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Posted by Lisa at 1:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

10,000 people danced on a beach in Belgium to demand action at the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen in December.

The dance will be incorporated into a 2-d and 3-d video clip to be released at the end of October.

The effort was part of "The Big Ask Again" campaign by the Climate Coalition, a group of 80 Belgian environmental, social justice, and human rights groups including Greenpeace Belgium.

You can see more pictures here and more here, and some more here...

A huge THANK YOU to everyone who participated!!!!

Posted by Brian at 9:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

About a month ago the Greener Electronics campaign released videos on the popular gaming site Kotaku targeting console manufacturers Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo (makers of the ever-popular yet not-so-green) Wii:

The reactions from gamers were a little bit less 'you make a good point' and a little bit more 'piss off'. So, in the grand Greenpeace tradition of persevering in the face of taunting - we tried again. This time Tom (coordinator of the Greener Electronics campaign and occasional blogger on Making Waves) responded directly to the criticisms/doubts/annoyance the gaming community expressed with the campaign that targeted their much-loved gaming consoles.

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Posted by Laura at 1:18 PM | Permalink

This is part of a series of short news updates beyond Greenpeace-specific news. World environmental events in a blurb:

The Buzz behind the honeybee headlines:

Affected by climate change, pesticides and insect deceases, the number of honeybees in the wild and in managed honeybee colonies continues to decline. In 2006, scientists witnessed a decline so bad they gave it a name - Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). What's strange about CCD is that, while it leaves colonies bereft of adult bees, there are no dead bees to be found near the hives.

Recently this topic has been grabbing headlines again as a declining honeybee population profoundly affects agriculture. While other species are capable of pollination, none do so as efficiently as the honeybee. Organizations and governments are trying hard to raise awareness about this growing problem (some in more entertaining fashion than others, see below).

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Posted by Anne-Marije at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

An account of Solar Generation's trip to Kenya by Abi, Solar Generation Coordinator

Last week, I was fortunate enough to spend my days with a group of young, dedicated Kenyans who were attempting to tackle the twin problems of energy poverty and climate change. The young activists installed solar panels on the Senator Barack Obama School in Nyang’oma Kogelo and on the roof of Mama Sarah’s - US President Obama’s grandmother - home ,as part of a 20-day renewable energy workshop by Solar Generation.

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Posted by Jess at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As we embark on the last 100 days before the crucial Climate talks in Copenhagen, Grist has put up a cool blog featuring 100 facts about Copenhagen and the climate talks you probably didn't know.
They also have banner counting down the hours, minutes and seconds until the world's leaders meet to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol.

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Posted by Anne-Marije at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Cindy Baxter has been working with Greenpeace for more than 20 years and currently working on communications for the climate campaign at Greenpeace International.

It’s official: Greenpeace didn’t say that the Greenland icecap would melt by 2030 - the BBC got it wrong. Yes - I know - this was something we pointed out last week.

The "Denyosphere" got somewhat hysterical, spinning the old line that we lied, got science wrong, etc. (And boy did they spin it – Michael Tobias has kindly listed all the blogs on it here.

But now we know we MUST be right. Why? Because the granddaddy of the climate denial industry, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), says we are. They must have read our blog – and they have concluded that we’re not lying.

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Posted by Jess at 4:05 PM | Permalink

© Greenpeace/FB Anggoro
An update from Richi about fighting the forest fires that raged through Indonesia recently

My name is Richi, and I work for Greenpeace in Indonesia doing action logistics and volunteer coordination. Recently, I coordinated the work that we did with community firefighting efforts in Riau Province, Sumatra, Indonesia from 31 July – 6 August 2009.

Now, I’m back in the village of Kuala Cinaku, with my feet firmly planted in it’s yellow soil after over two-years. Not much has changed in this small village, but this time I’m fighting to breathe through the thick pungent smoke from the forest fires that annually blight the province of Riau on Sumatra’s east coast, opposite Singapore. I am here to check firefighting equipment and prepare teams for the peatland forest fires that are once again burning out of control here.

