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April 24, 2010The Agreement of the People at the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth
Paloma and Hernan talk about what the World People's Conference achieved and the closing ceremony in their final blog from Bolivia
It has been a fascinating experience here at the World People’s Conference, which closed on Thursday, World Earth Day.
In the end the numbers were even bigger than we first thought, over 35,000 people from 140 countries came together to exchange views and search for common goals to tackle the climate crisis. Outside of the official panels and working groups, there were some very interesting meetings as well.
US fossil fuel lobbying out-spent climate defenders almost six times, 2009 reports show
Source: Data taken from The Center for Responsive Politics, cited New York Times 02.02.10
Last week the New York Times reported on the latest lobbying figures for oil and gas industries in Washington D.C., published by the Center for Responsive Politics, (also featured in our news blog on February 2). The article frighteningly (but not so surprisingly) contrasted the immense lobbying weight of oil, gas and electric utilities against the feeble (but growing) dollar-voice of renewable energy industries and environmental groups. Above is the stark reality, expressed in millions of dollars. In 2009, the oil and gas industry spent $154 million on lobbying, a 16 percent increase on 2008; electric utilities $134.7 million, down from $161.3 in 2008. Meanwhile, alternative energy companies spent only $29 million, up from $22.1 million in 2008; and environmental organizations spent $21.3 million, up from $18.3 million the year before.
Manufactured doubt
One journalist thinks tabacco companies are to blame for climate change. Well, sort of. He's noticed that the oil/gas/coal industry used the same tactics perfected by the tabacco industry to help scuttle the Copenhagen climate summit last December.
From The American Reporter:
But one big obstacle to reaching an agreement is arguably the ongoing, cleverly orchestrated and well-funded campaign of junk science designed to mislead people into thinking that there is a difference in scientific opinion about climate change.It's not a particularly new tactic. The tobacco industry perfected it years ago. They called it "manufactured doubt." In the early 1950s, there was a spate of scientific reports linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer that were starting to have an effect on cigarette sales; people began to be concerned about the health risks associated with smoking.
...
Michaels wrote that Hill & Knowlton's strategy was simple. "The industry understood that the public is in no position to distinguish good science from bad. Create doubt, uncertainty, and confusion. Throw mud at the anti-smoking research under the assumption that some of it is bound to stick. And buy time, lots of it, in the bargain."
There's a new book on the tabacco industry tactids by David Michaels (epidemiologist at George Washington University), tittled, "Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health".
What do you think? Should we call it "tabacco gate"?
Ask Sony
Sony is the first electronics company to appear in the Guardian's you ask, they answer environment series. So drop in on the Guardian site and ask a question about Sony's environment policy and practice.
As for suggestions - here's our assesment of Sony in our latest Guide to Greener Electronics. Or you could ask:
When will Sony be putting PCs free of worst hazardous substances on the market like Apple and HP already have?
Will Sony be publicly supporting the Japanese Government's emissions reduction target?
Will Sony be supporting a stronger law (RoHS) on toxic chemicals in Europe?
Why does Sony not score better in our Cool IT Challenge?
Questions end Friday, you can see Sony's answers so far here
Warming to civil disobedience after Copenhagen’s failure
Jasper Teulings, general counsel at Greenpeace International, writes about the release of our 'Red Carpet Four'. He says the restriction of peaceful protest against a problem as pressing as climate change is a serious threat to democracy. An edited version of this article was also published in the UK's Guardian Weekly.
Whether the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Summit has dealt a mortal blow to the process of international climate negotiations in their current form is an important question currently under debate. A broader issue that is receiving attention in a handful of European countries is the future of civil disobedience, especially in the fight for 'climate justice’.
On December 17, three Greenpeace activists made a special appearance at a banquet hosted by the Queen of Denmark for Heads of State attending the UN climate summit in Copenhagen. Juan, dressed in a tuxedo, and Nora, decked out in an H&M red floor-length gown, were waved through the high security cordon in their three-car convoy. They were ushered up the red carpet and, arriving inside, unfurled two banners reading "Politicians Talk, Leaders Act". They were arrested, along with two other activists, Christian and Joris. On January 6 - after substantial international public and diplomatic pressure - the "Red Carpet Four" were finally released.
The theoretical roots of civil disobedience are usually traced to Henry David Thoreau's 1849 essay Civil Disobedience. Thoreau believed that the individual, who grants the state its power in the first place, must follow the dictates of his conscience in opposing unjust laws. (His ideas on civil disobedience reflected time he spent imprisoned for his refusal to pay a poll tax that supported the Mexican-American War and slavery.) Today civil disobedience is generally defined as a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies.
What the Red Carpet Four did was classic civil disobedience.
Before her arrest, Nora told an interviewer that she was aware of the possible consequences of what she intended to do: "It's a personal risk of spending a couple of days in prison.... you have to compare it to people who are affected by climate change and if we can do just a little to support them in this way then I am happy to do it".
TODAY: Will Santa Free Our Activists for Christmas? COP-FLOP Stories of Woe Continue; Swiss City Bans GP Supporter Recruitment
This is part of a trial series
Like yesterday, lingering COP15 news reports on the failure of the Climate summit and the updates on the arrested activists.
In the Washington Times, Gabe Wisniewski was quoted, "Two years have passed since world leaders promised all of us a deal to stop climate change. After two weeks of U.N. negotiations, politicians breezed in, had dinner with the Queen, a three-hour lunch, took some photos, and then delivered what could only be described as the 24-hour Head of State tourist brochure of Copenhagen instead of a climate treaty."
Grist however seems optimistic about The Copenhagen Accord and calls it a big step forward. "The Copenhagen climate deal that President Obama hammered out Friday night with the leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa broke through years of negotiating gridlock to achieve three critical goals," it said.
The German Tageszeitung reports that 12 activists have been released from a Copenhagen prison but our 4 Greenpeace activists remain in "solitary confinement." Norwegian and Spanish media continue to report strongly on this topic in favor of the GP activists.
AP reports that in the case of Norwegian activist Nora Christensen, Danish investigators who usually take on cases of murder, robbery and other serious violent crimes have been put on the case of Nora.
TODAY: Brown blames COP-Flop on China, US; Mexican cars take a dive and Climate heroes spend Christmas in jail
This the first in a trial series
Unsurprisingly, the biggest story in environment and Greenpeace news this week has been the disappointing outcome of the COP15 summit as major NGOs are turning focus on Mexico in 2010. Only US media seems careful to judge the summit as harshly as the European Press.
There are some interesting new names for the Copenhagen summit floating around in the media. Which was first Hopenhagen is now Flopenhagen or Brokenhagen in French media.
L'Express reports that the last two weeks have seen "45000 accreditations, 12 days of negotiations and 46,200 tonnes of carbon only to lead to "a crime against humanity" the major NGOs have turned to Mexico in 2010, are angry after the flop of Copenhagen." Kumi Naidoo was quoted saying, The Copenhagen Accord has "holes so big you could cross them with the Air Force One!"
One small step against a dirty plan, one giant leap for climate justice!
Ben Jasper is international projects co-ordinator at Greenpeace Czech Republic. Pictured above - occupying the top of the smokestack at Prenerov II coal fired power plant. Below he shares some encouraging news on how a small Pacific Island State is taking a stand against this plant.
This week, reporters in Prague have been buzzing with excitement at the news that there was an official request from the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), a small Pacific Island State, to participate in the Transboundary Environmental Impact Assessment (TEIA) proceedings on plans to increase operations at the dirtiest and highest CO2 emitting coal-fired power station in the Czech Republic, Prunerov II. This is the first time a state - particularly vulnerable to impacts of rising sea levels, water supply insecurity and extreme weather events - has used legal provisions to demand information on CO2 emissions from an industrial project - in a foreign country. They are demanding to know how this project in a developed country will effect small island states such as FSM due to global climate change. This offers an exciting new opportunity for current and future victims of climate change to stand up for themselves against dirty energy companies. It is perfectly reminiscent of the classic David vs. Goliath battles for justice and survival.
Prunerov II is a coal-fired power station of monstrous proportions: it emits 10% more CO2 than the iconic Kingsnorth power station in the UK and over 40 times as much annually as the whole of FSM combined! Greenpeace Czech Republic has waged a long campaign with a coalition of Czech NGOs to decrease the damage that this plant does to the climate and the local area. Our activists twice occupied the 300 metre high chimney and most recently hung a huge banner on it saying “STOP CO2” which stayed up there for several days. There have also been numerous other happenings and direct communications with ministers to demonstrate the widespread mistrust and dissatisfaction in the way the giant energy company CEZ runs the power plant.
Send a Love Letter to the future
They're building a time capsule, and your message to the future could be in it. Very cool project.
The time capsule will be sealed in Copenhagen, during the climate summit. Part of the idea is to get delegates thinking about which future they're creating. Part of the idea is just to, well, say something nice to the future world.
Here are a few of my favorites.
You can send a message and also vote for which ones go in the time capsule.
Intel in bed with big polluters on carbon offsets
It's no secret that big polluting companies are going all out to try and destroy the chance of the US congress passing meaningful global warming legislation with significant emissions reduction targets. On big loop hole is the option of "offsetting" reductions abroad. The flawed nature of large scale carbon offsets has been exposed many times, recently by a Greenpeace investigation into offsets related to rainforest projects.
Big polluters love them because it's a cheap way of passing off their responsibility to someone else, somewhere else. Even though big polluters have already got the current draft US legislation filled with far too many loopholes, last week they wrote a letter asking for even more offsets, otherwise it would mean slightly lower multimillion profit margins. What was surprising was that joining such huge polluters such as Duke Energy, Dominion, Exelon and American Electric Power was Intel.
Yep Intel, one of the foundations of the IT industry that claims in can cut emissions by 15 percent by 2020 and generate billion of dollars of efficiency saving as well. Now Intel is firmly siding with the regressive, dirty companies and adding it's name to calls for US legislators to make even less effort to cut emissions in the US.
The full text of the letter and entertaining translation is in on our US blog but here's a flavour:
Re: The Importance of International Offsets for U.S. Climate Change Mitigation Efforts
Dear Senator Kerry, Senator Graham, and Senator Lieberman:
We, the undersigned, are companies that employ hundreds of thousands of American workers, and serve hundreds of millions of American consumers. We expect that our companies would be affected significantly by any greenhouse gas regulatory program. We write today to communicate our firm belief that in order for any such program to be both environmentally effective and economically sound it should be market-based and incorporate both domestic and international offsets. To this end, we are concerned about the further restrictions on use of international offset credits in S. 1733, reported last week by the Environment and Public Works Committee.
TRANSLATION: We are some of the biggest, richest polluters in the world and we have a lot invested in dirty business. If you pass climate legislation without huge loopholes for us, we’re going to be very upset. One of the most important loopholes we want are carbon offsets – cheap vouchers that allow us to side-step cutting our pollution with the rationale that someone else, somewhere else, will cut pollution instead. Sure, the legislation in Congress already has massive subsidies for us and billions of tons of offsets in it, but we are still not happy. We always want more.
When IT companies need to be championing a strong deal in Copenhagen Intel is pushing in the wrong direction. It certainly won't help Intel's score in our Cool IT Challenge. Maybe Intel deserves a new slogan "Intel is working on the technologies of the future today" is more like "Intel is promoting excuses at the expense of the future today"
Species we're killing this week: Koalas
Last month, Sasha informed us about the alarming state of the grizzly and black bears as their main food, salmon, are diminishing.
This week, another type of bear is threatened by climate change – the koala bear.
AFP reports that the cute cuddly creatures could be extinct in 30 years. The Australian Koala Foundation indicated in a recent survey that numbers have plunged by more than half in the past six years due to climate change, disease and over-development.
"We're saying (numbers) could be as low as 43,000 and as high as 80,000” Foundation chief Deborah Tabart told public broadcaster ABC Radio.
Large numbers have been killed by disease while others have been affected by loss of habitat due to deforestation and climate change. Hotter, drier conditions have reduced the nutritional value of their staple food, eucalyptus leaves, leading to fatal malnutrition, Tabart said.
Conservationists are calling for the iconic creatures to be declared an endangered species.
Statisticians reject global cooling
You most probably have heard of them once or twice before. They appear here and there, suddenly out of nowhere. They are loud, they are convincing and they are very persistent in their messaging - Climate skeptics!
A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, found that only 57 percent of Americans believe there is strong scientific evidence for global warming, down from 77 percent in 2006.
It would appear that climate skeptics did a great job in confusing the public about the real issues at stake.
Musicians going Green
In 2007, Aussie musician Missy Higgins and her band toured the US in a Prius, participated in Live Earth and helped PETA campaign against animal abuse. That same year, KT Tunstall also jumped on the green bandwagon, touring in a biodiesel-fuelled bus and supporting the "carbon diet" campaign by Global Cool. And Moby is currently participating in the Play4Climate campaign co-created by the EU and MTV to educate people about climate change with a musical backdrop.
In today’s Irish Times, Jim Carroll takes a look at 10 green musicians and their eco-friendly ways, asking the question, “how green is your rock star?”
Among the eco-minded stars on his list are artists like Jack Johnson, Neil Young, Feist, Radiohead, and Damien Rice.
Moms against climate change
How realistic is this video? Well, people do bring their kids to protests. (And why not? It can be a nice day out for a bit of a walk. Get away from the game console and learn a bit about free speech.) Reminds me of the kids in this climate camp video.
What if we all started bringing kids to climate protests? After all, they're going to have to live with our decisions.
Big coal lobbyists busted for forging letters
Job well done by the Sierra Club, which has been following the scam. Now there's Congress is investigating. From the Sierra Club blog...
Oh for shame, lobbyists. An investigation has found that a lobbying firm forged letters from the NAACP and a Hispanic community organization in Charlottesville, Virginia, saying that the organizations opposed the American Clean Energy and Security Act. The forged letters went to Congressman Tom Perriello (D-VA 5th) and as expected, the community groups are incensed (as are the rest of us).Neither of the groups oppose the bill.
UPDATE: Groups Impersonated by Big Coal Testify Before Congress
Climate global day of action - US video
Nice to see people all across the country getting out there. Big diversity of events. Some civil disobedience (apparently you can get arrested in the US just for putting a sign on someone's fence), and lots of fun stuff too.
Google, Microsoft and IBM: Bring it on for the Climate
Today we launched the latest version of our Cool IT leaderboard - take a look a which of the biggest names in IT are doing the most on the top priorities to tackle climate change. As well as scores we've added more background on the issue and started the first in series of comparisons, starting with Google v Microsoft. This is all the product of many company meetings, phone calls, sifting through carbon disclosure project reports and lobby expenditure filings along with far more late nights team discussions than I care to remember!
The leaderboard covers companies measurable climate solutions, climate advocacy and efforts to reduce their own emissions. With the vital UN climate meeting in Copenhagen fast approaching we are focusing on which companies are speaking out in support of a strong deal that is vital for the planet, as well as being good for IT companies bottom line. In short no company really stands out on climate advocacy, even Google, with a relatively high score on advocacy has been silent on Copenhagen.
Another victory in Lapland
There's rejoicing in Finland, where we just notched up another victory protecting some of Europe's last old growth forests!
Just 2 months after a lawsuit against Finland's State forest service was settled by a deal which will protect the Nellim forest, we have reached a major victory on our other old-growth forest campaign. We’re pleased to announce that following intensive negotiations, Finnish State forest enterprise, Metsähallitus, has agreed to leave 35 000 hectares of boreal forests intact. It's a decision that significantly improves old-growth forest protection and will bring peace to the forests and its inhabitants.
Yes men fix the US Chamber of Commerce on Climate
The current disarray at the US Chamber of Commerce over its lobbying against climate legislation was made for the Yes Men and their unique style of humorous expose. Sure enough, several US media outlets reported that the Chamber had announced a reversal of its position. Entertaining video:
There's more background here, also reported in the Wall Street Journal blog, Guardian, Huff Post, apparently Reuters and CNBC reported the initial announcement. There's a nice description of the way the Chamber had to madly scramble to deny it was changing position in the Guardian:
The spokesman said he learned of the hoax when a reporter came to the Chamber office looking for the press conference. Wohlschlegel said he immediately leaped into a taxi.
Here's what the Chamber really should be saying about climate, rather than its inane "we support climate legislation, (just not any that actually exists now) line.
Climate trashing Chamber lashes out at Apple’s bold move
I’ve been following closely corporate action in the run up to the vital Climate meeting in Copenhagen in December. Like it or not, when big CEO’s speak, politicians listen. Unfortunately there hasn’t been much to follow for most of the year. Sectors like the IT industry (who stand to be big winners from a strong global deal to significantly cut emissions) have been very quiet, during this crucial period.
Now, as though someone has poked a slumbering giant somewhere very painful, all hell has broken lose in the US in the last few weeks. As Grist puts it “Could corporate America finally be stirring from its climate change slumber?” In reality vested corporate interests of old dirty industry certainly haven’t been slumbering, they and their trade bodies (who often do the grubby job of lobbying) have been putting in overtime for years to keep any chance of effective legislation off the table, especially in the US. That’s the biggest reason why current legislation before the US Senate is far too weak.
The US chamber of Commerce has been leading this charge: “No organization in this country has done more to undermine [climate] legislation,” according to the New York Times editorial page. We covered Apple’s departure and background on our main site yesterday but after so long without this issue being given proper scrutiny there’s been a rash of high profile US media stories on the issue. Businessweek points out why Apple’s departure matters, Boston Globe highlights how the Chamber’s climate scaremongering is coming back to haunt them. The New York Times points out what a mess the Chamber seems to be in over its decision making on Climate. The San Francisco Chronicle has companies fleeing the Chamber like it has the plague.
Sending out an SOS
CNN tour of the Arctic Sunrise
Our ship, the Arctic Sunrise, has spent the last months on an expedition to Greenland. We provided a platform for independent scientists researching climate change impacts, and independent journalists reporting on them.
