on my own PC. No image keys to indicate the topic of the post and no rich formatting options in blooger thanks to safari not being up to the task.

Anyway I've still got an interesting website to share: Renewable Energy access

http://renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/home

This is a great site for anyone interested in renewable energy and how things are developing in the states on a state by state and local level. I've also found a good few policy ideas which have applications for any government interested in renewables. Personally I enjoy reading about renewables, its a very positive side of the climate change issue, the progress is accelerating rapidly and there are several positive spin offs, makes a nice change from the reality of future climate impacts.

I heard the point expressed well quite recently by one of the WWF's honorary chairman, the sustainable development sector and the pattern of environmental degradation are two phenomena experiencing exponential growth, its a battle of these exponential lines; although it often seems that the latter is going to win the race it is still nice to look at the former and hope for an acceleration in the growth rate. I love the concept of acceleration of acceleration, unfortunately it make its appearance all to often in the positive feedbacks of climate change models.

Postscript: Climate Change, RenewablesA, WebsiteA

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

Climate Change Action: What I'm up to.

Hello all, hopefully I will get a chance to post a few articles this weekend but at the moment I will just give an update of what I`m doing, what the group I`m working for are doing and what our plans are for the future.

First off, I`m down in London working with Campaign against Climate Change, currently I`m trying to organize the office and our mailing lists. We have quite a few people who have registered an interest but aren't yet on our mailing lists, I`ve been sorting that out today. I'm also replying to e-mails and helping people with contact details, particularly in regard of the CCC meeting which is happening in Frankfurt this Saturday. Good work with that everyone, particularly Nathalie, who doesn't seem to stop meeting people/networking.

The Frankfurt meeting is being carried out in order to organize significant demonstrations in western Europe for Nov 4th, the next meeting of the parties to Kyoto. We are going bigger and better this time around, photos from the last demos around the world can be found on the actavists portal, have a look and if you are interested, sign up and either talk about the issues or get involved with actually organising things where you are.

In interesting event I attended on March 1st was the 'carbon dating' event, organized by the Stop Climate Chaos coalition and supported by our group. Basically 70 tables of 9 or 10 people, around 60 mp's to share around. I met some interesting people, and a couple of MP's, suprisingly our group got on rather better with the Conservative MP (Shadow Environment Minister: Gregory Baker ) than the Labour MP (Sadiq Khan) who seemed both uninterested and disingenuous, which was a surprise given his superb work on civil liberties.

(photo shows david cameron, the Conservative Party leader and the man who has brought climate change to the top of the political agenda-even if we dont trust his motives, this isnt a bad thing!)

I will be drafting letters to both of these MP's on behalf of our table, and once everyone has commented/amended this they will be sent off and posted here.

There is plenty more I could add here about both the organization, the people and myself but I will just finish by mentioning my daily commute, which I`m doing by bike. Its about 8-9 miles across rush-hour London. First time it took me 2hrs to get to work, 1hr45 getting home! My latest efforts are 1hr to get ot work, 1hr 15 getting home. This is involving a lot less map reading now, but still a couple of stops. Realistically once navigation isn't a problem it will probably take around 50 minutes during rush hour, and perhaps 40 minutes when its quite, I can cope with that aslong as the pollution doesn't sting my eyes as much as it did yesterday evening, how will things be in the summer?

Home del.icio.us Digg This!