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Posted by Jess at 1:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

As I write this, London is being "swooped" by a virtual rainbow of environmental activists preparing to set up this year's Climate Camp. Up to 3000 people are expected to attend the event, outfitted in predetermined colours, depending on which of the six different symbolic locations they plan to show up to. Then, from these six corners of the city, the groups will converge on foot and bike like so many brightly-coloured ribbons to one as-yet undisclosed location* and set up camp for eight days.

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Posted by Sasha at 12:26 PM | Permalink

©Greenpeace/Fojtu

Check out the video and image from one of our latest actions. Yesterday, 40 activists set up a climate-protection camp atop the Gorner glacier in Switzerland and unfurled giant cloth letters reading “Our Climate – Your Decision!”

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Posted by Sasha at 4:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Originally from Vancouver, I moved to Amsterdam in June of 2008. My friend got me a job in an Irish pub, where I worked for almost a year. Sick of fuelling the needs of alcoholics, as well as of the ensuing problems (to be polite), I started volunteering for the Toxics and Agriculture campaigns at Greenpeace International. Now I'm a Media Analysis intern, which I'm quite pleased about as nothing in my job description involves getting covered in Guinness or breaking up fights between men twice my size, not to mention how cool it is to work for such an amazing organisation.

Posted by Sasha at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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Posted by Juliette at 2:15 PM | Permalink

This is part of a series of short news updates beyond Greenpeace-specific news. World environmental events in a blurb:

Change comes from underneath:

Change comes from within, or in the case of a new internet trend, from underneath. Underneath your clothing that is. With its eco line of men’s and women’s underwear, companies like PACT, Obviously and Pants to Poverty and wants to start a social movement with eco-friendly underwear.
Websites such as The Frisky, Mother Nature, Urlesque, Bitch, and Eco Fashion World are all raving about eco-friendly underwear that takes your daily environmental act to another level.

And fair trade and organic cotton isn’t the only material used to make these green undies, the pouched brief from Obviously for example, is made from Modal which is cellulose extracted from sustainable beech tree and takes 12 times less water to produce than cotton. Another company called g=9.8 make their underthings from recycled white pine tree pruning.
And PACT tries to outdo them all by not only making their products from organic material, but the shipping material as well. PACT uses reusable cloth bag packaging and compost-able shipping bags. And 10 per cent of their sales go to three different nonprofits - 826 National, ForestEthics and Oceana.

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Posted by Anne-Marije at 2:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The climate-denial blog-and-twitosphere -- also known as the "Denyosphere" -- is abuzz with the news: Greenpeace admits live on the BBC that it lied about arctic melting.

That's not true, it's being promoted by the handful of global warming skeptics still standing, and we're hitting back. You can help us by tweeting, blogging, and sharing this clarification on Facebook.

Here are the facts. Gerd Leipold, our Executive Director, appeared on BBC's "HardTalk" the other day and got blindsided with a challenge by journalist Stephen Sackur. Sackur selectively quoted from a Greenpeace "press release" (actually, it was a web story) from July 15th to claim we were misleading the public by exaggerating the impact of climate change on the Arctic. This is the paragraph he referenced:

Ice free Arctic

Bad news is coming from other sources as well. A recent NASA study has shown that the ice cap is not only getting smaller, it’s getting thinner and younger. Sea ice has dramatically thinned between 2004 and 2008. Old ice (over 2 years old) takes longer to melt, and is also much harder to replace. As permanent ice decreases, we are looking at ice-free summers in the Arctic as early as 2030.

Sackur claimed that we were predicting that all the ice in the Arctic -- including the massive Greenland ice sheet, which is on land, would be gone by 2030. That's NOT what we said. When we talk about "ice-free summers" in the Arctic, we're using the term the same way that NASA and climate scientists the world over use the term: to describe an Arctic free of sea-ice. And Sackur, or his researcher, would have known that if they read the entire article, including the next sentence:

They say you can't be too thin or too young, but this unfortunately doesn't apply to the Arctic sea ice.