During the journey, CNN filed this really lovely tour of the Arctic Sunrise. Kind of makes me homesick for the ship. :-)
Live from the scene of a crime in the Age of Stupid
Here's a fine piece of reporting from the field by one of our action specialists. John helped make possible our live feed from the Himalayas onto the big screen in New York City where Age of Stupid, Franny Alexander's new documentary film on Climate Change, made its premier. Some internal emails just beg to be shared, and this was one: when these things work, they look effortless, which really is a disservice to all the effort that goes into them.
Rescue hut, once surrounded by ice, where Indian film director Shekhar Kapur once sheltered.
Hi Actioneers,Just a quick report on one of the live broadcasts we did from the Himalayas for the "Age of Stupid" movie premiere this week.
After weeks of work against the impenetrable Indian bureaucracy - which is intended to thwart all but the most patient people - we got the go ahead in one of our preferred locations for the live shoot.
The one permission we forgot though, was from Shiva, the owner of these mighty mountains, he kept flicking our helicopters away like bugs.
Who's top of Newsweek Green Ranking?
This week Newsweek released its assessment of the green policies and practices of top 500 US companies. It makes interesting reading, with some surprising results.
Unsurprisingly tech companies dominate the top with 1 HP, 2 Dell, 4 Intel, 5 IBM.
Of course we’ve criticised HP recently on delaying toxics phase out from its products, which is noted in the Newsweek ranking. Our very own Guide to Greener Electronics is due out next week so you can compare and contrast how these tech companies are doing against their non US competitors.
Two big tech companies who don’t come out so well are Google 79 and Apple 133. Both are secretive about relevant company data that competitors do publish. At least Apple took a step up in that sense by finally publishing its total emissions data yesterday.
There’s a few good quotes in the background story on the Newsweek site:
"One of the purposes of this is to improve the transparency of corporations…and encourage them to provide an even higher level of disclosure," says Thomas Kuh, KLD's managing director.
This is also one the aims of our Guide since August 2006. And of course something we are familiar with, the controversy:
Rankings inevitably provoke controversy—and we welcome that. Our hope is to open a conversation on measuring environmental performance—an essential first step toward improving it.
The best analysis I’ve read is over on greenbiz.com, I my opinion Joel is right that of course the ranking is imperfect (they always are) but rather than pick it apart:
I'd rather step back and admire this first effort, however imperfect, and salute the team for doing what hadn't previously been done, or done well: brought together a wealth of data on a broad spectrum of the world's biggest companies to provide a snapshot of the green business world.
And he speculates on what might be hopefully happening as a result:
I suspect that as you read this, scores of senior sustainability professionals are getting calls from their overlords in the C-suite, asking tough questions about why their companies fared more poorly than hoped, and demanding answers. And for that reason alone Newsweek's rankings are a beautiful thing.
Finally we wouldn’t be doing our job if we let those tech firms rest on their laurels at the top of the Newsweek ranking. When it comes to being strong climate advocates and providing real climate solutions, HP, IBM, Intel, Dell and others still have much work to do in our Cool IT Challenge.
Species We're Killing This Week
Alright, alright, so we've all heard about the polar bears. But now it seems their cousins to the south, the grizzlies and black bears, are also under serious threat.
Climate Camp Ends, but Action Continues
Wednesday marked the end of this year's Climate Camp in London, but it seems the "swooping" is not over. Activists recruited by the Camp for Climate Action organised various protests, ranging from a Climate Casino at the European Climate Exchange to the "embellishment" of the Barclay's Bank HQ with post-it notes. Now the organisation is preparing to stage what they call "The Great Climate Swoop" in order "to close one of the UK's biggest coal fired [sic] power stations, E.ON's Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottingham." The event is scheduled for 17-18 October.
Ask Intel about climate leadership
Well ask the BBC to ask Intel's CEO about climate leadership - he's being interviewed this week on the BBC and they are soliciting for questions.
Here's mine:
As Intel stands to profit from IT solutions to reduce carbon emissions will Paul Otellini be making a public statement about the vital need for a strong deal at the Copenhagen Climate summit in December?
Here's how Intel is doing in our Cool IT leaderboard, hardly a stellar perfomance so far.
There's no info about when the interview will be on the BBC but add a question today on the BBC site before it's too late and if you see the interview lets us know in the comments if it was raised.
AREVA takes ass-kicking from own nuclear reactor
A guest blog by Aslihan Tumer, Nuclear Campaigner at Greenpeace International
I've got a nuclear energy riddle for you:
What is dangerous, costs 5.5 billion euros, and may end in bankruptcy?
The answer:
French nuclear giant AREVA's Olkiluoto 3 reactor, currently under (severely-delayed) construction in Finland.
The OL3 is an amazing construction project in so many ways: 4 years into the construction it is already suffering an amazing delay of more than 3 years, the costs have doubled from 2.5 billion EUR to the amazing amount of 5.5 billion EUR, and the OL3 project has single-handedly wiped out AREVA's half year profits. Yet - amazingly! - Areva is now demanding extra money on top of the agreed price from Finland.
Let's look at the situation from a different angle:
3 thoughts from lightbulb campaigning
The European Union has finally outlawed 100W incandescent lightbulbs -- the pear-shaped bulbs invented by Edison you'd use as the main light in a room. Other inefficient household lighting will follow between now and 2012, as the supply of modern bulbs (efficient halogens, CFL and LED) increases.
It's frustrating to see how slowly the authorities and lightbulb companies are moving. But today's milestone provides a good opportunity to think back over the lightbulb campaign (2007-2008 mostly), and what lessons it might hold for other climate campaigns.
10,000 Dance for a Climate Deal
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!!!!
Visiting Mama Sarah Obama
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.
With friends like these…
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.
Firefighting in action
© 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.
"Our Climate - Your Decision!"
©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!”
Greenpeace admits: BBC got it wrong about arctic sea ice melting
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.
Greenpeace Germany spoofs RWE Ads
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.
Climate Camp in Ireland this August
Irish activist mailing lists, facebook groups and forums are abuzz with
news of an upcoming camp in Co. Offaly.
If I were in Britain or Ireland now I'd go to the climate camp in Ireland, August 15 to 23rd.
There are so many climate change problems in Ireland that could be tackled by grassroots action--burning turf in power stations, building houses with shoddy insulation, and rising greenhouse gas emissions from cars.
Citizen action works -- just look at the history of Carnsore Point in Ireland, or the Zwentendorf nuclear plant in Austria.
Arctic Rice Shelf Collapse
After our web and press guy, Dave Walsh, on board the Arctic Sunrise noticed a rather amusing typo in a recent draft press release - this is what he sent back to our communications department in Amsterdam for a giggle.
The Petermann Rice Shelf has collapsed, dumping five billion tonnes of glacial rice into the ocean, according to cooks on board the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sushi today.
This follows last week’s revelations of how polar bears are starving due to the rapid decline of Arctic sea rice, following the breakup of the Lincoln Sea Rice Bridge, which flooded the rice fields of the Nares Strait.
“The collapse of Petermann is a perfect example of what’s known as the nori roll effect”, said Jason Box, well known chef from the TV programme Extreme Rice Survey. “When you get rice pushed to the bottom of a fjord like this, it rolls up all the fish and seaweed together, and allows the rice sheet to slip. Climate change is definitely on the
menu here.”
The Arctic has now left Petermann floating rice tongue, having taken swift evasive action earlier this week, to avoid getting trapped between pressure ridges of thick sea rice pudding from the Lincoln Sea.
“The best way to navigate through this multi-year rice is to simply avoid it”, said experienced rice pilot Arne Sorrenson, on board the ricebreaker Arctic Sushi. “It’s one thing to punch your way through a thick layer of Basmati, but getting through a plate of sticky risotto is well nigh impossible”.
“With Greenland’s rice sheet continuing to slip into the ocean, we’re seeing the potential for sea rise around the world, especially in Pacific island nations like Pilau”, said Greenpeace expedition leader Melanie Duchin, over a glass of saki.
The Arctic Sushi is currently anchored in the Kane Rice Bowl, 80 nm south of Petermann. Lunch 12-1, Dinner 6-7, booking essential, phone
Call +551 655 755 455 for reservations.
[Obviously - Our ship is actually investigating the impact of climate change on ICE! You can read all about the more serious side of this expedition over on the Climate Rescue Blog. But if you're interested in RICE - you might want to check out our campaign to save the world's most important food and sign the petition against GM rice! ]
Ask Google your Energy question today
Today Google's Dan Reicher will be online on the Guardian Website to answer your questions about Google and energy/climate change. Dan is Google's director of climate change and energy and has worked in past US Administrations and on the Obama transition team.
Not often you get the chance to pose a question directly to someone as knowledgeable and well connected as Dan. Here's a few suggestions for substantive questions to pose:
Will Google be setting its self a goal to cut it's own absolute greenhouse gas emissions, like many other tech firms have done already?
How much renewable energy does Google use and will Google set a target to increase this in the future?
Does Google support the 25% cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 needed in the US to help ensure a strong climate deal is reached at the vital UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen at the end of this year?
Or you could ask how Dan thinks Google measures up against the climate change policy and practice of other US Tech giants. Check out how we rate IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Dell, HP and Sun on our Cool IT Challenge.
You can add your questions now, Dan is online from 4pm UK time Thursday 16 July.
Check out the Climate Rescue Blog!
Hey folks! All the blogs and updates from the G8 actions happening now are being posted on our Climate Rescue Blog!
Greenpeace goes to the G8
We're at the G8, and a lot of other places in Italy as well. Follow our occupation of four coal fired power plants here.
Here's a blog from Julien, one of our climate campaigners who is posting updates live from the top of a coal smokestack!
I'm standing here, 200 metres above Italy's most greenhouse-polluting coal power plant and I don't know what I feel most overwhelmed by: the gargantuan scale of this greenho|use Goliath, or the bravery and ingenuity of the activists around me.
Not only are we preventing the feed of coal into the power plant here, but we are preparing to "write" "Stupid" on the massive chimney stack. Given that we are teetering on the verge of triggering catastrophic climate change, and coal is the single biggest source of greenhouse pollution, continuing to burn coal is a pretty stupid thing to do, especially when there are ready-made solutions such a renewable energy ready to replace coal.
We are here because the heads of the G8 are meeting here in Italy, and we are urging them to demonstrate real leadership on climate change by committing to strong targets to cutting greenhouse pollution.
The G8 have the responsibility, the ability, and influence to lead on climate change.
Right now the G8 nations have proposed such weak actions on cutting greenhouse emissions it would allow for many more coal-fired power stations to be built, and almost guarantee triggering catastrophic climate change. This is sending completely the wrong signal to the rest of the world.
We need the G8 to use their clout and influence. Politicians talk, but leaders act, and this G8 meeting must deliver action to prevent catastrophic climate change and rescue the global climate negotiations.
Half of our activists are on top of the chimney stack, where just above our heads, 40 tonnes per second of greenhouse pollution spews forth. The others are dangling underneath the conveyer belt that, due to our intervention, is no longer feeding the station with coal. Less coal going in means less greenhouse pollution going out. Yay!
This is one of four power plants that Greenpeace is taking direct action on, and my hat goes off to those people climbing ladders, occupying perches, dangling under conveyors or on the side of smokestacks, paintbrush in hand, getting our message out loud and clear.
Truly inspiring.
I'll keep you updated as events unfold.
J.
Swimming towards a coal ship - Greenpeace campaigners block coal delivery to Kingsnorth
A cheeky reposting of Christian's blog on our UK website:
Around midnight three of my colleagues eased themselves off one of the Greenpeace inflatable speedboats and into the cold water of the river Medway in Kent.
It's difficult to imagine what must be going through your mind in that situation - in the dark, in the cold water, with the looming lights of a large ship getting closer. But however difficult to imagine it is, it must have been even more difficult to do, because Cathy, Emma and Hannah knew that they were swimming out into the channel to block a coal freighter carrying twenty thousand tonnes of coal from docking at the Kingsnorth jetty.
As they made their swim - on one of the shortest nights of the year - more Greenpeace volunteers flagged the ship down with flares and banners, pulled alongside and clambering up the steep metal sides, across the deck, and on up the mast and funnel. They secured themselves in place and waited for the calls from the morning news shows.
So long Susan
The final installment of a trilogy is out today. The last of the three Reasons to Believe films narrated by the charming and talented Ms Susan Sarandon has been released - 'Reasons to Believe: Servers'. These films give us three out of an endless list of reasons to believe that an Energy [R]evolution is possible and necessary to change our energy habits and reduce emissions contributing to climate change.
Hell still not frozen over
This week, Shell paid $15.5m to the Ogoni people in Nigeria, an out of court settlement after a 13 year struggle. I read that Shell's lawyers apparently once said that Shell would only settle when "hell freezes over" and they were "skating on it" - (perhaps that explains why Shell is now the most carbon intensive oil company on the planet - a desperate bid to keep hell nice and cosy).
Unfortunately I have now found that this quote was in fact from Chevron's lawyer in relation to a similiar case - but I would guess there was a not entirely dissimilar sentiment involved here. (Strangely, Shell's former Group Auditor Bill Campbell also told Shell's senior execs in 2007 that "hell would freeze over" before they would appear in court to clear their names. These guys must clean up at the annual Oil Industry Buzzword Bingo convention).
Wake up call in Bonn
An update on UN Climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany brought to you by our very own Cindy Baxter who has been at the negotiations since the start.
Coming to the end of a hard two weeks here at the climate talks in Bonn, we were greeted yesterday by a very (VERY) loud siren on the back of a truck parked by our colleagues just down from the conference centre. Sounding the alarm for the climate. The siren went on for two hours before our 15 activists were arrested. The noise carried into the building and maybe it
jolted some sense into at least some of the negotiators here.
Why were we sounding the alarm? Well, anyone who's been watching these talks would be quite amazed at the complete lack of urgency in these corridors, given the science on climate change. The usual suspects, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and New Zealand, are holding everything up, and seem more obsessed with the short term, special interests of their fossil
fuel industries at home. I could get very depressed at this stage. Time is marching on.
Dead humpback found on bow of Exxon tanker
Honestly, people. You can't make this stuff up.
An ExxonMobil oil tanker arrived in the port of Valdez (yes, the site of the Exxon-valdez oil spill) with a dead humpback whale stuck on its bow that (really, I'm not making this up) nobody noticed until the tanker got into port.
Now, let's put our conventional journalism hats on -- for just a moment -- and look at how Exxon tried to duck this rather sensitive news item.
I went to our top Conventional Old Media guy with this news item to get his take. If you picture J. Jonah Jameson, Spiderman's editor, you'd be fairly close to our Chief Editor, at least in disposition. Grumpy. Impatient. Blunt. (Occupational hazard among chief editors, actually) But give him curly hair, lose the cigar, throw in a Scottish burr, and you get the picture.
Greenpeace pees all over the IT sector!
Blogger Jay Yarrow, from the Business Insider Green Sheet, described the launch of the Cool IT Challenge with the following sentence: "Greenpeace pees all over the IT sector today, saying companies aren't doing their part to save the world." Believe it or not, this was not a direct quote from our press release. We're not peeing on them Jay, we're endorsing them. Very different.
Watch the Nick Broomfield film about climate change and direct action
Do you remember the six Greenpeace volunteers who made history last year when they were acquitted for defending the climate?
They were accused of causing £30,000 of criminal damage to Kingsnorth coal-fired power station. Their defence of "lawful excuse" was accepted by the jury - because they were acting to safeguard property around the world "in immediate need of protection" from the impacts of climate change, caused in part by burning coal.
Internationally acclaimed director Nick Broomfield was so inspired by this story that he has just completed a 20 minute film celebrating the spirit of direct action. The film tells the story of the activists who scaled the 220m chimney at Kingsnorth and the landmark case with supporting testimony by the world's leading climate scientist Dr James Hansen of NASA.
Watch the trailer above, or see the whole film in indulgent HD.
Exxon funding for junk science revealed
Kert Davies, over at the ever-vigilant Exxon Secrets site, writes:
Finally. After years of denying its role in the campaign of climate denial, Exxon has revealed a dirty secret, that it has and likely still is DIRECTLY funding junk scientists.
Thanks to Exxon's revealing this little secret, we now have a direct link between the Exxon black bag o' cash and two scientists who have made their careers as global warming deniers.
Read all about it.
Big carbon footprint equals welfare?
The following piece is by Satu Pitkänen, one of our press officers in Finland
I realised it's time to wake up and smell the upcoming EU election. Despite the fact that many of the decisions that affect my everyday life are done locally, inside my country, some of the most significant political processes have to be done internationally. Take climate change for example. It is nothing a single person or a single country can do much about. We need to be in on it together.
That's why I had to stop yesterday, rub my eyes and read again. "Our enlarging carbon footprint is only a sign of the welfare we have created for ourselves", said Mr Ari Vatanen, a Finnish world rally champion and now member of EU parliament (as a French resident, and part of a conservative French political party) and a candidate for the next term from Finland. He went on: "Warmth is a good thing, cold is a bad thing. When it's cold one can die of a flu. Welfare has always meant that it gets warmer." Yes, really. It does sound like an argument from kindergarten!
I'm sure most of us understand the basics of science and know it's perfectly possible to study long term temperature and climate changes. And I'm sure most of us - even the sceptics - have now accepted the fact that we are influencing the climate. But not Ari: "It's absurd that a person would know how the climate changes. Nobody knows what the weather is going to be like next Saturday. Warm periods have come and gone during history."
If the EU is to maintain its position as the climate leader of the world, we have to make sure we elect the right people to the parliament. Politicians who have earned their votes simply by driving a fast car should not to be allowed to undermine the promising path of diminishing greenhouse gas emissions and slowing down climate change. We need parliamentarians with vision, not populist ideas of bringing a sports car to everyone's garage without exhausting any natural resources.
Finnish action:Update
All 32 activists at a palm oil diesel refinery in Porvoo, Finland have been arrested by police. 6 of the activists have already ben released and we are waiting for the release of the remaining activists.
Do your part. Join these brave activists and take action - Send a letter to Neste Oil and ask them to stop using palm oil in NExBTL diesel and to instead find a sustainable raw material before putting their planned NExBTL refineries into operation.
