We've been saying for years that nuclear power comes at a cost to renewable energy. Nice to hear someone in the nuclear industry agree. From the Guardian:

Industry recognises that nuclear power and renewables in Britain are mutually exclusive because they both need government support as well as the same national grid infrastructure to distribute electricity. Last week Carlo de Riva, chief executive of French state-owned nuclear company EDF, said British backing for renewables, would undermine nuclear power.

"If you provide incentives for renewables ... that will displace the incentives built into the carbon market. In effect, carbon gets cheaper. And if carbon gets cheaper, you depress the returns for all the other low-carbon technologies. [like nuclear power]."

While hunting around for this article, I came across some letters to the editor (about a previous nuclear power story). Form more information, check out our briefing (pdf) on why nuclear is not the answer. And if all this makes you think of sumo wrestling, you're a very strange person, click here.

Posted by Andrew at 3:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Thom (radio operator) and Wout (external systems techie) have set up a webcam for the Arctic Sunrise. Now you can follow what the ship is up to, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That said, today's a Sunday - the only day off for the crew. Keep your eye out for coffee drinking.

Tune in tomorrow (Monday) and you'll see activity on deck again. The ship's in port for maintenance, so if you like watching things like new satellite dish instillations, then you are in luck.

Post comments to this entry for the crew and Thom will pass them on.

(watch webcam)

Posted by Andrew at 12:56 PM | Permalink

This was the sight that greeted Philips shareholders at the company's AGM in Amsterdam. Philips is one of the few big electronics makers who don't want to take responsibility for their own e-waste. That's the main reason Philips is almost bottom of our Guide to Greener Electronics.

Philips is definitely the most vocal company in lobbying that customers should pay a fee to recycle e-waste. More progressive companies like Dell will recycle your old e-waste for free, ensuring more old electronics are recycled and saving resources at the same time. We want Philips to match other companies' global recycling schemes that are vital to stem the rising tide of toxic e-waste being dumped in Asia.

A Philips spokesperson responded in the Dutch press that Philips is talking with governments and consumer groups about who's responsible for recycling. As Martin, our campaigner, paraphrased - yes, Philips is talking to governments asking them to make the consumer pay for recycling!

However at the AGM the Philips chairman did claim he wanted to lift the company off the bottom of the Guide, so lets see what happens....

Posted by Tom at 3:40 PM | Permalink

Seeing through the industries promises of clean coal takes brains, knowing the right thing to do takes heart and actually doing it takes courage. According to this piece in the Washington Post Kansas Governor Katherine Sebelius showed all three when she vetoed a bill that would have allowed the construction of two new coal fired power plants.

"Of all the duties and responsibilities entrusted to me as governor, none is greater than my obligation to protect the health and well-being of the people of Kansas," she said.

Posted by Martin at 3:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

BBC reports that while the extent of the ice in the Arctic this year is about the same as last year, the downard trend in old ice continues. But the polar bear is not endangered?

Posted by Brian at 9:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

This quote from The Register caused much amusement in our little corner of the Greenpeace office yesterday, with an amusing description of our colleagues at CeBIT IT show:

Greenpeace weighed in to the debate. From the inside. In recent years the environmental organisation has pitched up at the gates of the show, pitching piles of IT scrap onto the floor to shame attendees into rethinking their attitude to the environment. This time they were on the inside, staging a press conference to highlight their report into how green a sample of PCs, phone, and PDAs were. The panel would have struck fear into the hearts of the IT industry jockeys who sneaked in. Young, committed, multi-ethnic. The sort of people who would have once been haranguing one another in the student union, while the geeks were playing /Dungeons and Dragons/ in their bedrooms.

As well as some gentle ribbing of our 'young, committed and multi-ethic' colleagues we also had to explain to Zeina what Dungeons and Dragons was.

As usual from The Register the rest of the article is a good read, on how the IT industry is seemingly lacking a cohesive plan to tackle it's carbon emissions. Our upcoming energy criteria for the Guide to Greener Electronics should help them there!

Posted by Tom at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Back in November we added Nintendo to our Green Guide to Electronics. Despite several requests for information Nintendo provided none and was the first brand to score 0. The next edition of the guide is released today and Nintendo only gets 0.3 due to an indication that it does have a chemicals management policy.

We covered the reasons why Nintendo got zero last time around. Since then we have not received any response from Nintendo aside from one person from its UK PR department. Nintendo has been sending out a pretty lame response to emails on the subject, which tells you mainly about office recycling.