Read more »

Posted by Brian at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (39)

What a lovely, high-end bit of Shrek-like animation those hilarious PR flacks at German energy company RWE have put together to run on German television and as a cinema ad in front of Harry Potter, showing people what a kind, environmentally gentle green giant of an energy company they are, saving the planet while providing clean, renewalbe energy for all:

And here's what it looks like when it gets the greenwash stripped out of it:

The text in German reads:

15% of Germany's energy in 2008 came from renewable energy.

Only 2% of that renewable energy was produced by RWE.

There follows a joke on the abbreviation RWE, suggesting that it stands for "Toward less Renewables."

If you speak German, drop in over at greenaction.de and join in on some remix fun by creating your own spoof.

Posted by Brian at 4:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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Posted by Juliette at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (49)

This is part of a series of short news updates beyond Greenpeace-specific news. World environmental events in a blurb:

In the same way previous generations engaged in anti-war activism, Environmental organizations and political leaders alike, are trying to find ways to engage people, particularly young people, in environmental activism.

Well aware that young people, a.k.a Generation Y, are connected to some piece of digital technology at all times, leaders and organizations are experimenting with new and trendy ways to get their message out and people in. Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Web chats, Blogs, etc – they’re all up on their technology.

The Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for example, likes to tweet. He’s also on the various social networking sites and recently held a live webchat about climate change. Now if only he’d listen to the demands and did more acting than talking…

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Posted by Anne-Marije at 3:47 PM | Permalink

This is part of a series of short news updates beyond Greenpeace-specific news. World environmental events in a blurb:

Men are slacking when it comes to climate change, at least that’s what a recent survey in Australia showed. The survey conducted by the Australia Institute, found women are doing more to tackle climate change, and plan to do more in the future, than men. (Maybe that’s why the emissions trade scheme isn’t getting passed in Australia’s gov’t)

The survey showed that women are taking climate friendly actions such as installing energy-efficient light globes, spending less time in the shower, and turning off appliances at the switch.

The online poll of 1000 people, who the institute said were representative of the general population, found about 80 per cent believed climate change was occurring and Australia needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

So either women spend more time on computers filling out surveys or men, you need to pick up the slack.

Posted by Anne-Marije at 3:36 PM | Permalink

As expected, Australia's parliament rejected a plan for the world's most ambitious emissions trade regime yesterday. The defeated carbon pollution reduction scheme intended to reduce emissions in the biggest per-capita emitter in the developed world, Reuters reports.

Despite the rejection, the government renewed its pledge to push through the scheme before the December U.N. meeting in Copenhagen, where world nations will try to hammer out a broad global climate pact and where Australia is eager to take a leading role.

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Posted by Anne-Marije at 3:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Action update from Richard, one of our oceans campaigners

Yesterday we began work to stop trawl fishing in two sensitive marine areas in Sweden, called the Lilla Middelgrund and Fladen. Given that the Swedish government and the European Union has written laws on paper that protect these two sites since 2003, you might think that measures have been put in place to stop fishing and other damaging activities, but this is not the case.

Check out the video on BBC news

Using a specially equipped barge, our team is carefully placing a number of large boulders on the seafloor to create obstacles and thus stop fishermen from ploughing up the strangely named, but wonderful, sensitive and rare habitats of maerl bottoms and bubble reefs. Bottom trawling is a highly destructive type of fishing. Fishermen drag a net across the seabed, which indiscriminately catches everything in its path. This decimates stocks of popular fish, such as sole and plaice, and results in a large amount of unwanted bycatch – which is thrown back into the sea either dead or dying. In fact, most European countries have done little to protect the sites they have designated by law. This situation is clearly ludicrous. Libraries full of scientific evidence points to the need for fully-protected marine reserves - areas where all extractive use including fishing is prohibited - to ensure real protection of marine ecosystems.

For this reason it is not the first time we have used stones as fishing obstacles inside a protected area.