Early morning action
Before most of us even had our first cup of coffee this morning, 32 activists from Finland and Sweden were up and taking action at a palm oil diesel refinery in Porvoo, Finland. Neste Oil, an oil refining company that is largely owned by the Finnish government, has plans to rapidly expand over the next three years - to become the world's largest consumer of palm oil.
Palm oil production is the leading cause of deforestation in Southeast Asia. Rainforests and peatlands are cleared and burned to make way for palm oil plantations releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxiode. This destructive practice is the leading reason why Indonesia is now the third largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world. If that doesn’t sound bad enough we can also blame this rampant deforestation for pushing species like the orang-utan and the Sumatran tiger to the brink of extinction.
The activists will be at the plant as long as they can demanding that Neste Oil stop contributing to forest destruction that is contributing to climate change. Do your part and join them in the action. Send a letter to Neste Oil and ask them to stop using palm oil in NExBTL diesel and to instead find a sustainable raw material before putting their planned NExBTL refineries into operation.
Neste Oil uses palm oil as the main component of the NExBTL-diesel and markets it as an environmentally-friendly alternative to fossil fuels. This ‘green’ marketing contradicts the warnings that climate scientists issued last year that palm oil grown on deforested land is many times more damaging to the climate than conventional fuels.
The Carbon Budget
In these tough economic times none of us are strangers to the concept of ‘budgeting’. It makes perfect sense doesn’t it? You have a limited amount of funds to allocate so you try to live within those means. Of course you could ‘live now, pay later’ but that way disaster lies.
That concept is applied to carbon in the context of climate change in a new study published today in the science journal Nature.
There's a Q and A on the article here
This is the road to Copenhagen!
A busy day for team Greenpeace in Belgium yesterday. At 8 in the morning activists blocked traffic on the Ring around Brussels, the busiest traffic 'knot' in the country. After safely re-routing traffic, 30 of them unrolled a 180 square meter green carpet on the road and used it to visualise the alternatives for the planned road expansion of the Flemish government. In the run up to regional elections in June, they wanted to put these road expansion plans on the political agenda.
The message was clear: continuing to expand road infrastructure does not match with the urgency of climate change, and will not lead us to a good result from the Copenhagen climate summit at the end of this year. Emissions from road traffic are still rapidly increasing, and to turn this around we need not only fuel efficient cars but also less traffic on our roads.
In fact, several studies show that expanding road infrastructure does not solve congestion problems anyway, because new capacity is overtaken by an increase in new cars on the road in just a couple of years.
Governments need to invest in a modal shift, in order to get more cars off the road.
If they fail, the road ahead will start looking like the highway to hell.
(Read more in Nederlands or Français)
Choose a bike, Choose a bus, Choose the climate: your second reason to believe is transport
Guest Blogged by: Mel, Climate Campaigner on the launch of latest Energy [R]evolution video Reasons to Believe: Transport (narrated by Susan Sarandon)
Sustainable Transport. I am often accused of trying to limit people’s freedoms when I mention that phrase. They say that they need a car, and that they have the right to go wherever they please and whenever they please. They don’t want to have to wait, or get on public transport with other people.
But to me, it is not about limiting freedoms, although it cannot be denied that the transport sector is the only sector whose CO2 emissions have actually increased in recent years. To me the phrase sustainable transport should be about the freedom to choose. Making smart transport choices, and encouraging politicians to create the circumstances where we have the right to choose, truly integrated transport in towns, and alternative ways of thinking about journeys in the country. Ok, it may be about not driving oversized cars with big-bore exhausts on the road, but as the Australians have already realised, it’s not big and it’s not clever.
Our new video, the second of three Reasons to Believe videos narrated by Susan Sarandon, shows that there are many choices in a sustainable transport system, and that they are smart choices to make. It also shows that it is possible for us all to help to create the conditions that we need for an Energy [R]evolution, in order to help prevent catastrophic climate change. As Ewan McGregor may have said in Trainspotting:
Choose a bike
Choose a bus
Choose sharing a car and making a friend as you both sing along, too loud, with that song on the radio
Choose a train
Choose to walk
Choose the right size of vehicle for the journey and the load
Choose the climate
Choose Life
Watch the video below:
To all new arrivals
What kind of footprint will we leave for our little ones?
Today is a very special "Earth Day" for me because I just heard this morning that someone very close to me is expecting a baby and I am over the moon with this news. I am already starting to make plans for the arrival of this exciting new life and I'm thinking about what the future holds for it. Inspired by the fact that it's Earth Day - I wrote the following for the 'new arrival' in my life but really - it's a letter for the next generation intended to shake up the current one!
To all new arrivals,
You will soon be here on this planet and I hope that you will get the same chances I have had to enjoy this beautiful place we call "Earth". However, I am very worried that you wont because every day it seems that parts of our planet are irreversibly destroyed.
Everyone is supposed to do something today that will make a difference to the future of the planet but I can't help feeling like it is a joke. How can we be happy setting aside only one day for the Earth when every day needs to be "Earth Day"? Sure one day is better than no day but for too many people the other 364 days seem to be "Consume and Destroy" days. And we just can't carry on like this. We only have one planet to live on and that's it. We wont be handed another after we have completely screwed up this one and even if there is a creator and they have a spare planet lying around, I'm sure they wouldn't let us get our filthy hands on it because they know exactly what would happen if we did.
Top Tech CEOs - "You've got work to do!"
I'm chalking down California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer as a supporter of our IT climate leadership challenge. On Monday she told told more than 50 Silicon Valley CEOs to lobby for greenhouse gas emissions reductions in the US:
"We need your help," Boxer said. "Once the price of carbon is set by the free market, your world will change dramatically. Others control the price of oil, and they know exactly what they're doing."
Which is pretty similar to what we are asking for - Tech CEO's to stand up from a strong global deal on greenhouse gas emissions reductions because it makes good business sense. A strong international climate change deal would certainly increase demand for energy saving solutions offered by the IT industry.
Sun Microsystems first with response on climate leadership
Back in March we launched our IT Climate leadership Challenge to the biggest IT companies to stand up and be counted in support of a strong Kyoto deal this year and lead the way in providing climate solutions across the economy.
Since then we've been following up letters sent to company CEO's back in February in preparation for releasing company scores during May. With many companies it's taking a long time to get answers but kudos to Sun Microsystems for sending and now publishing a response which already puts down a good marker for where they will score against others in May.
Sun Microsystems is a founding member of Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy (BICEP). A key principle among the eight put forth by BICEP is that the United States must achieve a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 and at least 25 percent reduction below 1990 levels by 2020. (snip) Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz will be featured on a plenary panel at the upcoming (April 2009) Ceres conference. We expect that Sun's support of BICEP and its principles will be featured in his remarks.
I've asked for more details from Sun on a few points but so far this is the best response.
So IBM, Dell, HP, Google, Fujitsu and co, now you know what you have to beat…..
The card image is the Sun CEO and a sneak preview of how the climate leaders website will look come the May launch.
Lead change on the climate
Take a look at this picture in der Spiegel, one of Germany's biggest magazines.
Our activist was only fifty meters away from Obama, as you can see here.
Read the full story of the action here.
Video: burning ice: methane vents in Siberia
More about the science of other Greenhouse gasses here.
Become a climate activist here.
Maximum Arctic Ice Extent fifth lowest on record
It seems it's going to be another grim year in the Arctic. The Ice Sheets have reached their maximum extent for the year, and it's the fifth lowest on record.
Update from Bonn climate talks
Quite a few of our climate folks have been on the UN Climate meeting circuit since before the Kyoto protocol was born. Not a few of them have been fairly jaded about the role the United States has played at these meetings in the past. So it's good to see some enthusiasm for the new administration's break from the "Crisis? What Crisis?" head-in-the-sand policies of the Bush era:
Here's and update from Cindy Baxter, at the Climate conference in Bonn:
It was quite something to watch a US delegate in the climate talks say that his entire delegation believed in the science of climate change. "The science is clear, and the threat is real."of leadership we want to see here in Bonn.
Historic Yongding gate becomes site of climate summit countdown
Greenpeace activists have turned to Beijing’s historic Yongding gate to call on the government for immediate action on climate change. Activists turned one of Beijing's ancient city gates into a gigantic countdown clock marking the time left till the UN climate summit in Copenhagen. Greenpeace is calling on Chinese President Hu Jintao to personally attend the Copenhagen Climate Summit and work with world leaders to come up with a binding treaty to fight climate change.
The action has started a buzz, with mentions popping up online shortly after the action started.
AP has an article with a small photo and quotes from our climate campaigner, Li Yan.
Greenpeace China is calling on Chinese President Hu Jintao to attend December's climate change conference in Copenhagen.As the world's most populous developing nation and, by some estimates, its biggest producer of greenhouse gasses, China is obliged to take a major role in the talks, said climate change specialist Li Yan of Greenpeace's Chinese branch.
"Copenhagen is the best, maybe the last, chance to avoid catastrophe," Li said Monday at the launch of a clock counting down to the start of the Dec. 7-18 U.N. Climate Change Conference.
China says developed countries bear most of the responsibility for stemming climate change.
Li said surveys taken in Chinese cities show a willingness to absorb higher electricity prices to promote sustainable power generation.
Photo © Su Li/ Greenpeace
Activists locked down Sinar Mas headquarters
Forest destruction is now universally recognised to cause about 20 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions. This means that cutting down trees is more destructive to the planet than the entire global transport sector. Add that to species extinction, loss of biodiversity and the elimination of entire ways of life for forest communities and you have to wonder why companies like Sinar Mas are allowed to continue to expand their destruction of forests and peatlands in Indonesia.Yesterday, 25 activists put themselves on the line and demanded an immediate end to expansion into forests and peatland by Sinar Mas and other companies. Read more.
Take Action. Tell the Indonesian government to implement a moratorium on any further forest conversion. This will not only help curb the country's greenhouse gas emissions, but will safeguard the wealth of tropical biodiversity and protect the livelihood of forest dependent communities all across Indonesia.
Truth coming out about UK police actions against Kingsnorth coal plant protesters
I hadn't heard before how badly the police behaved at the climate camp protest last August. At the time, it was reported as "police clash with protesters". The reality that has come out is that it was really police harassing protesters and local residents alike - without cause, without provocation.
The police questioned, searched and harassed anyone in the area - plus confiscating, apparently, anything they wanted to. Stuff like bike locks, spoons, umbrellas, chalk, toenail clippers, duct tape and felt tip pens.
My favorite is line in the video is a little kid saying, "They took my crayons because apparently they you can draw on banners and that you can, um, commit a crime with crayons". Good job coppers!
More:
Kingsnorth report reveals shocking police campaign of intimidation against protesters
Greenpeace UK climate camp updates
BBC: Protest policing complaint
Boing Boing: How British cops are criminalising peaceful protest
Susan Sarandon is back! The energy revolution rolls on ...
Last week Greenpeace launched a new version of the first of three 'Reasons to Believe' videos narrated by Susan Sarandon, to coincide with the launch of the Energy [R]evolution in the USA. The video got close to 2,000 views on YouTube within the first day! Then we hit a snag. In the film Susan mentions New Zealand as a shining example of greater energy efficiency, due to the government plan to phase out traditional (and supremely inefficient) lightbulbs in 2009. After we launched the video and it was enjoyed by almost 2,000 people we then discovered that New Zealand's new government, led by John Key, was no longer going through with this phasing out. These things happen, unfortunately. So, after some adjustment we are re-launching the launch! Please enjoy our new, improved, and more accurate 'Reasons to Believe: Lightbulbs' video. And just as a side note to John Key - when you do get back on track with phasing out traditional lightbulbs in New Zealand we're more than happy to go back to the original version of the video. We've got you covered. Enjoy:
Twitter live panel feedback
I liked this. The "Using Mobile Phones for Good" panel at tech conference SXSW in Austin put the audience twitter stream live on the screen in the panel room. The panel was primarily about how UNICEF is partnering with Mobile Phone companies to help with their hunger programmes in Africa.
So I used this to ask the Mobile phone company representatives in the room to do good by lobbying for decarbonization of our energy supply, to stop future famines that will happen due to runaway climate change, unless they and other Electronics firms take the lead in challenging the oil & coal industries.
EU Comission agrees with us on IT industry and climate change
It's nice when occasionally big political institutions agree with you. Last week we launched our IT Climate Leadership Challenge, looking for IT leaders to raise their game on tackling climate change. Yesterday the EU Commission followed with a new proposal on IT and its role in tackling climate change:
Today the Commission announced its intention to set out concrete measures that will pave the way for ICT to contribute to energy efficiency gains and emission reductions. It will also call on the ICT sector to lead the way by setting itself concrete targets to become more energy efficient, by collectively agreeing a common approach to measuring energy performance and benchmarking progress.The Commission also announced a new public consultation to establish a common base for commitments to and claims of improved energy efficiency. Only by identifying who does what within the set deadlines, that targets have a real chance of being achieved.
Unfortunately there's no mention in their press release about the need for the IT industry to push for a strong deal at the vital meeting on the Kyoto treaty in Copenhagen in Dec. Maybe that's because the EU is struggling it's self to show climate leadership right now.
What is promising is the fact that the EU Commission is calling on companies to set concrete targets for themselves, we've put numbers on that ask to IT companies:
Measure the company's absolute emissions and commit to cut them by at least 20 percent by 2012.
This EU consultation should also push companies to prioritise carbon reduction solutions they can provide and have done the right homework to prove that those solutions can reduce overall emissions across the economy, much like our ask to the industry:
Prioritise those technologies and product development lines that cut greenhouse emissions across the economy.
So the challenge is out there and not only from us. So which company will be the first to rise to it?
Revolution in the USA
Greenpeace USA is launching a revolution today - an Energy [R]evolution, with the official release of Greenpeace USA's Energy Revolution scenario. The US Energy Revolution is part of a sustainable global energy outlook, with an original report which is 212 pages long, contributed to by scientists, engineers, academics, and developed with specialists from the Institute of Technical Thermodynamics at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR). You can download both the full 212 page report in all its glory, or a more time-friendly 16 page version here, OR I could sum it up for you right now.
Our reliance on dirty energy has helped to create the greatest threat we've ever faced: climate change. You may hear that a shift away from fossil fuels and nuclear is not possible, or not necessary, or not urgent - but it's not true. The Energy Revolution report is proof that a major change of direction in our energy consumption is possible, necessary, and urgent in order to avoid the worst consequences of what dirty energy has helped to create. You need to be part of the revolution. Here is one reason to believe:
UPDATE: EU finance ministers fail to bail
As we feared - the EU finance ministers avoided making any kind of decision on climate funding after hundreds of us blockaded their meeting in Brussels yesterday. This pathetic outcome means it's now up to Heads of States and governments to step up and show us the money at the EU leaders meeting next week.
While the finance ministers recognised the need for rich countries to provide funding to developing nations - they did not propose any concrete public financial support for climate action and instead made an empty promise for private investments, which they can neither predict nor control.
To secure a global climate agreement at the upcoming UN climate negotiations in December, the EU and the rest of the wealthy countries must take responsibility and pay up. EU leaders must now do what their finance ministers failed to do and put enough money on the table to tackle the climate crisis.
We're continuing to push the EU to bail out the planet - and save the climate. If you sign up here - we'll let you know how you can help soon!
Bailing out the planet- Video
Here's some video from the inspiring action today in Brussels. More than 340 activists were arrested and the activists were able to block the exits of the building for more than 2 hours. All of the activists have been released from jail and while some of the activists need to be hospitalized because of police brutality, there we no serious injuries. Thank you the activists that came from 20 different countries to take action and to all of you that followed the action and offered your support. Read more and see photos here.
Bailing out the planet in Brussels
I woke up at 6 o'clock this morning to save the climate - the kind of climate that you and I are so accustomed to - the kind of climate that sustains the diversity of life on this planet - the climate that is on the brink of total destablisation. And even though it was pouring with rain when I stepped outside - I didn't wish for sunshine or anything more than the meager 4 degrees Celsius in the surrounding atmosphere. This is Belgium after all and I was fully prepared with waterproofs and a brolly.
With a bright yellow Greenpeace emblazoned jacket stuffed into the bag on my back - I trudged along the streets of Brussels towards the EU Council Building with several other activists. We were going to lock the gates outside the building by placing solid metal D-locks around the gate and our necks. Meanwhile over three hundred other activists were going to block the front entrance of the building and all the other exits so that EU finance ministers couldn't leave until they had agreed to bail out the planet - and save the climate.
Twitter updates on climate action in Brussles
Here's a feed from Lisa (ecotist) on the ground, plus updates our team in Amsterdam are posting (people are calling in and we're putting the news on Twitter).
You can comment on the action by including #climateaction in your tweet.
340 activists call for global climate bail out in Brussels
More than 300 activists from 20 different countries are in Brussels this morning to take action and demand a financial commitment to tackling climate change. The activists have surrounded the building in Brussels where finance ministers are discussing funding for climate change.
The activists have sealed the entrances and are refusing to let the politicians leave until they committed to “Sav€ the Climate” and “Bail out the Planet”.
Green Refrigerator crosses into US via Mexico
Good ideas just keep marching forth. Greenfreeze is Greenpeace's market proven, environmentally friendly, refrigeration technology, which we've been pushing as an alternative to fridges which run on climate-killing chemicals. Over the weekend, 15 years after Greenpeace proved "Greenfreeze" technology viable and drove a reluctant industry in a whole new direction, the first consumer Greenfreeze refrigerator has arrived in North America, via Mexico, thanks to Bosch, which brings the fridge from Europe, and Sears, which brings it from Bosch to the consumer.
This is a beautiful sneak attack on the North American market, thanks, ironically, to the North American Free Trade Agreement. Consumers in the US and Canada have not had the choice of Greenfreeze technology that most of the rest of the world has, thanks to the efforts of industry lobbyists to keep it out.
Connecting climate change and economic recovery
In this video interview, economist Nicholas Stern discusses the downturn and its effect on the climate change agenda.