Nintendo has added to its one meager FAQ on the environment some information on product recycling. There is now one phone number for US customers where eventually an operator refers you to the EPA for recycling options. That doesn't compare very well to other electronics makers. Sony for example offers much better recycling services.

Nintendo remains the odd one out of the 18 companies in the Guide, without any public time lines to eliminate the worst toxic chemicals or a global recycling policy for the millions of products it sells every year. If Nintendo has better policies why not make them public like the other 17 companies in the Guide?

You can keep up the pressure on Nintendo to improve by writing to them.

Posted by Tom at 11:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Today we've published our latest quarterly ranking of the leading electronics companies environmental policies and practice. Often this generates a lot of online discussion so this time around we've added an in depth question and answer section to cover questions like why we only rank on public information, how we ensure companies are doing what they claim, why we don't suggest alternatives and many more.

Many of the companies are rising to the challenge on the existing chemicals and e-waste criteria - in the next edition these will become more stringent, and new criteria will be added on other chemicals and the use of recycled plastic. The biggest change will be the addition of criteria on climate and energy. Electronics products are very energy intensive to produce and the rapidly increasing amounts of home electronics are driving up electricity usage in many countries. Data centres that run Internet services use huge amounts of electricity. Many electronics companies are now making many claims about their energy saving products. But how do the companies claims, policies and practice on energy and response to global warming compare?

In the next edition of the guide we will be scoring the companies against the new criteria. All companies now have these new criteria and have several months to respond. We have published them in advance to be transparent about how the companies will be assessed.

Read more »

Posted by Tom at 11:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Here's a quick and dirty translation of an article announcing that the single biggest buyer of Norwegian whale meat is getting out.

Reducing whale purchase

The single most important buyer of whale meat the recent decades, Ellingsen on Skrova, is reducing its involvement. - Maybe we buy, maybe not. But it will be considerably less than in previous years, says Ulf Ellingsen.

The chair of Ellingsen Seafood is the first to regret the development. The Skrova factory has for many years lived for the whale - but off the salmon. Whalers have landed their take here since 1947. In 2005 the two Skrova factories bought over half of the meat from the domestic hunt. But the Ellingsen family has increasingly focused on aquaculture and Ellingsen doubts that they can get labour for both. He would rather take some summer vacation. Ellingsen fears that the hunt slowly but surely will stop, with less players everywhere. - Whaling is in a downward trend, he claims.

He's right. Japan is having trouble finding people to buy it as well.

Posted by Brian at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

"There are times when one tragedy, one crime, tells us how a whole
system works behind its democratic facade, and helps us understand how
much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful"
John Pilger - Stealing a Nation. Oct.2004.

What do former Greenpeace ship's crews and captains do in their spare time? If you're Martini Gotje, Jon Castle, and Pete Bouquet, among others, you found your own organisation, buy a boat, set up a website, and set out to right a great wrong: the forced displacement of the Chagossian people from their islands.

Jon Castle and Pete Bouquet are currently under arrest (that's not the first time those words have been written over the years) for sailing into the waters of Diego Garcia uninvited. Those waters are off limits not only to Jon and Pete, but to the people who lived there generation upon generation, but were evicted in the 60s and 70s as part of a secret deal between the US and the UK -- the US would get to use the Chagossian islands (Diego Garcia is the biggest) as a military outpost in their cold war with the Soviet Union. The UK would get knock-down prices on Polaris submarines. And the indigenous people of the islands, who the UK government described as having “little aptitude for anything except growing coconuts,” would simply be kicked out. As told at the People's Navy website:

The Government split the Chagos Islands from Mauritius, which was heading toward independence, and created a new colony – the British Indian Ocean Territory. It proceeded, in violation of the UN Charter, to remove the islanders through trickery, intimidation and force, by encouraging them to take trips then refusing to let them back, by shutting down the plantations and stopping supply ships.

Some were taken to the Seychelles. The rest were consigned to a life of poverty and unemployment in Mauritius. Many turned to alcohol, drugs and prostitution. Some died from malnutrition. Several committed suicide. They staged demonstrations and hunger strikes, but to little avail. In 1982 the Government awarded the exiles a paltry £4 million – less than £3,000 a head – in compensation, provided that they renounced their right to return.

Few could read the documents that they signed with thumb prints.

Since then, UK courts have repeatedly decried the displacement as illegal. But Diego Garcia is now a key outpost in the Bush Administration's war on terror. It certainly is fitting that planes full of prisoners on their way to illegal detention at Guantanamo Bay should be refueled at a military base created by the illegal eviction of its residents.

