This parody ad being run in the United States by Reality is genius:

Read more »

Posted by Laura at 1:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sometimes, the story inside the office is sooooo much richer than the official news.

Yesterday, I walked over to the coffee machine to see one of our Toxics campaigners tanking up on caffeine he clearly didn't need. He was practically Tigger-like in his bounce.

"We won against Philips!" he whoo-whoo-whoo-whooed. "And you would not have believed it. We've been talking for months about how they could get us off their backs, and we thought we had an agreement. Then on Saturday night they showed us what they were planning to release and it was terrible -- they had backed out of three key points."

So across the weekend, Greenpeace and Philips went mano-a-mano. We were working out the terms under which we'd be willing to stop harassing them for lobbying for the status quo on e-waste. That would be the business-as-usual scenario that has led to the poisoning of the developing world with electronic waste. They were looking to do just enough that we'd start praising them as heroes -- even if we had to brush off the hero, twist their arm, shove them into the field of action, and tell them what to do.

But at the end of the day, they did the right thing. If all companies responded this way, the world would be a far better place. Sometimes, they need activists on their back, because in a world in which planetary costs don't figure in the balance sheet, the bottom line doesn't always drive them toward doing the right thing.

When we first crossed (non violent) swords with Philips on e-waste policy in November 2007 we were taking on a pretty entrenched opponent. This wasn't just a company who didn't have a policy, or simply didn't communicate their position. Philips was the leading promoter of a fixed fee consumers should pay for recycling. Philips had experts on this, academic studies to back up their stance, a business model built on this position and lobbied the hardest of all companies to maintain the current systems of e-waste recycling that have lead to huge amounts of toxic e-waste dumping. We were challenging their entire business model. The fact that Philips has performed a almost 180 degree turn in little over a year is testament to the public power of campaigning.

And this is a side of Greenpeace that very few people see:

Read more »

Posted by Brian at 2:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Will we ever stop being amazed at the latest news from Google Earth? Not content with recently adding water, Google Earth is more than ever proving to be a wonderful tool, as used by Purdue University (Indiana). A team of researchers has created a Google Earth layer mapping CO2 emissions from fossil fuels in the US, offering the world a great tool to better understand the where, what and why of climate change. You can see in more details how much emissions come from aircrafts, land travel, electricity production and whatnot.

Read more »

Posted by Juliette at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Remember that scene in The Man with the Golden Gun where solar energy is harnessed to make a laser, one which can shoot down aeroplanes?

Well it turns out that the laser stage might be entirely unnecessary. Because if you want to melt steel - all you need is a really big array of mirrors.

Of course we've known about this technique for a while.

Posted by Martin at 2:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

'Nuclear Power? Yes please ...' was one of the headlines on the homepage of The Independent this morning. If you read on you learned that four of the UK's leading environmentalists were urging Britain to embrace nuclear power "because of the urgent need to curb emissions of carbon dioxide."

Nuclear energy is dangerous and expensive. There is definitely urgency involved in reducing carbon emissions, but it is way too late for nuclear to be encouraged as a solution to meeting the UK's - or anyone else's - CO2 reduction targets.

This presentation of nuclear energy as coal's 'slightly-less-evil twin' can join 'clean coal' as dirty energy myth number two. Or number 100. Not quite sure where we are in the count ...

The four environmentalists currently embracing nuclear have all been anti-nuclear in the past, as mentioned in the article. The odd thing about this, beyond the flip-flopping, is that the article seems to present their former position on nuclear energy as backing up their current position. As if the fact that they used to think it was a crap idea means that if they think it's great now - it must be really, really great!

Nuclear energy is already heading towards extinction - investing billions of dollars in resurrecting it is about as useful to our planet as that scientist in Japan who is trying to clone the woolly mammoth. While I'm not sure what his time could be better spent on, we already know where our energy efforts will be better spent and have to be spent. It's the choice between going forwards - Energy [R]evolution - or backwards.

[Read The Independent article 'Nuclear Power? Yes please ...']

Posted by Laura at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Warning. Foul language, drunkenness, and bad taste. Whoever came up with this is a very, very sad person. And, today, my favorite goofball in the whole world. They even linked to the action to free the Tokyo Two!!!!

Posted by Brian at 3:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

China builds a wind turbine every two hours

Last year the number of nuclear reactors connected to the word's electricity grid fell by 1 (no new reactors, one old one turned off).

In January two more were turned off.

So, which is the energy of the future?

Posted by Martin at 2:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last year China added 6300MW of wind generating capacity, just about doubling their wind power capacity. Assuming 1.5 MW wind turbines that means China is adding a new wind turbine to their electricity grid every two hours.