If you're like me - and don't understand economics all that well - this video is actually an easy way to get a bit of a grip on how we can solve both the economic crisis and the climate crisis. OK so it's not the most inspirational video ever but it might help you in the next debate you end up having about this stuff with your mates down the pub! Also - it's nice to hear and see Mr. Stern after hearing so much about his famous review.
If Earth were a bank, they'd bail it out
© Falk Heller/argum/Greenpeace
Greenpeace activists have been targeting European Finance Ministers this week, in advance of next Tuesday's EU meeting about a global green deal.
Well, it should be about Europe's financial commitments to help developing countries tackle climate change (read more about it here). But some European governments are uneasy (or even dead set against) taking the lead.
Danish activists today dropped a large banner at the Ministry of Finance calling for a commitment to pay Denmark's share (6 billion Dkr, 800,000 EUR per year) of a green recovery package for the planet.
Real climate leaders wanted
I'm just back from the massive IT trade fair CeBIT in Germany where we launched our latest push for greener electronics – now asking IT leaders to rise to the challenge of climate change.
Basically we are asking the executives of top IT firms to lobby key governments for a strong, planet-saving agreement at the December 2009 climate change summit in Copenhagen. We're inviting companies like Cisco, Fujitsu, Google, HP, IBM, Nokia and Microsoft to the challenge. Many of these companies are positioning themselves as being able to provide the solutions to significantly cut carbon emissions. If they are serious they need to support a strong Kyoto deal in Copenhagen that will provide the demand for their IT solutions.
Despite the media at CeBIT being very excited about Arnold Schwarzenegger's attendance (possibly hoping for a Terminator style quote), we managed to get good interesting in the launch of the challenge with coverage in The Register, Computer world and the Green IT report.
Now we have a few things we need help with:
Right now, today, Thursday, - vote up the story on Digg to bring extra attention
Help spread the word
In between interviews I also popped over to Cisco's blog that talks about all the great climate solutions they have to suggest they support the challenge. I got a "your comment appears to be spam and will be moderated". I heard that several other folks comments have also not appeared since Tuesday. So either Cisco's moderation is much slower then their routers, or invite on the page to "Join the Conversation" doesn't apply if you have something meaningful to say. Anyway I've added a trackback to this post - so if you reading Cisco – rising to the challenge is a better business move than trying to ignore it.
Cisco Update, 6th March: Cisco's Laura Ipsen, Senior VP, Global Policy and Government Affairs posted a response yesterday on Cisco's blog. I have a few questions which I'm following up with by email. Stay tuned.......
For those companies who might need a bit more prompting to back up their green words with real action, to paraphrase Arnie "we'll be back", in May with the first assessment of the real IT climate leaders.
2,500 activists call for clean energy
An estimated 2,500 activists made their voices heard at the Capitol Climate Action, the largest act of civil disobedience about global warming in American history. James Hansen, Vandana Shiva, Wendell Berry, Robert Kennedy, Jr. were all on hand to add their voices to the crowd of activists at the plant to demand action on climate change.
Images from Climate Action on Capitol Hill
The Capitol Climate Action yesterday in Washington, DC concluded peacefully and with no arrests, despite being the largest incident of mass civil disobedience in the name of our climate. On the website they featured live streaming video, a twitter stream featuring posts direct from the action and live blogging. The above picture is my favourite from the Flickr stream so far - it shows people of all ages participating, and there is a great contrast between the red 'power' banners and the White House in the background. Along with a coalition of NGO supporters specially trained for the action other participants included Bill McKibben, Daryl Hannah, James Hansen and other prominent environmentalists and celebrities.
Also, if you look closely at the bottom right of the photograph you can see a man fiddling with his cellphone - probably posting to Twitter right at that moment. The online broadcasting of this event was really extensive, covering step by step, speech by speech, every moment.
Mass Civil Disobedience
If you are anywhere near Washington, DC today and you want to be part of the what will likely be the largest demonstration on climate change, get yourself down to the capitol to be a part of the action.
Ninety organizations and thousands of people will be marching right down to the the Capitol Power Plant to demand that the administration confront the climate crisis and make a solutions a priority. The power plant is a 99-year-old facility that heats and cools the halls of Congress, still burns coal and accounts for one-third of the legislative branch’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Mapping CO2 emissions
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.
Concentrating Solar Power
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.
Nuclear wishful thinking ...
'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 ...']
More numbers
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?
China builds a wind turbine every two hours
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.
Boing Boing kicking around climate change
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.
Obama opens the door for states to cut emissions
Yesterday, President Obama granted California and 13 other states a waiver to set strict vehicle emissions standards on their own. The administration is actually going to let states move forward and pass emission standards that might be even tougher than federal standards. Finally! Something resembling sense on environmental issues is coming from the administration in my country.
State of the world
Bruce Sterling and company are doing their yearly "state of the world" ruminations over on The Well. They're covering an lot of ground (financial crisis first and all that), but this is the quote that got me...
When you can't imagine how things are going to change, that doesn't mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.
One thing I get a lot is that Greenpeace should come up with answers instead of yelling about problems all the time. The truth is we're not smart enough to know all the answers. We just know they're out there. (Though we've got some ideas about solving climate change and marine reserves among other things.)
Anyway, here's the full quote from Bruce...
Last, and slowest, and worst, there's the climate. The planet's entire atmosphere is polluted. Practically everything we do in our civilization is directly predicated on setting fire to dead stuff. Climate change is a major evil. It's vast in scope and it's everywhere. The climate crisis would be a major issue even for a technically with-it bright-green secular Utopia, where every single citizen was an MIT grad. Of course our world looks nothing like that. Nor will it.The people fighting climate change -- they look like Voltaire combatting Kings and Popes. They're still eighty percent witty comments. They have a foul, hot wind at their backs, but they don't yet have the battalions.
Communism, capitalism, socialism, whatever: we've never yet had any economic system that recognizes that we have to live on a living planet. Plankton and jungles make the air we breathe, but they have no place at our counting-house. National regulations do nothing much for that situation. New global regulations seem about as plausible as a new global religion.
None of this a counsel of despair. Seriously. We dare not despair because in any real crisis, the pessimists die fast. This is a frank recognition of the stakes. It's aimed at the adults in the room.
Let me put it this way. People don't have to solve every problem in the world in order to be happy. People will always have problems. People ARE problems. People become happy when they have something coherent to be enthusiastic about. People need to LOOK AND FEEL they're solving some of mankind's many problems. People can't stumble around in public like blacked-out alcoholics, then have some jerk like Phil Gramm tell them to buck up.
When you can't imagine how things are going to change, that doesn't mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.
Discussion continues on The Well...
BP wins coveted 'emerald paintbrush' award for worst greenwash of 2008
I'm reposting this piece from the Greenpeace UK blog by my esteemed colleague Joss.
The tension built as the judges deliberated. Then at last the results were were all in and - ta-da! It was time to announce the winner of the first annual Greenpeace 'Emerald paintbrush' award for greenwashing above and beyond the call of duty. Cue a quick roll on the drums, and step forward into the spotlight - BP!
The energy corporation with an income larger than most of the world's nation states has spent a lot of time and money restyling itself as being 'Beyond Petroleum' in recent years, but a trawl through their accounts quickly reveals just how empty that assertion really is - 'Back to Petroleum', more like it.
Save Santa!
Thanks to our New Zealand office - here's the English version of the video Andrew posted below. Lovely vid to share on Facebook and the like. Hint hint!
Google-bombing energy giant Eon
The noble art of Google bombing - of making a website rise up the search results by encouraging other websites to link to them in a particular way - is being harnessed by blogs campaigning against new coal-fired power stations in the UK, especially the proposed new facility at Kingsnorth in Kent. The idea is to make the No New Coal website appear at the top of the list any time a search is done for 'Eon' (which is, of course, the company so intent on building the plant at Kingsnorth).
Anyone with a website, blog or profile on the likes of MySpace or Facebook can help out, so if you'd like to help here are the full instructions I purloined from Climate Change Action:
"Mass action" vs "direct action
Over on the Guardian blog, Damian Carrington has a post on mobilization tactics and climate change:
Can the people of the world make global warming history? Ed Miliband, the UK's minister for energy and climate change certainly hopes so.Talking to the Guardian, he has called for a mass movement, like the 2005 Make Poverty History campaign, that will force the world's leaders to agree to a meaningful global climate deal at UN talks in Copenhagen at the end of 2009.
The Make Poverty History campaign, a coalition of hundreds of groups, successfully urged the G8 meeting in Gleneagles to cancel $40bn of debt owed by 18 of the world's poorest nations.
With uncanny timing, the campaign group Plane Stupid have occupied a runway at Stansted Airport, stopping all flights. I suspect this direct action, by about 50 protesters, was not what Miliband had in mind. The police have made multiple arrests and it's now all over. My colleague Leo Hickman has strongly defended the action.
Damian goes on to ask whether mass protest or direct action (like Plane Stupid's) is better for putting the breaks on climate change. Here's a thought: What if we did both?
Top 10 big energy myths
The Guardian has a good article on the "Top 10 big energy myths". It explains solar and wind power are ready for the prime time, and some other good ones.
Myth 4: nuclear power is cheaper than other low-carbon sources of electricityIf we believe that the world energy and environmental crises are as severe as is said, nuclear power stations must be considered as a possible option. But although the disposal of waste and the proliferation of nuclear weapons are profoundly important issues, the most severe problem may be the high and unpredictable cost of nuclear plants.
The new nuclear power station on the island of Olkiluoto in western Finland is a clear example. Electricity production was originally supposed to start this year, but the latest news is that the power station will not start generating until 2012. The impact on the cost of the project has been dramatic. When the contracts were signed, the plant was supposed to cost €3bn (£2.5bn). The final cost is likely to be more than twice this figure and the construction process is fast turning into a nightmare. A second new plant in Normandy appears to be experiencing similar problems. In the US, power companies are backing away from nuclear because of fears over uncontrollable costs.
Oh yeah, we know all about Olkiluoto. What a mess.
Reasons to be cheerful?
Via FiredogLake I learn that the Wall Street Journal is reporting on a drop in electricity consumption in the US.
"An unexpected drop in U.S. electricity consumption has utility companies worried that the trend isn't a byproduct of the economic downturn, and could reflect a permanent shift in consumption that will require sweeping change in their industry."
One of the favourite myths of the power companies is that demand for energy grows regardless of what you do. Change your bulbs, insulate your house, buy a smaller, more efficient fridge and retool the factory you work in to be more efficient. Even if we all do all those things it won't make a difference say the power companies, somehow, magically, demand will rise, day on day, year on year.
This thinking was easiest to see in Chevron's laughable 'Energyville' game, where you could set energy policy. It didn't matter how much you spent on energy efficiency, demand always went up by the same amount, because if you work in the power sector rising demand is like the sun coming up. It just happens and there's nothing you can do about it.
Well that might not be true anymore. Demand is down in the US, a response to high prices or the start of an energy revolution?
Getting ready for Poznan
Over at our New Zealand blog Bunny sets the stage for the upcoming climate negotiations in Poznan.
Oil money
Almost 20 years after the Exxon Valdez caused the worst oil spill in US history the affected communities may finally be about to see some compensation.
How soon is now?
Palm oil giant destroying national park in Borneo
The Esperanza is now anchored in Singapore harbour and there will be a few days of ship operations - taking on supplies and fuel, doing essential maintenance, that kind of thing. But all that's happening without me. I disembarked yesterday and I'm finishing off a few things from a hotel in Little India. After weeks of daily cleaning chores, I have the strange urge to grapple a mop but I think the hotel staff would be bemused to say the least.
I mentioned that there was one final task left to do, however, and that's to expose once more the environmental crimes of Sinar Mas. Across the South China Sea from here in Kalimantan on the island of Borneo, Sinar Mas companies are clearing forests around the Danau Sentarum National Park, a wetland area protected under the international Ramsar convention, in order to expand their palm oil operations. The buffer zone which is being logged is vital to the health and biodiversity of the park, one of south-east Asia's largest wetland areas and home to a wide range of species including clouded leopards, orang-utans and a large population of proboscis monkeys.
Farewell to the palm oil boom town
After giving the Isola Corallo a farewell paint-job, we've finally taken our leave of Dumai. We did everything we set out to do (and perhaps a bit more), and we've reminded people both nationally and internationally about the problems associated with palm oil production in Indonesia. And as I mentioned in my last post, palm oil giant Sinar Mas has been rattled by our actions and, even though Greenpeace campaigners are now due to meet with their representatives next week in Bali, we're not going to stop exposing the wanton destruction at their hands (and the hands of other companies) of the forests and peatlands here.
This afternoon, we arrived in Singapore which is to be our final destination. This expedition is winding up but don't go anywhere just yet - we have one last task to perform but you'll have to wait for Monday to find out what that is.
In the meantime, remember that poll the Jakarta Post was running about whether our actions were justified? They've published some of the response on their website and apart from one or two negative comments, everyone thinks we did the right thing. Thank you very much if you emailed or texted in - you can go one better and write to Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, president of Indonesia, demanding an immediate end to deforestation in his country.
Tug of war
I had thought that, after the Esperanza nipped into the berth reserved for the Isola Corallo this morning, we'd have some time to rest (and, in my case, a long shower) and prepare for the inevitable visit by the authorities. It didn't quite work out like that and by mid-morning, events were moving rapidly.
The other ship alongside the dock had departed and was replaced by a big barge which was brought right up to the Esperanza's stern to hem us in. With the Corallo preparing to come in (the request for a pilot to guide the ship in had been picked up over the radio), it became clear that the port authorities were preventing us from moving up the berth.
NEW! Climate rescue weblog
We've just launched a climate rescue station next to a coal mine in Poland.
Previously we were using weblog.greenpeace.org/climate for political updates for last year's UN climate talks in Bali. This year we're back again with a new look and new stuff to blog about.
Not only will be at the UN climate talks again this year in December - but we've got a bunch of great stuff happening at our Climate Rescue Station and on the Rainbow Warrior. So we're going to post it all on the climate rescue blog.
Greenpeace ship moves in to block more palm oil tankers
Apologies for not posting an update yesterday. The anchor chain of the Isola Corallo has been occupied ever since Wednesday night, and still is, but we've been waiting for another opportunity to present itself. Finally, after long hours of observing the traffic in Dumai port and several false hopes, about an hour before dawn our chance came. Now the Esperanza itself has moved in to block the Corallo from taking on its cargo of palm oil.
There's one part of the quayside here dedicated to piping palm oil into the bellies of the tankers. Up until a couple of hours ago it was occupied by two other ships; then one of them moved out and the Esperanza was able to take its place.
We're now preventing the Corallo from coming alongside - it's a much larger ship, just a bit bigger than the Gran Couva we saw earlier in the week, and so both us and the other ship already here will need to move before the Corallo can come in.
Despite the early hour, all hands were on deck. It was my job to help fix the mooring lines once the Esperanza had reached the quay, which involved jumping down from the poop deck. Pipes and thick mud lay directly beneath, but I managed to get down without breaking my ankle.
The chain reaction continues as ship number two is immobilised
So despite several requests to leave Dumai, we haven't left (even though the harbour master visited the ship this afternoon and turned out to be a really nice guy). The reason for that is that we have a bigger and much more significant target in our sights. Now it's arrived and the Esperanza's crew have swung into action once more, and another anchor chain occupation is under way.
We've been waiting a few days for the Isola Corallo to turn up, and at one point a spelling mistake in the ship's name made the researchers wonder whether it even existed. It's time of arrival has slipped later and later but around 7.30pm it finally dropped its anchor.
We headed out into the dark and once more made for the anchor chain. The designated climber scrambled up the chain but, unlike with the Gran Couva, the crew showed very little interest. A couple of heads peered over the side, but their captain had already been informed what we were up to. Plus the crew were probably more interested in shore leave, but I imagine that will change.
Wanted: your opinions on our palm oil actions
The Jakarta Post, Indonesia's main English-language newspaper, is asking for readers' opinions on our recent activities in Dumai:
Greenpeace has blocked several palm oil shipments, preventing them from leaving Indonesia, and has called for an end to forest clearing for palm oil plantations. What do you think? Send your opinions by SMS to +62 81118 72772 or by email to readersforum@thejakartapost.com. Please include your name and city.
Meanwhile, enjoy this quick video of clips from the past couple of days. It was made to send round TV networks and media outlets, but you can still get an idea of what it was like to be there.
Greenpeace climber brought down in front of cops, spectators and fruit sellers
I was hoping we'd make the anchor chain occupation last for at least 24 hours and earlier this morning it was looking like we'd make it. However, we lost out by about 40 minutes because at 12.45pm our climber was removed from the Gran Couva and has been taken away by the police. Never the less, our actions prevented the departure of the Gran Couva and it's cargo of palm oil, plus we've made a big noise in the local, national and international media coverage about the link between the palm oil trade and deforestation.
According to our logistics co-ordinator Ric who was on the scene, police boats gathered during the morning until about 60 police were waiting at the bottom of the anchor chain. The main police boat had an embarrassing mishap on the way in, colliding with the Gran Couva before retreating to a safe distance. Adding to the crowd were pompong boats selling pineapples, jack fruit, onions and other essentials, like little floating shops, as well as various spectators watching the drama.
Paint 'em up, hose 'em down: taking action in Indonesia
Another dawn start today. Yesterday, we arrived in Dumai, a large port on the eastern coast of Sumatra and the second largest in Indonesia in terms of palm oil exports, and the scene of last year's Rainbow Warrior action. This morning, we headed out from the Esperanza and began painting slogans on the hulls of three ships anchored in the port.
They're loaded with palm oil from the plantations of Riau, just like the ones we've seen from the air and from the ground over the past few days, so being daubed with 'Forest Crime' and 'Climate Crime' in bright yellow paint is only appropriate.