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Posted by Lisa at 1:31 PM | Permalink

In the late 1700s, when Captain James Cook sailed into Sydney harbour, he claimed "there were whale spouts as far as the eye could see." Callum Roberts, in his book "The Unnatural History of the Sea" gathers similar tales of teeming cetaceans from the accounts of explorers ranging from the 11th to the 16th century. Surely, one thinks, these were the exaggerations of seamen suffering from long-voyage boredom and the possibly hallucinatory effects of rancid food supplies -- or maybe a little too much yo-ho-ho.

Well, unless somebody's been spiking the drinks of geneticists who have contributed to a decade-long study called the "Census of Marine Life," it's time to reassess those tales -- they may have been true.

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Posted by Brian at 8:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This is part of a series of short news updates beyond Greenpeace-specific news. World environmental events in a blurb:

“Real Leaders Back Clean Energy”

In Guadalajara, Mexico, Greenpeace let polar bears do the talking. An activist dressed in a polar bear suit and talked about their tragedy: loosing their homes because of the Climate Change. On Saturday, we climbed the Minerva Monument and put a banner that read “Real Leaders Back Clean Energy”.
Reaching out to the leaders of NAFTA through letters and action, Greenpeace demands that the heads of state of Canada, the United States and Mexico promote clean energies in the area.

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Posted by Anne-Marije at 3:16 PM | Permalink

This is part of a series of short news updates beyond Greenpeace-specific news. World environmental events in a blurb:

Coal or Climate, Kevin?
When Kevin Rudd was sworn in as Australia’s Prime Minister in December, 2007, his statements were promising as he signed the Kyoto Protocol and called climate change "the greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time." His actions since however, have been hypocritical.
Timed with the Pacific Islands Forum, where a regional approach to climate change will be discussed, GP activists climbed the Abbot Point coal terminal in north Queensland to protest Australia's inaction to climate change.
"As Pacific Island leaders call for the 40-45 per cent emission cuts needed to save their homes, Kevin Rudd presides over a massive coal industry expansion while posing as a climate hero,'' said Fijian Greenpeace campaigner Lagi Toribau. "Australia's Prime Minister needs to back Pacific calls for concrete action, not try to bully their leaders into submission.''

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Posted by Anne-Marije at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Staff and volunteers from Greenpeace Japan were in the streets of Aomori yesterday to spread the word about the whale meat scandal trial and Greenpeace's campaign to stop whaling.

Two of our activists, Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki, are facing up to 10 years in prison for their part in exposing a whale meat racket run by Japanese whalers with apparent official consent.

Lawyers for the Tokyo Two meanwhile were in court wrangling over the disclosure of important evidence -- stuff that the prosecution would prefer to keep secret.

We're confident that when the judges read all of the prosecution's evidence they will not only see that Junichi and Toru are innocent of any crime, but that their actions were in the greater public interest as they sought to expose criminal embezzlement within the taxpayer-funded whaling industry.

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Posted by Eoin at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This is the first in a series of short news updates beyond Greenpeace-specific news. World environmental events in a blurb:

In Short:

Reuters reports that India will pump about USD 200 million into the protection of its forests. Forests are critical to India's climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts, the environment minister said. Forestry forms will also play an important part of the international negotiations for a new U.N. climate change deal in Copenhagen in December. India considers its efforts to conserve and increase forest cover as vital as reducing deforestation.

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Posted by Anne-Marije at 10:14 AM | Permalink

When I was four, I wanted to be a police woman. As an eight-year-old, an archeologist. Then, a detective and later, a creative writer. Having lived in three countries and learned various languages along the way, I decided I should work for an international organization. I entered college interested in politics and wanting to work with the UNHCR but left as an activist journalist. Now, I am here at GPI as an Communications intern.

Activism plays a vital role in my life. I've stood up for refugees and child soldiers, civil rights and women's issues. I'm excited to add something as indispensable as the environment to my list.

Being a news junkie, I will blog about news events. I'll read the news, so you don't have to.

Posted by Anne-Marije at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)