So far, the only permission that has been granted to the Chagossians to return is for cleanup and maintenance of their ancestral burial grounds.

Jon and Pete are in jail because they believe in a Quaker concept, bearing witness, which was a founding principle for Greenpeace. It's the belief that witnessing an injustice and calling the attention of your community to it is a fundamentally moral act. You can choose to act or not, but you cannot ignore the imperative to choose.

You can follow the progress of the campaign (Pete Bouquet's son, Sam, is also on his way toward the island in a separate ship), voice your opposition to the eviction, and drop a note of support to Jon and Peter at the People's Navy website.

UPDATE 17 March 2008: Jon and Pete are being deported. Only Jon was charged, but by refusing to pay the fine he forfeits the Musichana and its contents. His appeal can only be heard in the UK.

See the Chagos blog for a full update, and please consider helping out Jon and Pete financially:

Account name: Chagossian Support Group Waiheke Island
Bank ANZ
Branch Waiheke Island
Address Cnr Oue St & Ocean View Road
Waiheke Island
New Zealand
Account Number 115351-0037094-011

Posted by Brian at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The Roman Catholic Church has updated and modernized their list of deadly sins (aka "mortal sins"). These are the really really bad ones. If you die with deadly sins unabsolved you're running a high risk of eternal damnation. And believe you me, that is not so good.

The Telegraph's headline, "Recycle or go to Hell, warns Vatican":

Failing to recycle plastic bags could find you spending eternity in Hell, the Vatican said after drawing up a list of seven deadly sins for our times.

The seven, which include polluting the environment, were announced by Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, a close ally of the Pope and the head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, one of the Roman Curia's main court.

The "sins of yesteryear" - sloth, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, wrath and pride - have a "rather individualistic dimension", he told the Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper.

The new seven deadly, or mortal, sins are designed to make worshippers realise that their vices have an effect on others as well.

What about swearing? But as sins go I guess that's only venial.

Posted by Andrew at 7:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

It’s Sunday, day six and last day of Cebit, world’s biggest IT fair. And we still didn’t find really green electronics.

As we also wanted to know what the Cebit visitors think of “Green IT” and what they expect from the industry, we asked some and have it on video. Our campaigner Zeina also summarizes the Greenpeace position on green electronics.

Personally, at the end of Cebit 2008, I have to say that Cebit didn’t keep its much-advertised “Green IT” promise, but at least “green” aspects seem to raise on the agenda of the IT industry. We at Greenpeace will keep the pressure on the industry to make those promises into action. The industry has to take responsibility and develop solutions.

Posted by Jan Michael Ihl at 6:20 PM | Permalink

German IT magazine Chip has been honouring some products and services with its Chip award at Cebit. One of their awards is a “green” one. It went to a Fujitsu Siemens Desktop PC called “Green PC”. Fujitsu Siemens states that it consumes 27 percent less power than its conventional counterpart and includes a “green mainboard” without halogens, cadmium or mercury. But: It’s still not 100 percent free of toxic chemicals.

In contrast to many desktop computer models in our survey “searching on greener electronics” at least it’s a computer which is greener than others and yet doesn’t cost much more than not-so-green models.

We sent our video activists Omer and Giona to Fujitsu Siemens’ exhibition at Cebit to get some more information. Watch the video to see their interview with a Fujitsu Siemens spokesperson.

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Posted by Jan Michael Ihl at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It’s Saturday – weekend – and we see much more people coming to Cebit and our booth today and expect even more tomorrow, as many end consumers attend Cebit at weekends. The train to the fairground this morning was overcrowded – actually mainly with young male population, although today is International Women’s Day and women may attend Cebit for free – our volunteer and gentleman Rembert from Hamburg local group even treated the women in our team to an ice-cream …

So, women! Please come to our booth in hall 19 and inform yourself about Greener Electronics. And men as well, please.

Posted by Jan Michael Ihl at 12:39 PM | Permalink

Our toxics campaigner Yannick Vicaire wrote up his view on the “Green IT” at Cebit. Read what he says about the tactics of IT managers not to take on responsibility.

It’s understood, “Green IT” in Cebit is all about energy efficiency, an easy first step to take for this industry that kept ignoring the issue for decades. Yet, looking at those brilliant “bla” quotes below shows that even this effort is not taken so willingly by the IT industry.