The first stop on our tour of the port was the Gran Couva, a large tanker carrying 27,000 metric tonnes for palm oil giant Wilmar (the same company that owns the plantations John flew over on Saturday) and bound for Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The two painting teams got off to a great start, marking out the positions of the letters and getting stuck into 'Crime'. Angry shouts from the Gran Couva's crew did nothing to dissuade the painters, and neither did the hoses which were turned on them. Unfortunately, the water-based paint didn't last so well and some of the letters began to run.
The team in the small inflatable headed to the stern to try their luck there, but were met by more hoses. The second team in Susie Q fared better and were able to complete the words 'Forest Crime' on the other side of the bow. Watching from a short distance in the media boat, I was impressed how easy the painters were making it look, despite the water hoses and the awkward task of writing with paint rollers fixed onto broom handles.
Revealing the facts about palm oil to the Chinese public
posted on behalf of Shangwen, forest campaigner from Greenpeace China, on board the Esperanza
The Forest Defenders Camp we set up last year has gone, and so too has the ancient forest.
I saw the disastrous landscape through the lens of John our photographer and the pictures he has taken. I can feel the pain of our earth and I feel pain in my heart that I couldn’t catch the last cry of the forest which once stood in the same spot where we held the banner. There is an echo in my ears: the Earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the Earth. What will be the future?
The Earth needs a voice. The forests need a voice. I believe that’s why we, Greenpeace volunteers from around the world, stood in the middle of the devastation on Friday, even though many times we’ve felt hopelessness in the depth of our hearts. We must face the truth instead of turning our back and walking away. We must make decisions and take action instead of just talking while the forests are being chopped down. We must understand this: if we can not stop deforestation immediately, we will lose the struggle against climate change.
Sumatra's dark, satanic mills
posted on behalf of John on board the Esperanza
As a Greenpeace photographer, I find myself creating pictures in many interesting places. In any part of the world where there is a critical environmental problem, the Greenpeace photographers are there making the best visuals possible to share with everybody. Yesterday was no exception.
It was the last of the twice-daily, three-hour helicopter aerial surveys of Riau province in Sumatra, carried out over the last four days as part of the Esperanza's Forests for Climate tour of Indonesia. Every flight survey has been fascinating but this one - documenting the palm oil plantations belonging to Wilmar, one of the biggest palm oil companies in Indonesia - was breathtaking on a scale I have never seen before.
After flying a short while over intact and beautiful peatland forest, in the distance there appeared what looks like a sea or enormous lake. As we approached, we started to make out a green plain stretching to the horizon. Closer still and we knew we had found what we were looking for – the Wilmar plantations.
Alongside the forest, up against the wall
I've scrubbed and showered but there are still traces of mud sticking to me. It's my own fault - I guess I shouldn't have gone tramping around the peatlands here in Riau. But the picture above, that's us: some of the Esperanza's crew and several Indonesian volunteers pulling our banner tight against the forest wall, the straight line that separates the thriving ecosystem from the barren areas which have been cleared of trees. In case you're wondering, I'm at the top of the P in 'STOP'.
It was an early start and a long drive to get to the site on the Kampar peninsula, chosen because PT Arara Abadi-Siak has permits to set up plantations for acacia trees, used for making pulpwood and paper. The company is a subsidiary of Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), which is in turn owned by our old friends Sinar Mas - as well as having fingers in pulpwood, Sinar Mas is also one of the largest palm oil producers in Indonesia (not to mention a member of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil), and many of the nearby palm oil plantations have their name above the gate.
Driving along the road from Sungai Pakning was deceptively pleasant - elegant wooden houses were nestled amongst lush green foliage, and kids were cycling to school. But after crossing the Siak river on the ferry, we were deep into plantation country. Rows of oil palms lined the way with their shaggy coats of ferns, and bunches of palm fruit lay by the roadside. Along one stretch, intact forest sprawled to the right while regiments of young oil palms were springing up on the left, the forest wall a thick blue line on the horizon, and a pipeline followed us all the way from ferry.
Slash and burn in the forests of Sumatra
We've arrived in Sungai Pakning, a small port on the coast of Riau in Sumatra, and the Esperanza is anchored in a wide, silty channel running between the mainland and two islands, Pulau Bengkalis and Pulau Padang. The soupy water flowing gently past the ship will be down to the Siak river, the mouth of which is just a few miles south.
Sungai Pakning might be small, but the signs of what's happening further inland are everywhere. Large container ships wait patiently at anchor for their cargoes and the flame at the top of a refinery lights up the night sky. For we're on the edge of the great plantations which have come to dominate this area, both the oil palms we've seen so much of and, increasingly, acacia trees which are being harvested to be used as pulpwood and paper.
All these plantations are sitting on areas which used to be lowland forest growing in thick, water-logged peat. Of course, the forest is no longer there and the peat has been drained and burnt, causing the annual smog which drifts over south-east Asia during the burning season. It's this chopping, draining and burning which is releasing colossal quantities of greenhouse gases and helping to give Indonesia the number three spot in the global emissions charts.
Memo to Obama
Thank you, Barack Obama, for giving all of us new hope for a changed America.
We're non-partisan here at Greenpeace. We don't have any permanent allies or enemies. We support policies, not politicians. We endorse deeds, not words. So even while a lot of us (in our personal capacity as human beings and not Greenpeace employees) are jumping up and down this morning with glee, we want to take a moment to remind you of the promises you made in your election campaign.
It's delivering on these promises, or bettering them, that will be the true mark of your leadership. As you yourself said
This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were.
When the oil company sharks and the coal industry crooks and the nuclear energy shisters begin to gather at your door, please remember what you promised us in this election. Please remember the reasons you gave us to hope:
Cycling through Sumatra to meet orang-utans
posted on behalf of Madeleine, captain of the Esperanza
In early 1995, sailing on a Greenpeace ship was still just a dream for me. I had applied several times over the years, but I never received anything other than the standard courtesy reply. If people asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I used to tell them that one day I'd love to sail on a Greenpeace ship.
But at that time I was in Sumatra. For a few months, I had been learning to surf on the island of Nias, famous for the surf break at Lagundi Bay. My board had just snapped for the second time and it looked like it was irreparable, so I was searching for the next adventure. I caught the ferry back to Sibolga in Sumatra and bought the cheapest mountain bike I could find to replace my surfboard as my travelling companion. So I had a 20kg bike and a backpack which weighed 8kg and held all of my worldly possessions.
A VIP tour of the Esperanza
While we were docked in Jakarta last week, hundreds of people came to see the Esperanza and take a tour around the bridge. These included Greenpeace supporters, journalists and the general public, but there was one group that was particularly special.
When he's not being second mate on various Greenpeace ships, Dmitri runs a charity called Orphans Trust Fund in his adopted home of New Zealand to help kids who lost their parents in the 2004 tsunami. He was on board the Rainbow Warrior when she delivered aid to Aceh in Sumatra following the disaster and stayed behind to help when the ship departed.
The money Dmitri raises helps to pay for the kids' education at a school called Fajar Hidayah which has faculties in both Aceh and Jakarta. As we were in town, we couldn't pass up the opportunity to give them an exclusive tour of the ship.
Here Dmitri explains how he came to set up his charity and why he believes helping just a few children is very important. Listen to the interview, and there's a transcript below.
Forests For Climate: the great tree protection scheme
With a scheme like Forests For Climate, intact forests would become more valuable than cash crops like palm oil © Beltra/Greenpeace
Change is in the air. We've picking up several new crew members in Jakarta who are joining the Esperanza for the journey to Sumatra and the peatlands of Riau province. As I've been escorting one or two of them around the Esperanza, I can't help thinking back to when I first came on board barely more than three weeks ago. It's odd to think that this ship which is now so familiar was once just as new to me as well.
You'll get to meet some of them over the next couple of weeks but the big event today was perhaps the lynchpin of the entire expedition. In the VIP room of the bustling passenger terminal at Tanjung Priok port in Jakarta, we presented our Forests For Climate plan to get money flowing from developed countries to fund forest protection in Indonesia, Brazil and elsewhere, with the eventual aim of zero deforestation across the globe. I covered the nuts and bolts of it a couple of weeks ago, but it's a complex piece of work so it's worth going over some of the details again.
CoalFinger
Our colleagues in the UK have sent this great animation for their coal campaign. I'll let you watch first:
Taxpayer money could be handed over to climate killers
Earlier today, activists in Germany "road up" on Berlin's Brandenburg Gate to protest Angela Merkel's climate policy on cars. Thirty activists on toy cars cruised over to the Chancellory and let Merkel know that building fuel efficient cars is child's play and that the government should not give taxpayers' money to climate killers.
Get in the race to and tell Angela Merkel that it is not okay to go against her own stated position and give into the whims of the car industry at the expense of the taxpayer and the climate.
Sign the petition.
Read more about how Greenpeace is taking on the car industry.
'It's more powerful than just wearing a t-shirt'
It’s slightly weird being docked after ten days at sea. I woke this morning to find Jakarta hovering on the horizon with container ships lining the route into Tanjung Priok port, and sadly the glistening blue seas and dense white clouds have been replaced by grimy harbour water and a blanket of brown smog. But the energy of the place is infectious and I’m itching to get some shore leave and explore.
Before we launch into the next phase of our tour and really get to see the damage that palm oil is doing to Indonesia’s environment, there’s one last interview to present. Madeleine is the ship’s captain and, although this is her first time as captain of a Greenpeace ship, she has a long involvement with both this organisation and others involved in environmental and social campaign work.
With yesterday's Rainbow Warrior activity in the UK, it's particularly interesting to hear Madeleine describe her first experiences with the ship in the Pacific and explain why she loves direct action. There’s a transcript below.
Our man in the sky
Someone who has taken part in all the research flights our helicopter Tweety has carried out during the Esperanza's current tour is, of course, the pilot. Shaun (or Dingo as he's known about the ship) has flown every mission in both Indonesia and during the previous leg in Papua New Guinea.
As a result, he's seen a considerable amount of New Guinea and is able to draw comparisons between the two sides of the border.
Listen to the interview below to hear about Shaun's experiences flying over New Guinea.
Video: Investigating Indonesia's last forest frontier
To show off the most interesting footage from the helicopter trips over Papua during the Esperanza's current tour of Indonesia, we’ve compiled the video below. It’s narrated by Bustar, who went on many of the flights, and he explains why protecting the forests of New Guinea is so important. Enjoy.
"O"s are tricky
[Photo by Mattheo Nobili.]
Agnes has been on board the Arctic Sunrise for the Italy leg of the "Quit Coal" tour. That's Agnes standing up. Here's her report from the front lines of the energy revolution - where she explains what they've been getting up to, why and talks about her first ship painting protest.
NO CARBONE (no coal). That was the Italian message I had to remember today, as we were taking action against the coal plant owned by Enel in Genoa. While others of the team were entering the coal plant and branding Enel a climate killer, I joined our boat team from the Arctic Sunrise and painted the words "No Carbone" on a huge Ukrainian cargo ship Aristea, as it was offloaded coal at the port to go to the power plant.Another team was hanging a banner from the giant Lanterna lighthouse.
It was a very busy morning, as we also had an open boat, to tell the Italian public about our campaign to Quit Coal.
Although I have been working for Greenpeace as a climate campaigner for a while now, I never painted a ship before, so I was quite excited this morning. Luckily, my fellow mate Papaul has a lot more experience in painting than me, so he taught me the handy tricks (like how to paint difficult letters like the 0). Luckily I did not make any spelling mistakes.
Feet on both sides of the border
On the Esperanza, we've been sailing past and through some of the most wonderfully named parts of the world - Flores, Butu, Ceram, Halmahera and their associated seas - which for me conjure up images of trading ships at full sail, laden down with cargoes of nutmeg, pepper and cloves.
It's a very Eurocentric view, of course, and the spice trade was often at the expense of the local population, but I can't help finding the associations with exploration and uncharted waters bewitching. (And for a very readable account of that period in history, you could do worse than track down a copy of Nathaniel's Nutmeg by Giles Milton.)
But while these exotic locations drift by, we're preparing for our arrival in Jakarta next week, and the long journey is also giving me a chance to catch up on some of the interviews I conducted between Jayapura and Mankwari.
One of the more interesting and colourful people I've had the pleasure of working with on this expedition is Dorothy. She's a Greenpeace forest campaigner from Papua New Guinea and joined the Esperanza in Port Moresby in August. Dorothy left the ship last weekend in Manokwari but before she disembarked, I wanted to find out why it was important that she stay on the ship over the border into the Indonesian half of New Guinea.
Listen to the audio clip below and hear about Dorothy's links to both Papua and Papua New Guinea.
Imagine paying someone to be a prick!
Another coal video - this time a HILARIOUS one by our Australia-Pacific office. As an ex-child therapist I can fully appreciate the Wiggles parody! :-)
Coal is not the answer
Love this clever ad done by the Sierra Club - a parody on the pro-coal ad being used during the election coverage lately in the U.S
Follow the Esperanza in Google Earth
If you're still trying to picture the destinations we've been to so far and the route we're taking through Indonesia as part of the Forests For Climate tour, you can now follow the Esperanza in Google Earth. Just download this Googe Earth layer and you can see when and where the highlights on the tour have occurred. (You'll need to have Googe Earth installed as well, of course.)
New placemarks will appear automatically as we update the journey, so check back often to see what we've been up to and how the campaign is progressing. If you don't want to install Google Earth, you can also see where we are in your web browser.
Meanwhile, we left Manokwari on Monday and are sailing west towards Jakarta where we'll arrive in the middle of next week. We've passed through a narrow passage called Selat Sagewin, less than 2 miles between the forested slopes of two islands, and we're now cruising through the Ceram Sea.
The crew have been taking advantage of the journey to Jakarta and the paint pots have come out to give some parts of the ship a touch-up. I also been taking a break from my web duties to help out and yesterday a gang of us were giving the forward bulkhead of the boat deck a new coat of paint.
While we were working, Locky the bosun and Silas spotted a commotion in the water a couple of hundred metres away. Areas of the sea were foaming, and every so often a plume of water would shoot skywards which could only mean one thing - whales. Several of them appeared to be herding schools of fish into bait balls and occasionally a set of massive jaws breached the water as a whale scooped up it's prey.
Dimitri, our second mate, took a few photos and although we were some distance away, you can clearly see a whale gorging itself. It's seven years since he's seen a whale at sea - a lucky day, indeed.
Manokwari, here we come
A dance troupe from Manokwari take a tour of the Esperanza's bridge © Greenpeace/Rante
After nine days at sea, the Esperanza pulled into Manokwari harbour this morning - that's Manokwari in the Indonesian province of West Papua, not any other Manokwari you might be thinking of. Crowds of people were already on the dock and despite the overcast skies, we received one of the colourful and exotic welcomes I'm becoming accustomed to on this trip, with traditional dancing and singing to greet us when we disembarked.
Manokwari isn't what I expected. The image I had in my head was a quite an industrial place with lots of concrete, but although I haven't left the port yet it looks very pleasant. It's a small place, strung out along a bay and from the ship, most of the town is concealed by palms and trees. And just behind the town lies the forest, the tall tropical trees towering over the nearby buildings.
Who's who in palm oil: commercial interests
See that yellow and black blob? That's Switzerland, about the same size as the area waiting to be converted into palm oil plantations
As we saw from the helicopter flights yesterday (part of the Esperanza's Forests For Climate tour around Indonesia), palm oil is beginning to make its presence felt in Papua and West Papua. So far, we've surveyed plantations in two areas - Lereh near Jayapura last week and of course the one near Teluk Bituni from yesterday - and compared to the vast monocultures in Sumatra and Kalimantan, these are pretty small affairs. But their presence here is a reminder that huge areas of forest have already been carved up on paper between the Indonesian government and palm oil companies, and will be carved up for real if we don’t take action.
While only 60,000 hectares of palm oil have been planted in this region, the government has handed out permits covering four million hectares (that's just a bit smaller than Switzerland), and at the moment much of this is densely forested. Palm oil producers like Sinar Mas, Medco, Korendo and Asian Agri have been given the rights to move in and expand their huge agribusiness operations but they're not moving in en masse, at least not yet.
The king is naked
What do you call someone who yells that car emissions are putting the climate in danger? A visionary? Environmental activist? Concerned citizen? Captain Obvious? For French President Nicolas Sarkozy, it's none of the above - he likes to call them nutcases.
During Sarkozy's visit to the annual car show in Paris, someone was heard yelling "Climate in danger - Sarkozy accomplice". This refered to Sarkozy and Merkel recently working on killing a climate deal that would force car makers to limit emissions of newly produced cars.
Tis the season…. for corporate bailouts
Never mind failing banks, apparently the European car industry is also getting in on the act. It wants a mere E40 billion of tax payers money to finally build greener cars now it seams they might finally be forced to lower the amount of CO2.
Having fought tooth and nail against regulation, using no doubt some very expensive lobbying, they now have the cheek to say we all need to pay them to be greener.
I suspect it's just another last-ditch ploy by again exaggerating the costs and then demanding someone else pays. As usual George Monbiot has an alternative suggestion.
They don't just save the climate
How did we make those Washington Bears?
The heat is on - tell your MEP it's time to lead
Make sure the EU answers the call to keep global warming below 2 degrees.
Tell your MEP that it's time to lead
You can even leave an answerphone message for your European leaders on YouTube. Make sure they feel the heat!
Isn't it time we bailed out the planet?
How much renewable energy could you buy for the 700 billion US dollars about to be spent bailing out failed banks?
Here's a quick calculation
Global wind market in 2007 - 37 billion dollars - 19 865 MW added
700 billion is about 19 times 37 billion, giving us 377 GW of new electricity
So that's 5-6% of global electricity demand switched to clean renewable fuel
And as an added bonus, once you'd spent the money you'd be left with 700 billion dollars worth of profitable generating capacity, rather than handfuls of worthless loans. In other words you'd have made a good investment in your future, and the future of mankind.
Velib' and World Car Free Day
Today is World Car Free Day -- a showcase of what city life could be if we used our feet more, cycled, and took public transport to get around.
Amsterdam, where I now live, has marked the occasion with a week of activities and some pedestrianized roads. Cycle lanes and bikes abound though, so it's hard to tell when there's a "bike-friendly-city" campaign, and when there's not.