Posted by Martin at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Today we've been able to expose an illegal export of e-waste from the UK to Nigeria. Get the full details here or watch the slideshow below but here's the behind the scenes story of the expose and the tracking technology that made it possible. This is how new tech tracked the dumping of old tech.

To highlight environmental crime we've been using tracking techniques for a long time, such as ultraviolet light to track illegal logs from the Amazon, inside info from satellites to track toxic ships but finding out how tonnes of e-waste finds it's way to places like China, India, Pakistan and Ghana has been especially challenging.

Firstly it's a shady business often operating on the boundary of legality. Then there's the technical challenge. E-waste often passes through several locations before being loaded into shipping containers where it often sits for weeks before being loaded onto container ships for export. Once the containers arrive in ports in places such as China, India, Pakistan, Ghana or Nigeria they often are stored for weeks amongst thousand of other containers before being unloaded.

To follow an e-waste shipment we had to solve several problems. As e-waste might take months to reach its destination the tracking device needs to be able to have a very long battery life. It needs to be able to transmit a signal while buried under other waste in a shipping container and be traceable to its final destination.

Following the e-waste trail - a Greenpeace investigation

Read more »

Posted by Tom at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

...but some are just a little more dedicated than others.

You don't need to get a tattoo: just sign up for the newsletter.

Posted by Brian at 6:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Above is a funky video shot by Michael Nagasaka at the Sapporo Snow Festival in Japan last weekend. Check it out!

And here's a report from Sachiyo, campaigner at Greenpeace Japan, who spent all last week standing outside in the chilly Sapporo air, talking to everyone who stopped for a look at the Greenpeace ice sculpture:

Hello - I'm just back from talking with the Japanese public about our Oceans campaign at the Susukino Ice Festival, which is part of the Sapporo Snow Festival, a famous winter-time event in Japan.

Last year, at the Susukino Ice Festival alone, 1.2 million people attended – both from Japan and around the world. As we recently opened our new Greenpeace Communications Center in Aomori, where is pretty close to Sapporo, we decided to travel there and talk to people about environmental issues and about Greenpeace’s work in Japan.

To highlight our Ocean Conservation message, we designed a beautiful ice sculpture, which featured a humpback whale, a dolphin, a dugong, a sea turtle, and two tuna, swimming around the blue-lighted globe. The sculpture spanned 4 meters-wide, 1.5 meters-deep, and 2 meters-high. It was an exciting experience to see a two-dimensional drawing developing into a three-dimensional ice sculpture that could be appreciated by the public.

Read more »

Posted by Dave at 7:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Interesting thing brewing up over on mega blog Boing Boing. One of the guest bloggers, Charles Platt, has been posting tons of climate denier BS (sorry, got to call it what it is), and Cory Doctorow has started coming back with tons of good stuff to counter it. Check it out under their posts tagged "environment".

Overall, the Boing Boing comment crowd has been giving Platt a piece of their mind as well. One of my favorite comments is from SMonkey.

I will not even address this but to point out that the article from the website refd (Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine) was written by Arthur B. Robinson who, according to wikipedia,

/snip

Robinson is a signatory to A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism, a petition produced by the Discovery Institute that expresses skepticism about the ability of natural selection to account for the complexity of life, and encouraging careful examination of the evidence for "Darwinian theory".

/unsnip

So yeah, global warming is a fraud. And so "Darwinian Theory".

And the other big name on that site, Frederick Seitz, was a Physicist (not exactly climate related) who argued on behalf of big tobacco that there wasn't a solid link between smoking and cancer.

Yeah...no solid link at all.

Trolling is all good and fun and all. But check your sources.

Posted by Andrew at 8:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday a new version of Google Earth was launched which now includes two thirds of the planet that was previously left out - our oceans!

After renowned marine scientist Sylvia Earle noticed the serious lack of aquatic information in Google Earth she sarcastically asked one of the creators "why don't you call it 'Google Dirt'?". Her comment actually inspired them to make "Google Ocean". Thanks to their collaboration with over 100 organisations - you can now dive in and explore the big blue without even getting wet.

Of great interest to the oceans geeks here at Greenpeace - is that you can find marine protected areas across the globe. Sadly - only 1% of our oceans are protected but we need to protect 40% in order to ensure that they stay healthy. It will be interesting to watch this area grow (hopefully really quickly!) on Google Earth as governments take steps to declare marine reserves in the coming years. Click here to help speed this up!

Marine conservationists are excited about new possibilities with this powerful tool since they can use it to identify important areas that need protection and illustrate them easily for policy makers.

Download the new Google Earth and let us know which parts of the ocean you'd like to see protected by leaving a comment below. You can even check out the research we've been doing in the Bering Sea (just search for "Greenpeace").

Posted by Lisa at 5:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)