“ICT covers two percent of the global energy consumption. We can work to halve it to 1%, but the priority is to work to decrease the remaining 98 percent,” said Francesco Serafini, vice-president of Hewlett Packard in the EMEA region.

“The real challenge is to address heavy energy consumers. ICT can help. It is indeed a typical anti-inflationary industry that with time gives you more for less. But the real problem is to cut heavy consumption,” argued Intel chairman Craig Barrett.

Let me translate: “don’t pick on us cos’ we can save the world”, they claim. I’d like to challenge this here.

Read more »

Posted by Jan Michael Ihl at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Day 4 here at CeBIT in Hannover, and despite the excellent work and camaraderie of our international crew here in Germany, I am definitely missing my home of Oakland in the heart of the San Francisco Bay Area. Besides the great weather (hey, it’s going to be 64F/18C today!), I also have to admit I miss the fine vegetarian food of California. Let’s just say that CeBIT is a bit lacking in the available vegan goodies, unless I want to start crunching on the new bamboo covered laptop from Acer.

Not THAT hungry. Yet.

My rumbling stomach has made me start thinking about all things through a culinary lens, and I figured that this would be a good theme for today’s post. As you’ll see in the video below, my colleague Omer visited various exhibits in search of the newest eco-friendly laptops.

There’s still no clear winner, which is consistent with the report we released earlier this week, ranking company’s greenest products to date.

No one product excelled in all areas. It appears that when certain electronics focused on improved energy efficiency, they lagged behind in the elimination of toxic chemicals such as PVC and Brominated Flame Retardants (BFRs). Similarly, products that excelled in designing out these toxic chemicals didn’t possess good policies on product lifecycle – a product’s warranty, upgradeability and recyclability. Ho hum.....

Read more »

Posted by Casey at 4:06 PM | Permalink

My colleagues Omer and Giona strolled a little bit around at Cebit. They visited the famous Green IT Village, had a look at the brand-new and much-hyped Lenovo X300 laptop and the Asus “Ecobook” with parts out of Bamboo – but not yet a true eco-laptop according to a holistic approach. And then they found a very special Apple Macbook Air – gold-coated with 12,000 crystals on the top. Omer got really enthusiastic about that shiny golden computer – although the Macbook Air is still not entirely free from PVC and BFRs. But watch yourself.

Posted by Jan Michael Ihl at 3:31 PM | Permalink

You would never pick out Hans in a bar as a hero. He just didn't have the look. But he went places most people wouldn't dare go, to do work beyond most of us - for Greenpeace, Médecins Sans Frontières and other groups.

He was born in the Netherlands, traveled most of the world (from the Amazon to Antarctica) and died in Vietnam - where he lived with his wife.

Recently, Hans checked into the hospital with pneumonia. He responded well to treatment, and checked out several days later - eager to get back to work on a Greenpeace project. Today, he collapsed and passed away at a hotel breakfast table.

Hans was a behind the scenes person. Not one for the spotlight. He had strong convictions though, and when pressed would talk about them. Here's his crew profile from our first ship tour together - a voyage to defend whales in the Southern Ocean:

It is important for me to participate in this campaign - for a long time millions of people all over the world have been united in voicing that whaling is just not on - we have a responsibility to make sure that we preserve whales, not kill them.

One of mankind's greatest gifts is the one of creation - we have the ability to create both beautiful as well as destructive things.

Another gift given to mankind is freedom. We are capable of choosing to destroy or protect the earth.

Creativity and freedom are not for free - we also have the responsibility to use our gifts in a good way, that is: to make things beautiful, then we can enjoy them together, in freedom.

My personal goal to be with Greenpeace is to be part of a group of people that gives others food for thought.

-- Hans

I was lucky to know Hans, but I know a lot of you knew him better than I did. Please leave messages in the comments. We'll pass them on to his family.

Read more »

Posted by Andrew at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (117)

Over at the official Cebit blog Sascha is wondering about an exhibitors’s huge Humvee car (blog post in german) and whether some companies take “Green IT” really that seriously.

We wondered too. That’s why we – that’s me and our german-language blogger Frida – went to the so-called Green IT village at Cebit in hall 9.

And we have to admit that we are a little bit disappointed. Why?

Read more »

Posted by Jan Michael Ihl at 6:20 PM | Permalink

… claims our Greener Electronics campaigner Zeina Al-Hajj in an interview she gave to the Cebit Channel on Youtube. Please watch it, blog it, spread it.

Posted by Jan Michael Ihl at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's hard to know whether to pity or admire an opponent when they're up against a wall and start throwing out the desperation arguments.