Paris is a different story. The public bicycles there -- the grayish-brown Velib bikes parked all over the city -- have taken the city by storm. Now that there's a critical mass of cyclists on the roads, motors have begun driving with more care, and some have even swapped their cars for the two-wheel alternative.
There are road accidents, of course, but initiatives like the Velib and car free days have a civilizing effect on our cities that cannot be overstated. They also demonstrate that planners and public policy makers, when given enough encouragement, can do the right thing.
Did you drive a car today?
Wake up, Freak Out
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A short animated film about the feedback loops likely to lead to catastrophic climate change, by Leo Murray. The script, with extensive peer-reviewed references and additional information and links, is available at wakeupfreakout.org
Knocking the crown from King Coal's head
The acquittal of our six coal activists in the UK continues to send ripples through the UK press and out into the world. I especially liked this piece from John Vidal in the Guardian, who points out that Greenpeace now has a four-nil record in jury cases against the Crown in which the activists have plead that they acted according to their consciences and that they were trying to prevent a greater crime.
Activists aquited for action against coal plant
[ Five of the 'Kingsnorth Six' at the top of the 200m chimney. ]
From our press release (with small edits):
The charges arose after the six attempted to shut down the Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent last year by scaling the chimney and painting the Prime Minister’s name down the side. The defendants pleaded ‘not guilty’ and relied in court on the defence of ‘lawful excuse’ – claiming they shut the power station in order to defend property of a greater value from the global impact of climate change.August 28, 2008
If we lived at the north pole...
If through some quirk of evolution things had turned out differently and man lived at the north pole there wouldn't be much debate about global warming, just what to do about it.
Some leading scientists now fear the arctic has reached a tipping point, bad not just in itself, but one with knock on consequences for the pace of global warming.
August 21, 2008
Carrotmob - consumer power
Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.Full update on the Carrotmob site.
The little 'rain on the parade' voice inside my head said, "Yeah, but that's a bunch of work to change one store out of 20."
Then I thought... What if instead of rewarding the one store that actually does something, you make it more of a competition. Reward them after they take action, and the one that does the most - gets the most.
Lot's of business will act because they won't know exactly how much their competitors are doing.
Maybe this is even already your plan?
August 18, 2008
Videos of windmills, wind turbines, and comedy
Been inside a 1.3 megawatt wind turbine yet? Me neither. But Greenpeace volunteer at large Pepijn Koster has, and he made this short video to share it with everyone on YouTube.
(There's a funny video after the jump...)
August 13, 2008
A week at the UK climate action camp
Here's a blog from Jo who attended the climate camp in the UK last week as an independent volunteer.I recently got back from spending some time in a field with 2000 other people motivated to take action against climate change. Well that’s how many it built up to being over the course of the week. Despite some serious aggression from her majesty’s finest police force, people came from all over to make it the biggest climate camp ever. It was brilliant.
The week long event, one of 8 across the world this year, culminated in a mass day of action last Saturday. Where we caused some serious disruption to Kingsnorth coal fired power plant - owned by energy giant E.On.
I was helping out with media on site and had one of those fantastic days where you’re in the centre of update after update of brilliant news “7 kayaks are on the Medway” and “Greens have breached the inner fence, using – get this- the outer fence as a ladder.” Though of course I couldn’t help being a bit jealous of the Great Rebel Raft Regatta crews, how much fun must that have been!!??
The day of action was amazing, but so was the whole camp. I was overwhelmed by everything the organisers, always working on consensus decision, had achieved. From compost toilets (complete with sign welcoming us to P.On E.On – brilliant!), to kids spaces, workshops on every related topic you could think of and great entertainment.
August 12, 2008
Candle-lit celebration
The Esperanza’s 2000 km anti-coal clean energy tour of Australia (from Sydney to Cairns) ended with a spectacular candle-lit celebration. Local residents and Greenpeace used 3000 candles to build a giant wind turbine. The art installation was sending a clear message to Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd: Australia needs an energy revolution - renewable energy not coal is the only way prevent catastrophic climate change.
Learn more here.
July 31, 2008
Columbia Journalism Review on climate experts
Excellent piece in the CJR about reporting on climate change. They argue that the nature of the story is changing from being a debate about whether it's happening to a debate about the solutions...
The era of “equal time” for skeptics who argue that global warming is just a result of natural variation and not human intervention seems to be largely over—except on talk radio, cable, and local television. Last year, a meteorologist at CBS’s Chicago station did a special report entitled “The Truth about Global Warming.” It featured local scientists discussing the hazards of global warming in one segment, well-known national skeptics in another, and ended with a cop-out: “What is the truth about global warming?…It depends on who you talk to.” Not helpful, and not good reporting.About time!!! All the major scientific institutions have said for years that we know enough to act. Good to see CJR reinforce this message. CJR also has a list of useful climate change websites for reporters covering the beat.
As the CJR points out, the reporting job's going to get harder not easier. The economic and political complexities are actually less straight forward than the science. Hopefully, reporters won't fall into the same "depends who you talk to" trap with false solutions like nuclear and carbon capture sequestration.
What do we think are the real answers? Check out our blueprint for an energy revolution.
July 28, 2008
Beijing Olympics hang under a clound of smog
Air quality levels in Beijing are still far from World Health Organization standards. From ABS-CBN news:
Beijing's air quality is still falling well short of international guidelines, despite desperate efforts to clean the Olympic host city's skies before the Games, a report by Greenpeace said Monday.However, the city has met many of its commitments on environmental issues and will leave an important legacy for Beijing after the August Games, the organisation said in a report.
"Beijing's current air quality still faces major challenges presented by the country's booming economy and the rapid increase in car ownership," said the report, released on a day when thick haze shrouded the city centre.
"Although Beijing has undertaken factory upgrades to improve air quality in the city, more could have been done to move the city towards clean production methods."
More info on the green Olympics page of Greenpeace China's website.
Also see the BBC report "Lingering Pollution Worries in China". (They did their own tests.)
July 23, 2008
Free speech and The Swindle
I posted about the Great Global Warming Swindle before, but just saw this article from the Sydney Morning Herald titled "Climate program swindled viewers". The Swindle was shown on Australian Broadcasting Corporation (different ABC from the one in the US).
This bit captures the issue perfectly:
The ABC's Science Show presenter, Robyn Williams, said the claims in Swindle were "obviously flawed for many reasons" but not to screen it would have been censorship. "I'm in favour of free speech but in this area the waters have been completely muddied by propagandists, so I thought the way we did it in the end was reasonable," said Williams, who participated in the discussion after the show.The program was widely criticised by Australian climatologists when it was aired. Among many other errors, it was pointed out that graphs purporting to show temperature rises being affected by sunspots excluded contradictory evidence.
So they knew The Swindle was inaccurate (to put it politely), and aired the program anyway.
I'm also in favor of free speech, but am I obligated to let someone use my blog (for example) to repeat things I know are not true? I don't think so. They are welcome to spread their bullshit somewhere else, but not on around here. I've got an obligation to be truthful and honest with my audience. I violate that if I give someone space to spread false information.
In fairness, ABC did a good job of framing the show, before and after. Watch their interview with The Swindle's director here. Unfortunately, this still works for the climate change deniers. As long as they can keep the idea that there is still legitimate debate on global warming, they can delay the energy revolution we need.
See also...
New Scientist, "Climate change: who is swindling who?".
Longer post about the Great Global Warming Swindle.
July 21, 2008
Great global warming swindle ruled "unfair"
The UK regulator Ofcom issued findings today rightfully criticizing, "The Great Global Warming Swindle". The Swindle was supposed to be climate change deniers answer to An Inconvenient Truth. Here's the watchdog's main findings:
From the BBC:
The regulator backed Sir David's complaint of unfair treatment, judging that his views were misrepresented and that he was not given the right to reply.Ofcom also found in favour of Carl Wunsch, an oceanographer interviewed for the programme, who said he had been misled as to its intent.
Dr Wunsch, from the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, said he believed he was being asked to take part in a programme that would "discuss in a balanced way the complicated elements of understanding of climate change", but "what we now have is an out-and-out propaganda piece, in which there is not even a gesture toward balance".
The Broadcasting Code requires Channel 4 to show "due impartiality" on "matters of major political and industrial controversy and major matters relating to current public policy".
The last segment of the programme, dealing with the politics of climate change, broke this obligation, Ofcom judged, and did not reflect a range of views, as required under the code.
However, the regulator said it did not believe, given the nature of the programme, that this led to the audience being "materially misled so as to cause harm or offence" - the standard that Ofcom says complaints have to reach.
Ofcom's logic is that "the link between human activity and global warming... became settled before March 2007".
This being so, it says, disputing the scientific link between human activity and climate change does not meet the Broadcasting Code's definition of "controversial".
Eh? What's that last one? I thought the whole point was to be "controversial". Let's have a closer look at that Ofcom ruling...
July 15, 2008
In coal hell
I was standing at the bow of the Rainbow Warrior filming. I could hear my heart beating. The first daylight made its way through the clouds and the nose of a tug boat was only meters away from my lens. We will hit it, I thought.
July 10, 2008
Bush: "Goodbye from world's biggest polluter"
In the, "too true to be funny" department...
President George Bush signed off with a defiant farewell over his refusal to accept global climate change targets at his last G8 summit.As he prepared to fly out from Japan, he told his fellow leaders: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."
President Bush made the private joke in the summit's closing session, senior sources said yesterday. His remarks were taken as a two-fingered salute from the President from Texas who is wedded to the oil industry. He had given some ground at the summit by saying he would "seriously consider" a 50 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2050.
As of posting, 193 days, 19 hours, 22 minutes until Bush finally stops leading my country. Woot!
Community power against coal
I cannot describe my feeling other than I am absolutely overwhelmed.
The Rainbow Warrior sailed to the province of Prachuab Kiri Khan (PKK), home to one of the strongest community oppositions against coal in Thailand. A fleet of over 30 fishing boats full of people wearing the movement’s green T-shirts greeted the Rainbow Warrior on its arrival. A fantastic welcome followed and you could literally feel what a symbol of hope the ship is. Over 1000 people had gathered from all over the province. These communities have a fantastic track record of success regarding shelving plans to construct coal fired power stations along their stunning coast.
July 7, 2008
Rain in a ski resort - a sad but appropriate G8 start ...
Update from Daniel at the G8:
The G8 leaders have been hiding from the people they claim to represent in ever more remote places in recent years. But the summit here at Toyako, Hokkaido, takes the idea of "hiding far, far away" to perfection. Even the media centre is kilometres away from where Bush, Fukuda, Merkel and Co. are meeting. Toyako - and the area around it - is said to be beautiful. It is difficult to judge right now, I have to say, as it is raining cats and dogs. The mountains, said to be magical, are hardly even visible. The mist is not romantic, but really just low-lying rain clouds. As this is a ski area, that has received less and less snow fall in recent years, I guess the weather is fitting. This is what it will be like in Toyako - and other ski areas - even in winter. Unless our leaders act. Will they?
June 18, 2008
From the climate defenders camp to the the funders of coal
Sorry but my last entry didn’t show up on the website (internet doesn't always work on the ship). So I give you again an overview of the last days.
When the sun rose on Monday morning I climbed into one of the inflatables from the Rainbow Warrior and headed with mixed feelings towards the Climate Defenders Camp on the shore.
The day before had started off in a festive atmosphere. Anti-coal communities arrived in boats to support the camp as the road access had been blocked. Together we planted colourful wind socks around the camp with personal Quit Coal messages. We packed out our solar cookers and cooked noodles for everyone. It felt a little like having a picnic at a festival.
June 17, 2008
Breathing Earth
Martijn, our IT unit head, just passed this on to me. Very cool animation of CO2 emissions. It's based on 2002 emissions - so slightly out of day. Gives a sense of where all that carbon dioxide is coming from though, and how urgently we need an energy revolution.
June 16, 2008
Squeeky clean coal wash
You've heard of greenwash right? Well, look out for the "clean coal" media machine as they spend obscene amounts of money spent on advertising and PR in the run up to the US presidential election. The self-described "clean coal" industry is keen to invest in relationships with our elected officials. I doubt they'd want the reality of "clean coal" to become a campaign topic.
By now you might be wondering why I'm spreading around so many links to a supposed "clean coal" website. Well, I think I'm going to let you figure that one out for yourself. ;-)
June 14, 2008
Save the Climate - Quit Coal in Iloilo, Philippines
Do you remember the movie “The day after tomorrow” ? When I watched it a shudder ran through me and I felt helpless with this dooms day atmosphere in relation to Climate Change. Entering the climate defenders camp this morning here in Iloilo, Philippines in the area of a proposed coal fired power plant, reveals a completely different picture; laughter, colourful flags and banners all around the site, happy but tired Greenpeace activists are working to improve the camp and an atmosphere of peace prevails.
June 13, 2008
Coal transport to Drax stopped now
Protesters have blocked a coal shipment to the Drax power plant - one of Europe’s worst for carbon emissions:
As a movement, we are serious. Although we conduct ourselves cheerfully, we don’t think this is a game. Although we can joke, we know why we act. Although we feel anxious and nervous about the consequences, we do it anyway, because it’s important. We are serious - serious about the problem, and serious about solving it.
As the site puts it - where else can you see a giant canary shovelling coal?
June 11, 2008
Pyjama protest: Sleepwalking to disaster at Bonn Climate talks
Photo © Greenpeace/Stachowske
Stephanie Tunmore in Bonn writes:You know those nights when you wake up in a cold sweat because you dreamt you were out in public in your pyjamas? Well for some Greenpeace volunteers and staff the nightmare became reality at the Bonn climate talks this week. Determined to give governments here a wake up call about the rate and extent of climate change to try and shake them out of their inertia, we strode out into the sunlight dressed in our nightclothes, lugging a giant replica alarm clock accompanied by a bugler playing ‘Reveille’We decided to kiss goodbye to the last shreds of our dignity to highlight the real nightmare unfolding in the Hotel Maritim, venue for the latest round of climate negotiations.
May 27, 2008
Rockefellers to Exxon: Clean up the climate
I was just having an argument with someone today. They said companies will never change because the people running them are afraid they'll be fired if they put anything before profits. That's the excuse you sometimes hear. "Making profit for the shareholders is my main responsibility," kind of thing.
But today's article in the New York Times, titled "Rockefellers Seek Change at Exxon", shows how that's getting turned on it's head. Here you have major shareholders in a company making record breaking profits up in arms about the CEO Rex W. Tillerson's refusal to take the long view.
From the article:
The family members have thrown their support behind a shareholder rebellion that is ruffling feathers at Exxon Mobil, the giant oil company descended from John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust.Three of the resolutions, to be voted on at the company’s shareholder meeting on Wednesday, are considered unlikely to pass, even with Rockefeller family support.
The resolutions ask Exxon to take the threat of global warming more seriously and look for alternatives to spewing greenhouse gases into the air.
Funny quit coal editorial cartoon
This is about a blockade the Rainbow Warrior did the Philippines that got good support from even some politicians. Our ship parked alongside a coal shipment at a power plant's dock - preventing other shipments from coming in.
Being an island nation, the Philippines is especially vulnerable to climate change. They also produce 54 percent more electricity than they use, but have major power grid problems. We're saying fix those, and invest in things like efficiency and renewable energy.
FYI - That's Philippines president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo bouncing out of her chair. Hello President Arroyo! The world is shouting. Are you listening?
April 21, 2008
Orang-utans swing into action to stop Dove destroying rainforests for palm oil
Today, we're launching the next stage in our campaign to protect the rainforests of Indonesia from the expansion of the palm oil industry and direct actions are taking place in London, Rome and Rotterdam. Our volunteers, dressed as orang-utans, are currently climbing over the Italian, Dutch and UK headquarters of the company behind Dove, which uses palm oil as one of its ingredients. Our latest research shows that Unilever, the makers of Dove, is buying palm oil from companies that are destroying valuable rainforest and peatland areas, which is bad news not only for the millions of people who depend on them for their way of life and endangered species such as the orang-utan, but also for the global climate.April 16, 2008
Al Gore talk at hyperspeed
I'll admit it. I never watched his movie, never saw the slideshow. Thought they were great for other people, but I already know how dangerous climate change is. Plus, I'm a busy busy person. (I mean, aren't we all?) Still... Always felt like I really should - what with the Oscar and the Nobel prize and all.
At last, someone has solved my plight. Thanks to George Spyros for this 2 minute condensed version of Gore's latest talk (given at the TED conference):
Found it via Treehugger where you can find the full 22 minute version, and a 30 second out take with the classic line...
"Junkies find veins in their toes when the ones in their arms and their legs collapse.... Developing tar sands and coal shale is the equivalent."April 14, 2008
We're number 96!
A site named Wikio ranked, "influential blogs in the UK blogosphere". Believe it or not, we're number 96. Wooohoo!
Please link to us from your blog to help us reach our goal of 95th place. (Watch out Adrian, we're up and coming!)
April 8, 2008
Beware the 'consumer choice' excuse
In a long Guardian article from a couple of weeks back I noticed a fine example of the favourite "consumer choice" excuse of corporations under pressure to change their ways. The massive German car maker Volkswagen has more efficient versions (blue motion) of their popular models but doesn't sell very many:
The VW Polo BlueMotion gives off just 99g of CO2 per km. But this year VW envisages selling 5,000 BlueMotion Polos as against 36,000 conventional ones. Some of this is market reticence, but some is down to the increased price - an extra £500. Surely a company that takes the environment seriously would withdraw the old version or price the more environmentally friendly one equally?'We wouldn't be doing ourselves any favours if we withdrew customer choice or disguised the increased costs of BlueMotion cars,' says VW's UK press spokesman Paul Buckett.
Notice the weasel words of "consumer choice". VW definitely would be doing the planet a favour if they just sold the more efficient version. Also VW and all other car companies spend fortunes every day on adverts, billboards and marketing to create the very consumer demand (for large, fast, inefficient cars) they then use as an excuse not to act.