In 2006, when the Competitive Enterprise Institute was finding it increasingly hard to buy climate science that challenged global warming, they dumped a lot of Exxon dollars into an excruciatingly bad TV ad with the belly-laugh tag line: "CO2: they call it pollution, we call it life."

(That may be why they got dropped from the sponsorship of what our Man on the Exxon Funding Watch, Kert Davies, calls the "Denial-a-palooza" Conference currently underway in the US)

But our old Viking Whaler pals at the High North Alliance have just thrown the best kitchen sink argument in a long time: "Whale Meat -- it's a climate-friendly alternative to beef."

Now this, kids, is desperation. Iceland couldn't sell enough whale meat last year to justify sending a single whaling ship out this year. Norway doesn't even bother to kill as many whales as their quota allows because they can't move the stuff. Even in Japan, demand continues its decline despite government-funded marketing pushes and subsidised price-cuts.

You can see why they need a new sales pitch.

But let's just accept that the High North Alliance's long-documented concern for the environment and alarm at global warming are genuine, and that they're not just looking for a way to push old wine in a new bottle, and run the numbers:

World production of beef in 2005 was about 50 million tons.

Let's assume we want to make a 1% decrease in beef consumption. And even though it is not true, we will assume that whale meat production has zero CO2 cost. So to replace 1% of the world's beef production we need 0.5 million tons of whale meat - ie 500,000 tons. The Norwegians get about 1.5 tons of meat from a minke whale, so to generate 500,000 tons they will need to kill about 330,000 minke whales.

Unfortunately this is more than double the population estimate - they would wipe out the minke in under 6 months.

Whoops.

And so, once again our friends the folks who drove species after species of whale to the brink of extinction demonstrate precisely how far you can trust the whaling industry to regulate themselves -- which is about as far as you can throw a kitchen sink.

Posted by Brian at 6:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Hi, this is Casey, reporting Greenpeace's first video blog from CeBIT. Here, I am showcasing the Greenpeace e-waste exhibit and am on the hunt for a comment from Microsoft, whose CEO Steve Ballmer announced on Monday that the company was "going green". Hmmm. Stay tuned for more updates this week from Hannover.

Posted by Giona at 5:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The work of long nights, just published on Youtube and screened at our booth at Cebit: Our new video on (not yet) Greener Electronics.

Posted by Jan Michael Ihl at 4:08 PM | Permalink

Posted by Jan Michael Ihl at 1:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

From Treehugger:

Animal Planet has teamed up with the makers of Wallace & Gromit to produce a series of 10 short clay animation films that demonstrate how everyone can make a difference by changing to a greener lifestyle. Narrated by British comedian Dawn French, and starring the amusing characters from Aardvark Animations' Creature Comforts, The Animals Save the Planet will be showing exclusively on Animal Planet this month.

Way cute. Can't wait to see the rest.

Posted by Andrew at 6:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

After a long Monday of setting up our booth at CeBIT – world’s largest computer trade fair –, a lot of press and visitors attended already and discussed with us about Greener Electronics, from news agencies Reuters and AFP, german national TV ZDF and Bavarian Radio to bloggers like Charbax from Techvideoblog.com, who showed us his XO, the “$100 laptop” by the OLPC initiative. We had a very nice discussion on the Pro's and Con’s of OLPC.

Read more »

Posted by Jan Michael Ihl at 5:30 PM | Permalink

You know that saying, "denial ain't just a river in Egypt"? Well, there's a bunch of guys meeting in New York right now who make a living out of it. Denying climate change that is. From NY Times reporter Andrew Revkin's notebook:

Several hundred people sat in a fifth-floor ballroom at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square on Monday eating pasta and trying hard to prove that they had unraveled the established science showing that humans are warming the world in potentially disruptive ways.

One challenge they faced was that even within their own ranks, the group — among them government and university scientists, antiregulatory campaigners and Congressional staff members — displayed a dizzying range of ideas on what was, or was not, influencing climate.

Our own Kert Davies is there, roaming the corridors and blogging about it on ExxonSecrets - being, in his words, "the skunk at the garden party". From Kert's blog:

We've done an ExxonSecrets deluxe map of those we know about. We have all the cosponsors on the left side, the 50 some odd speakers down the middle and the other organizations they are linked to down the right.

We have data linking some $7.5 Million in Exxon funding (98-06) to many of the prominent cosponsors along with the Heartland Institute.

Posted by Andrew at 5:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)