April 7, 2008
Greenpeace's big European cars petition
Last week journalists revealed that Merkel and Sarkozy are planning to water down EU legislation tackling CO2 emissions from cars. That's why we launched a petition on Friday, calling on other top European politicians to resist. The petition has been signed by almost 16,000 people at time of writing.
Jocelyn from Australia posted news of our cars petition on care2.com, early this morning, and now it's the top environmental story. It's clearly an international issue.
Many people look to Germany for leadership on tackling greenhouse gas emissions. Angela Merkel gets climate change, but the chemistry between Germany's government and the German luxury car industry is clouding her judgement.
April 3, 2008
Today we are all "banditi"
What happens when a cat, a dog, a mouse, a rabbit, a gorilla, a walrus and a snowman accuse themselves of being bandits?The result is that a court throws out an injunction and states the right of demonstration for the environment and public health.
This is what happened. On the 30th of November last year, 12 Greenpeace activists entered the coal power station in Brindisi (Southern Italy), Italy's biggest coal power station and the biggest polluter with its 15 million tons of CO2 produced yearly. They wanted to highlight the plan of the biggest Italian energy company, ENEL, to increase the coal energy production by 5.000 MW. This would mean adding 20 million tons of CO2 in the atmosphere every year, making it impossible for Italy to cut the 100 million tons of CO2 necessary to meet the Kyoto protocol.
Video of the action in BrindisiA few days after, our activists received an injunction from the Police Chief which described them as "a danger to society" which banned them from the local area for the next three years. It was effectively a "no public protest" injunction in a free society. Normally, criminals or mafia affiliates are considered a "danger to society". This was the first time that Italian police used such an injunction for a peaceful demonstration.
March 31, 2008
Renewable energy vs Nuclear power
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.
March 17, 2008
New energy criteria for Greener Electronics Guide
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.
March 4, 2008
Denial-a-palooza 2008
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.
February 27, 2008
UK parliment exposed as aviation industry's second home
Great action and great pics from the folks at Plane Stupid who scaled the House of Parliament to lower a banner saying "BAA HQ". The consultation on Heathrow expansion ends today and BAA (who run 7 UK airports) actually wrote parts of the government consultation. Nothing like a 'consultation' where the result is already stitched up with big business.
This was a nice touch:
The protesters are making paper aeroplanes out of confidential Whitehall documents that reveal the process is fixed, and gliding the planes into the MPs' car park below.
February 15, 2008
Bulb changing in Italy
We're calling for governments around the world to ban the bulb, but we're not waiting for them. Here's Greenpeace Italy local group activists changing bulbs all over town.
Reminds me a little of this fantastic video.
Pacific Ocean may be nearing a tipping point
In a related story....
Peering into the murky depths, Jane Lubchenco searched for sea life, but all she saw were signs of death.Video images scanned from the seafloor revealed a boneyard of crab skeletons, dead fish and other marine life smothered under a white mat of bacteria. At times, the camera's unblinking eye revealed nothing at all -- a barren undersea desert in waters renowned for their bounty of Dungeness crabs and fat rockfish.
"We couldn't believe our eyes," Lubchenco said, recalling her initial impression of the carnage brought about by oxygen-starved waters. "It was so overwhelming and depressing. It appeared that everything that couldn't swim or scuttle away had died."
Upon further study, Lubchenco and other marine ecologists at Oregon State University concluded that that the undersea plague appears to be a symptom of global warming.
That's from today's LA times. Also a good story on it in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Ocean impacts mapped
Maps of the world usually have lots of lovely blue to show where the oceans are. This map, showing damage to our oceans, is all yellow, oranges and reds with only small bits of pristine blue. It's hardly the first warning from scientists about the state of the oceans, but it's the most thorough and graphical. From the Baltimore Sun:
In one of the most comprehensive looks yet at the oceans, researchers say that humans have "strongly" fouled 41 percent of the high seas with everything from storm water runoff to shipping waste and that only small polar regions are still untouched."Almost half of the oceans are in a fairly degraded state, based on what we found," said Benjamin Halpern, the report's lead author and a marine biologist at the California-based National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. "There isn't a spot on the planet that hasn't been touched by humans."
The report was published today in Science Magazine (subscription). There's a Google Earth layer for the map (and an animated flyover) here, and another animated flyover on NPR's website. See Science Daily for more info.
And as Benjamin Halpern, the report's lead author, says, "There are things people can do". Ask questions about where the fish you eat comes from, avoid fertilizers and pesticides (buy organic), cut down on your carbon footprint and sign our marine reserves petition.
Nuclear and CO2
Article in yesterday's business section of the Sydney Morning Herald about doubts that nuclear energy a good solution to climate change:
Nuclear power's claim to be the answer to global warming is being questioned by reports suggesting mining and processing of uranium is carbon intensive.While nuclear power produces only one 50th of the carbon produced by many fossil fuels, its carbon footprint is rising, making wind power and other renewable energies increasingly attractive, according to environmental groups and some official reports.
Just another reason why nuclear is a bad investment.
Monarchies for (Energy) Revolution
Prince Charles has joined those calling for a revolution in the way we use Energy. The Guardian reports that
"Prince Charles highlighted the rapid melting of the north polar ice cap as a wake-up call "as we sleepwalk our way towards the edge of catastrophe" and called for a "courageous and revolutionary" approach to tackling global warming."
Hat tip to Daily Kos
February 12, 2008
Reverse graffiti highlights dirty Heathrow plan
Here's a very cool guerilla campaign tactic - a new style of 'clean' graffiti, where a steam cleaner is used to write a message in street grime, one thing any city has a lot of! A great way to get the message out that airport expansion should be stopped.
First the source of the problem - cheap flights
February 8, 2008
Visit EfficienCity: a clean, green climate-friendly town
If a picture speaks a thousand words, a multimedia-packed, animation-filled interactive town must speak a million. Which is why on the Greenpeace UK website we've launched EfficienCity (like Sim City, but greener) to explain exactly what decentralised energy is and how it works in practice (which can otherwise be a wordy business).
If you believe our government, you'd think we need nuclear power and coal to stop climate change, but come and pay a visit to EfficienCity, which shows how pioneering, real world communities around the UK are using decentralised energy. As a result, they're enjoying lower greenhouse gas emissions, a more secure energy supply, cheaper electricity and heating bills and a whole new attitude towards energy.
We've been working with the incredible team at Biro Creative to build the town and we're pretty chuffed with the result. It's full of video case studies, animations and slideshows that explain exactly how a genuinely clean and efficient energy system works - from wave and tidal power to micro-hydro and anaerobic digestion.
And, most importantly, UK residents can find out how to make their own town climate friendly.
Anyway, enough of the words - just go and visit EfficienCity to discover a cleaner, greener energy future. Enjoy.
February 7, 2008
Ex Shell Chairman says ban gas guzzlers
My quote of the week, both because of who said it and how he said it. Mark Moody-Stuart, the ex-chairmen of Shell illustrated his point that the EU should ban gas guzzling luxury cars:
"It is a social thing. We don't say the wealthy can avoid doing what is needed by society."
"When we eliminated coal fires in London we didn't say to people in Chelsea you can pay a bit more and toast your crumpets in front of an open fire - we said nobody, but nobody, could have an open fire."
Here's the full story from the BBC and a little wider context from our UK site.
Queue multiple car industry responses (excuses) basically along the lines of "no, we need flexible (lax) regulation (if we must) and gas guzzlers owners (=big profits for us) are allowed to pollute because they pay a fraction of extra tax and a few cents extra when they fill up (see no problem, no need for pesky regulation)".
February 6, 2008
Government/coal love-in gets the Greenpeace treatment
Our volunteers in the UK have been busy this morning. Coal industry bigwigs are holding their annual jamboree at Lord's Cricket Ground in London, where energy minister Malcolm Wicks was to give the opening speech earlier today. But greeting him and other fossil fuel fans were two-metre high fences barricading the entrance with attendant volunteers protesting about the ongoing collusion between government and industry.February 5, 2008
Follow the US candiates oil money
With the news is dominated today by 'Super Tuesday' in the US I saw this interesting graphic yesterday on which candidate gets the most money from oil companies. Who do you think, for instance, gets the most cash from climate trashing Exxon? Barack Obama.
The graphic from OilChange International definitely looks like it was inspired by our own Exxon Secrets website.
The oil info is interesting but after looking again at Grist's candidates comparison on climate, (notice how they all support dirty coal) it would be interesting to see which one the coal industry or coal dependant energy utilities are funding. Know a good source of this info? Post it in the comments.
Via New Scientist science blog
February 1, 2008
Polar bear arrested by man in hip waders
Yesterday, one of our activists was arrested outside the the US Department of Interior after a protest involving a polar bear suit and a paddle boat. Greenpeace US (along with other enviro groups) is pushing the Bush administration to face up to the fact that polar bears are endangered by climate change. Read the full story and watch the video.
I'm just trying to imagine the dialog, "You in the polar bear suit: We have you surrounded. Do not attempt to paddle away." But don't get me wrong. Those hip waders were a smart move. Pond water is mighty cold in Washington, DC this time of year. (larger photo)
January 29, 2008
Why do you think Adam and Eve were naked?
This isn't actually all that different to what the real President Bush said yesterday and it's much more fun to watch!
January 28, 2008
The Sun distributed 4m lightbulbs in a day
Matt Prescott's great environmental campaign website - banthebulb.org - reported on Friday that The Sun newspaper (Scotland) distributed four million energy saving lightbulbs in a single day. Yes, that Sun newspaper.
Just one month into the job as News International's new boss James Murdoch, son of youknowwho pledged to make the company carbon neutral.
The Guardian's mediaguardian.co.uk has more on the 4-million-bulbs-in-a-day newspaper distribution success story.
Meanwhile many of the companies behind the energy saving lightbulbs are still making the old wasteful type too. Seen in the context of climate change, and in light of all the green advertising from Philips, Osram and GE in particular -- it just stinks.January 17, 2008
Wind power in Spain
In my inbox from a campaigner in Spain
"Yesterday wind power broke all previous records in Spain. Because of high wind conditions, we reached 9563 MW of generated power at 15:27 (from a total installed wind capacity of 13908 MW). Wind power met 25% of demand at that hour, well above coal (15%) and nuclear (16%). A new record may be expected today.
You can see the graph in the following press release from the grid operator REE: http://www.ree.es/sala_prensa/web/notas_detalle.aspx?id_nota=53
And real-time wind generation from the same source:
http://www.ree.es/sistema_electrico/detalle_curva_eolica.asp?grafico=&hoy=1Now some sceptics will say that you can't rely on a power source that only works when the wind is blowing, and they'd be right. That's why a piece of research by German researchers is so important. They've shown how a portfolio of different renewable technologies can be combined to reliably meet Germany's entire energy demand. Read about it - and watch the YouTube explanation here"
Of lightbulb politics and aesthetics
You're not supposed to look directly at a lightbulb, it's bad for your eyes, but I did it the other day. Then it struck me: CFL lightbulbs are ugly in the same way the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris is ugly. The museum building looks inside-out, with colourful pipes running up and down the exterior walls (yellow for electricity, red for lifts, blue for air, and green for water). Energy saving lightbulbs are the home lighting equivalent -- they look raw, exposed, modern.Meanwhile, the Irish Government confirmed last week that they stand by their decision to outlaw inefficient lightbulbs by 2009. Italy began legislating to ban the bulb in December, and the European Commission are speeding up their energy efficiency standards-making process too.
Some lightbulb companies are still dragging their heels, but they haven't a leg to stand on. Legislators, activists and the general public heard their plea to "make the switch", and answered resoundingly: "Sure, we'll do that. But you have to stop making power crazy bulbs."
(Photo from Wikipedia Commons)
January 7, 2008
The Unchained Goddess
Here's an exerpt from a 1958 film introducing the dangers of global warming. Directed by none other than Frank Capra, with cartoons by Mel Blanc.
January 3, 2008
Oil breaks $100
Remember back in 2004 when this oil prices soared past first $40 and then $50 and people said 'don't worry, to be as bad as the previous oil shocks it would have to reach $100', well yesterday it did. Normally when prices go up demand goes down, but the world economy seems to be finding it hard to adjust. Here's a three step programme to help it kick the oil habit.
1. Adopt fuel efficiency standards
The 130g of CO2 / km standard proposed by the EU may not go far enough but higher fuel standards means lower fuel consumption.2. Switch out of Oil and Diesel Generation
In 2003 Oil and Diesel accounted for 494 GW of power generation around the world. A bit more than half the amount produced by Gas and a bit less than half the amount produced by coal. The Energy Revolution Scenario describes how investments in wind power, small scale hydro power and increased use of combined heat and power plants could help cut that down to almost nothing by 2050.3. Improve household efficiency
With all that oil going into power generation it's easy to see that using less power in the home will cut demand for oil. The world can make a good start by phasing out incandescent lightbulbs in favour of more efficient types.January 2, 2008
Italy shares Ireland's bright idea
One by one the nations around the world are stepping up to the plate and banning incandescent lightbulbs. On December 10 Italy took the plunge after the budget committee voted in favour of a proposal from Green MP Angello Bonelli.
That adds to an Australian ban and the Irish ban, with plenty of other nations lining up similar moves all due to come in before 2011. Which makes the European Lamp Companies Federations plan for a phase out by 2019 look a little, well, dim.
December 14, 2007
Physics continuing to ignore Bush climate rhetoric
It's the final hours of the UN Bali climate conference, and it looks like delegates will be up all night. Hope remains that they can overcome the US government's obstructionism.
But no matter what they end up with in Bali, they canna' change the laws of physics. This week, two new scientific revelations brought that home again: 2007 was shockingly warm and the arctic could be virtually ice free by 2012.
This year has been one of the warmest since 1850, despite the cooling influence of La Nina conditions, according to scientists.The UK's Hadley Centre and University of East Anglia conclude that globally, this year ranks as the seventh warmest.
From ABC News:
"The Arctic is screaming," said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government's snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo.Just last year, two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040.
This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions."
Our only chance is to stop dumping so much carbon dioxide into the air - less coal, less oil, more renewable energy and energy efficiency. We need a road map to binding cuts in CO2, and our team on the ground isn't going to sleep until it's done. Read their updates from the conference.
December 10, 2007
Boring conferences as bedtime stories: Episode one, Bali
From responses to our collaborative Message in a Bottle climate video one user submitted this:
Great idea, well made and the line - "what does that mean?" is perfect. I can see this spawning a series - Boring (but important) conferences as bedtime stories.....
A flower for Al Gore
From this morning's mailbag:
Oslo 9 Dec 2007
Little Håkon, the 3 year old son of a Greenpeace campaigner in Norway, Truls Gulowsen, delivered a wild wood anemone to Al Gore in Oslo today. Håkon and his father found the spring flower by the river blossoming in December. It should blossom in April!
Gulowsen sees a double meaning in this unusual phenomenon; It offers further evidence that climate and nature are severely disturbed. It can also be interpreted as a symbol of a new spring in our struggle against climate change.
With this simple flower Greenpeace congratulates Al Gore and IPCC for their Nobel Peace Prize.
December 7, 2007
The action's all in Bali
Right now, our team is in Bali for the UN climate conference. It's what I've heard described as, "probably the most important meeting about a meeting that will happen in your lifetime". :D
Ok, ok, joking aside, if we're going to beat this global warming thing, we need governments to get off their bottoms and take real action. And without a good outcome in Bali, that's not going to happen. Basically, governments need to ensure there's route map to agreeing deep cuts in global greenhouse emissions. And they need a good push to do so.
While doing some pushing, our political team in Bali is blogging from behind the PR firewall, read their updates on the climate blog. Here are a few of my favorite quotes...
Clair, on the Canadian government's admission that global temperature rise needs to be kept under 2°C:
Adopting a position that warming should stay as far below 2°C as possible is a definite champagne cork popping event, had it not been for the fact that Canada’s domestic climate policies seem to be 6 degrees of separation away from supporting this position.December 4, 2007
Google aims for renewable power cheaper than coal
This one slipped by me until I saw it on eco-geek just now. As their press release says, Google is going to, "develop electricity from renewable energy sources that will be cheaper than electricity produced from coal".
Looks like wind, solar and "advanced geothermal" are likely initial technologies. Google plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on this plan, but as eco-geek points out - it's an investment, not charity:
It's important to point out that this, like all of Google's seemingly philanthropic efforts, is an investment scheme, not a giveaway. Google wants to turn its gold into more gold, and investing in these technologies is a fantastic way to do that. That's not to say that they aren't doing a "good" thing...in fact, this makes far more sense to me than purely philanthropic efforts.Sounds good to me? How about you? Want to bet against Google when it comes to technological investment?
November 28, 2007
Dark forces at work against lightbulb stardards
Forbes.com reported the other day that a Californian electricity company is lobbying the US Congress not to ban energy-wasting incandescent lightbulbs. Southern California Edison were forced to reveal that they spent over half a million dollars, in only the first half of 2007, lobbying against proposed climate change regulations.
It just goes to show that for all the talk about "smart energy" and "switching to energy savers", some companies are still adamant to carry on business as usual.
We're calling on the Irish Government to announce a model lightbulbs law next week. That should bolster efforts in other countries, where some retailers are changing already, but manufacturers and politicians are still dragging their feet. Have you signed the petition yet?
November 26, 2007
Recycle, then revolt
Just stumbled across a good post about how that if all of us that really care about the future could just live a little more ethically - we'd still be doomed.
So many organizations put the focus on changing lightbulbs, recycling and other helpful, sensible things like that. Here at Greenpeace we also want you to change your lightbulbs, that's step 1... Then we want you to help us outlaw energy wasting lightbulbs, shut down coal plants and be part of a total energy revolution.
Over at WorldChanging, Alex explains why:
Why do good people keep advocating lifestyle change? Well, the hope is that small steps will lead to a big change of heart: that a tipping point will occur when the crucial can falls into the critical recycling bin, and people all around the world will awaken to the sustainability imperative, and then that, in some vague-but-direly-hoped-for way, this awakening will change everything and all will be well (and everyone gets a pony!). I think of this theory as betting the farm on the arrival of a Mythological Universal Conversion Event.Here's the biggest problem with this theory of social change: we've been at it for decades, it hasn't worked and it probably never will. Things are demonstrably worse than they were when we began advocating recycling and such, and they're getting much worse far faster than any lifestyle choices can make them better. In the absence of an unlikely change in the nature of humanity, buying bamboo shirts or sustainable furniture is like spitting at a forest fire.
Vote for worst EU greenwash and lobbying awards
You've only got one more day to help pick who gets the named as the lowest of the low. Vote here.
Oh but it is sooo hard to choose! Should I say ExxonMobile for, "purporting it is reducing its greenhouse gas emissions while in reality its emissions are increasing"; Shell for "an advert suggesting that their oil refineries emit flowers not smoke"; or the German Atomic Forum for, "abusing the public’s concern about climate change to promote nuclear energy".
Vote today for your least favorite.
Canadian polar bears hurt by ice loss
Life is hard for the world's largest land carnivore, and getting harder. Even though they're named Ursus maritimus for their swimming ability, a new study has confirmed that without the ice they're in trouble. From the latest Nature:
A census of polar bears in Canada’s Hudson Bay has lent some hard numbers to the long-held fear that retreating sea ice is causing some bears to starve or drown.Biologists have predicted that polar bears will struggle to survive as summer comes sooner to the Arctic. Less time spent on icy hunting platforms means the bears are slimming down before winter sets in. And there were anecdotal reports in 2005 of more bears found swimming far out at sea; a few were found floating dead, presumably drowned. But so far no evidence has directly linked the trend of melting sea ice associated with climate change to bear deaths.
November 21, 2007
Solar powered radio from 1956
Modern Mechanix (slogan - "Yesterday's tomorrow, today") found this ad in a 1956 copy of Popular Electronics:
Sun-Powered ReceiverAn experimental pocket-sized radio receiver, powered by energy from the sun, weighs only 10 ounces and will work more than eight months in total darkness without recharging. Developed by General Electric, the set uses a miniature storage battery, four transistors, and seven solar cells. During the day, light rays hit the solar cells which convert the sun’s energy to electrical current. This current powers the transistors and, at the same time, charges the storage battery which takes over at night. Artificial light, such as an ordinary 100-watt bulb, may be substituted for sunlight.
How cool is that? Hmmm, makes you wonder... What about a solar powered iPod (green, of course)?
(Via Treehugger, where the headline is much more clever.)
November 20, 2007
Getting there
Reading my favourite technology website I find a piece on Gordon Brown's energy policy, his recent speech on climate change and what may be a commitment to a broader target on renewables.
I also know that our UK office has been heavily engaged with the UK government in pushing for meaningful change. While there have been some public signs that this discussion was ongoing it's nice to see that it's starting to generate policy results. Of course the real crunch will come in Bali when we'll be looking to European leaders to set the standard for the rest of the world in environmental responsibility.
November 18, 2007
Palm oil blockade's end
© Greenpeace / Christian Aslund
This is actually from an email Sue sent yesterday from on board the Rainbow Warrior. I think it gives a good wrap up of their palm oil tanker blockade, and she was nice enough to let me post it:We have now moved away from the wharf after being forced out of the way by tugs while the [palm oil tanker] Westama crept out of its berth.You would have seen the press release from this morning stating that our blockade of the Westama is now over. The Westama tried to leave last night at midnight but due to our proximity it was deemed unsafe for it to proceed. We were served with an official notice to leave and the shipping agent had kindly ordered a pilot for us - who came on board around 11pm. We kindly declined the pilot's services and sent him off happily with a "Damming Crew" T-shirt, and continued to hold position. The tugs didn't turn up.
Life on the Rainbow Warrior
Lesley is the ship's medic on board the Rainbow Warrior right now, and she sent me an update about how things are going on the "road to Bali" - that's what we've been calling all this lead up work (actions against coal, nuclear power and deforestation around the world, plus tons of behind the scenes political work).
This all culminates with the United Nations Climate Change Conference - Bali, 3 - 14 December, when governments meet to decide the fate of our world (literally).
But as Lesley explains, the work is never as 'glamorous' as it looks from the outside:
The ‘Road to Bali’ has an exotic sound to it and while the Rainbow Warrior is on this road there are interesting and challenging sidetracks, some of which are less than exotic. India and Singapore are now behind us and this is day 6 at anchor in Dumai Port.
Some of these less exotic highlights of our time in Dumai port include:
An unusual anchoring system, which held the ship on the bow and the stern so that she did not swing around as the tide changed. Changing position and retrieving the anchors meant that some of us got to spend time laying the anchor chain in the chain lockers (several times!) These chain lockers are like small dark sweatboxes with rust dust and danger added. The person inside eventually exits with damp, blackened overalls and fascinating dark streaky features.
November 17, 2007
IPCC latest - climate change evidance "unequivocal"
Last night in Valencia, the IPCC approved its Fourth Assessment Synthesis report, which sums up the key points from the three major reports published this year on climate change science, its impacts and the mitigation options. It will be the key reference document for policymakers in the coming years. (Should be anyway, unfortunately not all politicians like 'fact based' decision making.)
The IPCC is a pretty careful, conservative body, so there were no big surprises. (Our press release is here.) But the message behind these reports is becoming increasingly blunt. From the New York Times:
Members of the panel said their review of the data led them to conclude as a group and individually that reductions in greenhouse gasses had to start immediately to avert a global climate disaster that could leave island states submerged and abandoned, African crop yields decreased by 50 percent, and cause over a 5 percent decrease in global gross domestic product.The panel, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last month, said the world would have to reverse the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2015 to avert major problems.
"If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late," said Rajendra Pachauri, a scientist and economist who heads the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."
He said that since the panel began its work five years ago, scientists have recorded "much stronger trends in climate change,” like a recent melting of polar ice that had not been predicted. "That means you better start with intervention much earlier."
Clear enough for you?
November 16, 2007
Captain's blog - palm oil tanker blockade
That's Mike, current captain of the Rainbow Warrior, seen through the bridge window. As I write, the Warrior is still in position - blocking the palm oil tanker from leaving port. This morning activists added to the pressure by climbing on palm oil holding tanks with banners. [ Photo here. ]
We've never done this kind of action in Indonesia before so this is all pretty intense for people on the ground there. Full story here.
Here's captain Mike's account from yesterday:
Both main engines fed into the one spinning propeller. The old girl was alive with power and her anchor clear of the mud. The tide was swift - 3 knots - a spring tide. Cautiously at first - not wanting to be detected - I edged the Rainbow Warrior out of the anchorage. But once clear of the other ships I put the engines on full astern. A shudder came up through the steel deck beneath my feet. The old girl leaped backwards: two knots, three, five knots. We were abeam of the Westema, a motor tanker loading 30 000 tonnes of Palm Oil Product. We were just fifty meters off.November 15, 2007
BBC followup - skeptical about bias
About a year ago, BBC environmental correspondent, Richard Black, asked climate change skeptics to send him evidence that scientific institutions are biased against them, and promised to look into any concrete claims. As he says, "Given the fury evidenced by sceptical commentators, I was expecting a deluge."
What he got was, well, not much. From his story today:
No-one said they had been refused a place on the IPCC, the central global body in climate change, or denied a job or turned down for promotion or sacked or refused access to a conference platform, or indeed anything else.If there is an anti-sceptic bias running through the institutions of science, it is evidently keeping itself well hidden.
Remote control banner
We had another surprise for the World Energy Congress today - four remote controlled banners that unrolled from the ceiling of the conference hall with the slogan "ENEL: Do Not Export Nuclear Risk". [ Large photo. ]
ENEL is an Italian company currently completing two old Soviet-designed reactors at Mochovce, Slovakia. Their designs date from the 1970s and miss crucial safety components incorporated elsewhere following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986. The most glaring inadequacy is the plant's lack of “containment” - the solid structure above the reactor intended to prevent radioactivity escaping to the environment and to protect the reactor from external accidents such as an aeroplane crash.
Here's a report from the scene by Jan, one of our energy campaigners:
"Be the change you want to see in the world" - that is the quote that appeared on huge screen during opening of the last day at the World Energy Congress. Well then, we will try to follow this wise advice.During the speech of Fulvio Conti, director of ENEL utility, a banner suddenly dropped out from the ceiling, saying "ENEL: do not export nuclear risk". Police immediately surrounded my colleague Francesco and I, asking us to leave the hall.
We decided not to, because we had paid for registration and had not do anything bad or illegal. When the first wave of alarm cooled down, an ordinary rank and file policeman tried to explain me in Italian that he is happy that we raised our message, repeating " grazie, grazie!".
How are we doing Al?
A while ago Al Gore asked why more young people weren't out protesting about coal power stations in an effort to save the climate.
Australia
Greenpeace has shut down the Munmorah coal power station, about 110 km north of Sydney. Fifteen arrested.Spain
Greenpeace blocks the unloading of coal in the harbour of Tarragona. Greenpeace vessel Arctic Sunrise detained.More later...
November 14, 2007
An Environment Minister blogs our Rome action
[If you missed this story, info and slideshow are here.]
Well here's something you don't see every day. Apparently, the Icelandic Minister for the Environment, Mr. Oessur Skarphedinsson, is an ardent blogger, which is cool enough right there. Skarphedinsson was at the opening ceremony of the World Energy Congress in Rome when Greenpeace activists unexpectedly 'dropped in', and he's blogged about it!
Here's a (very rough) translation of the ministers update:
Greenpeace stal senunni! [Greenpeace stole the scene!]Prodi, the Italian PM, lost the spotlight totally yesterday while he addressed four thousand people at the World Energy Council in the eternal city of Rome. The Council is held in the gigantic hall, reminiscent of many interconnected, hangars for airplanes
In the midst of Prodi’s speech, two men, dressed as mountain climbers, with helmets, appeared from the rooftop. Both had heavy rug sacks as if they were climbing down the glacier after having camped on the roof for several days in order to avoid police and security guards.
While this went on I sat in the front row together with a few Italian Ministers and other Ministers of other nations, and listened to Prodi as I detected the shadows of the two fellows above my head.
Oil addiction
Just posted a story about the Kerch oil spill. Was checking around for news coverage and noticed a few good stories about our oil addiction. From the BBC:
Oil is the poison in the diplomatic mix. The need to buy it means that energy-hungry giants like China will find another reason not to side with the US at the UN Security Council.Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran, 16 Oct 2007 Russia and Iran have more sway because of their big oil reserves The need to sell it means that countries like Venezuela and Russia can replace the stagger of poverty with the swagger of wealth without reforming their economies.
We are addicted to oil and so are they. The addict and the pusher are equally doomed.
(Oh yeah, and we're still at war in Iraq - partly thanks to our oil addiction.)
New Eurostar terminal opens in London to confetti and balloons
It was a small action that happened in London this morning, but in the interests of the entente cordial I thought it was worth a mention, not least because the title for the press release chosen by our media officer made me laugh: 'Greenpeace says 'yes' to something shocker'.
The shiny new rail terminal at St Pancras station opened today to much fanfare, including balloons and biodegradable confetti from the climbers hanging a banner from the ramparts. Not only is it the new home of Eurostar, it sees the start of high-speed services between our parochial little island and the rest of the world. Well, Paris and Brussels but it's a start.
There is, however, a caveat. While everyone is basking in the glory of this technological and architectural achievement, we need to remember that our government is still hell-bent on building a new runway at Heathrow airport, making a nonsense of any attempts to reduce climate change emissions.
Opinion polls regularly put figures of over 60 per cent on the number of UK people opposed to further airport expansion (a recent one pushed it as high as 70 per cent), so to visualise that opposition, we've launched the Stop Heathrow Expansion video wall. If you're incandescent with rage about the unfettered growth of aviation, feel free to add your own short video.
November 13, 2007
BBC's top 10 things to say to a climate change skeptic
What do you say to people who, despite mountains of scientific evidence, keep denying that climate change is a problem? My favorite so far...
Climate Change Denier: I don't think climate change is a big deal because blah blah blah blah blah.
Me: Have you won a Nobel Prize?
CCD: Ummm, no.
Me: Then shut up.
Ha ha ha ha! No that's not on the BBC's list, but it cracks me up.
Slideshow from our surprise visit to the World Energy Congress
For the full story read, "World Energy Congress and nuclear madness", or jump straight to the briefing.
November 12, 2007
Bush administration spending priorities
Someone just sent me a highly amusing/depressing post about how the Bush administration is spending US taxpayer's money. I can't really sum it up here. You'll have to read the original on Daily Kos.
Be sure to read all the way to the bottom for the punchline. (Thanks Page!)
Oil company loses ad ruling
Can an oil company really get away with saying something as ridiculous as, "Heating with oil: for more climate protection"? No you can't. Not today anyway. Today we won a ruling against the Swiss Oil Association.
We pointed out the (fairly obvious) fact that oil is a fossil fuel. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, contributing to global warming. The Swiss advertising industry’s board for integrity agreed with us and asked the company to stop using the slogan and other similar claims. [Full copy of the decision is here (MS Word doc).]
Tar Sands
An excellent piece about what getting oil from tar sands really means. Some highlights
"The extraction of the oil requires heat, and thus the burning of vast amounts of natural gas - effectively one barrel of gas to extract two of crude"
"The oil sands excavations are changing the surface of the planet. The black mines can now be seen from space."
"Two barrels of water are required to extract one barrel of oil; every day as much water is taken from the Athabasca river as would serve a city of a million people."
Now, that sounds like a solution. Right?
The full story is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/oct/30/energy.oilandpetrol
The real answer is the Energy Revolution.
November 11, 2007
Surprise visit to the World Energy Congress
[ Copyright: Greenpeace/Michelangelo Gisone ]I work at Greenpeace and even so sometimes I've got to ask, "How did they do that?"
This is the stage of the World Energy Conference (held by the World Energy Congress), in Rome. [Click for larger photo.] We got word that the World Energy Congress has a plan that lets global warming emissions keep increasing until 2030 AND proposes an expansion of nuclear power.
Looking at the sponsor list for the Conference, that's not a big surprise. One of the main sponsors is Enel - Italy's biggest power company. They aren't building any nuclear reactors in their own country of course. Italy had a referendum and the people voted against nuclear power. But they are working on finishing a plant in Slovakia - one that was designed in the (pre-Chernobyl) 1970's.
In fact, the sponsor and speaker lists are packed with companies still stuck in back in the nuclear age. No wonder they're pushing nuclear, and no wonder it takes so long for greenhouse gas emissions to peak under their plan.
How's this for an idea instead: Take all that money they want to spend on dangerous, polluting nuclear plants and put it into energy efficiency and renewable energy instead. Make a real energy revolution!
And one more thing. I love the photo posted with the web feature about this. The guys on stage are still clapping, and just look at all those camera phones! Makes me grin.
UPDATE: There's a video on YouTube. Love the part where every one applauds.
November 9, 2007
Wind power catching up to nukes in Germany
Today's mailbag contains a couple of encouraging reports from the field:
Last Wednesday we had pretty good wind conditions in Germany. Due to the fact that just 12 out of 17 german nuclear reactors were running (the rest are either broken, under maintenance or have other problems) - electricity production on the 7th November was 340 million kWh from nuclear.On the same day, german wind turbines produced 275 million kWh.
Germany nearly had as much of its electricity from wind as from nuclear -- and it's only a matter of time before wind exceeds nukes -- the question of course is how much time. "Faster, speed racer, faster!" being our motto, given that the world has only 100 months to get CO2 emissions moving toward decline.
And the good news for wind power this weekend (as well as for kite fliers, kite surfers, and extreme sailors): the forecast calls for force 9 winds.
In the same vein, Greenpeace pal Rémi reports seeing a sea of solar panels in Turkey.
Good news on the climate front is hard to come by: we need more nuggets of hope like these!
November 8, 2007
Palm oil: Cooking the Climate
[ A forest is seen through smoke, days after being burnt down along the Kapuas
River in Indonesia. (Photographer: Natalie Behring.) ]According to recent estimates Indonesia is the third largest greenhouse gas emitter after China and the United States, mainly due to the destruction of peatland forests. A lot of this clearing is being done to make way for palm oil plantations. Palm oil's one of those things that goes in to lots of snack products (KitKat, Pringels, that sort of thing).
The report we released today is getting quite a lot of attention all over the world - from Al Jazeera to the Washington Post, from the BBC to the Philippines Inquirer. Even food publications are picking it up. No doubt our team taking peaceful action in the forest against this destruction will be glad to hear the word is getting out.
There's also a feature story upon our site. But here are some quick factoids from our report...
Return to Energyville
The more I look at Chevron's Energyville game the more I think it's a fantastic example of oil industry greenwashing. Here are some of the things that really stand out for me.
November 7, 2007
Greening Energyville
I've just settled down to play Chevron's new climate simulation game 'EnergyVille'. It's a bit like Sim City, you get given a city of 3.9 million virtual people, and you have to power it. Join me, as I discover just how far an oil company simulation can go toward a green future...
November 5, 2007
Oxfam warns about biofuels
From the Oxfam website:
Biofuels may offer the potential to reduce poverty by increasing jobs and markets for small farmers, and by providing cheap renewable energy for local use, but the huge plantations emerging to supply the EU pose more threats than opportunities for poor people. The problem will only get worse as the scramble to supply intensifies unless the EU introduces safeguards to protect land rights, livelihoods, workers rights and food security. ... The UN estimates that 60 million people worldwide face clearance from their land to make way for biofuel plantations. Many end up in slums in search of work, others on the very plantations that have displaced them with poor pay, squalid conditions and no worker rights. Women workers are routinely discriminated against and often paid less then men.In Indonesia almost a third of palm oil is produced by smallholders most of whom lost their land to advancing plantations and were ‘rewarded’ with a two hectare plot. These smallholders are bonded to the palm oil companies which provide them with credit and are required to sell to them – which means they do not get the best price for their oil.
We've got a team on the ground in Indo
