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

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"

The Cool IT campaign tracks 14 top companies, rating them based on five criteria: public climate speeches; political advocacy; climate solutions; own emissions targets and renewable energy use. These are combined to give a total score out of 100. At the moment, by our reckoning, less than 50/100 is pretty lame. Anyone who knows what it's like to score 43 on a school assignment would probably agree.

We know ICT companies go out of their way to resource and employ the biggest brains and spectacles they can to stay top of the class in innovation and business strategy, but on Climate & Survival 101 (which implicates all innovation and business as long as they involve humans living on planet earth), ICT are under-performing. What's missing from their efforts? How do the better ones compare, and where can they improve?

Not exactly slam dunk

Take IBM, Microsoft and Google: the industry's leading jocks, if you will. IBM came top of our ranking, but is still lagging. Sam Palmisano towed IBM over the line into the end zone with a real chocolate-coated pretzel of a score: 43 out of 100. IBM's metaphorical sneakers are its own emissions target: first, because not all companies even have targets (so, well done to IBM for putting their shoes on before the game); second because it has met some of its targets.

IBM also scooped a little turf for its climate solutions - its energy efficiency-enhancing Smart Cities and smart grid projects. However, these technologies won't be enough to ensure global emissions peak by 2015. For a treaty at Copenhagen to ensure the energy revolution necessary to prevent catastrophic climate change, Palmisano needs to harness political weight; but it's highly unlikely that he will. For speeches and advocacy together, IBM scores a dismal 8/35.

Fourth in the ranking, Google got a plain-old-pretzel with a score of 32/100. An industry giant, the company came in behind HP and Fujitsu, with a modest 7/50 for climate solutions versus IBM's 23/50 - duethanks to its power-guzzling data centres that are still tied to fossil fuel energy production. Google scored zero on its own emissions target, because unlike most other companies, it has none.

Still, CEO Eric Schmidt does get a Sparkly Pyjamas Prize for Speech and Advocacy (lucky him!) beating all the others in the ranking with a combined score of 24/35 versus IBM's 8/35 (HP and Fujitsu in 2nd and 3rd place on the ranking scored only 12/35 and 7/35).

ICT leaders need to put pressure on their governments to secure a strong treaty that puts the legislative / incentive structures in place for a real energy revolution. (Read about our Energy Revolution Campaign here). More action in the style of Apple's departure from the Chamber of Commerce is what we need to see in the run up to, during, and after Copenhagen.

Microsoft gone soft?

Better known as a head-locking tackler when it comes to lobbying and industrial competition, Microsoft is quite simply a soggy dog biscuit in the rankings on environment and climate policy. Given the size and political influence Microsoft has, a combined score of 7/35 for public climate speech and political advocacy is very poor.

The company does score higher than IBM and Google for renewable energy use (with 4/5, versus 2/5 and 1/5, respectively), since it for purchases about 25% of its energy from renewable sources, however, CEO Steve Ballmer has not yet taken advantage of his high profile to speak out on climate policy. For own emissions target, a flimsy "relative" goal means that Microsoft scored a sad zero out of five.

In contrast, HP - which came 2nd in the ranking - has a strong target of 25% reduction by 2010 based on its 2005 emissions. While it would be better to base targets on the 1990 level, the company still earned credit for making an absolute target, and came in ahead of Cisco, which based its 25% target on a 2007 baseline.

Cisco and Intel, in 5th and 6th place, both get credit for their high renewable usage: a respectable 46% for each. But they still need to do substantially more in terms of developing climate solutions and political advocacy, to move up the ranks.

Take action on our Cool IT Campaign telling Google, IBM and Microsoft to speak up for urgent climate action now.

Read more about Copenhagen Climate Summit and why we need a binding treaty urgently to cut emissions here.

Photo by Hyku.

In several African languages we have the proverb “I am, because you are”. This means that your sense of being a human being is determined by the relationships you have with other people. This proverb has informed not only my thinking about human relationships, but also about nature and the environment. Unless we recognise that we must come together in communities, in rich and poor countries and cut across the range of divides that keep us apart, unless we recognise that we are all in this together, we will not be able to address the environmental challenges that we face and we certainly will not be able to address the problem of climate change.

Today we are at the cross roads. The future of our planet is at stake. The effects of climate change are being felt by millions of people across the world. We are at a time when civil society needs to be courageous and bold, peaceful and principled in coming together to ensure that we stop catastrophic climate change – the biggest challenge our planet has ever faced.

Catastrophic climate change is not inevitable. We have an opportunity through our creativity and our activism to push for a green economy that creates sustainable jobs; we need to pursue an energy revolution, which seeks to promote the use of renewable energy such as wind and solar power and increased energy efficiency. If we are able to harness all of these opportunities we can address the issues of poverty, job creation and protecting the climate simultaneously. We need world leaders to act with courage to ensure that we have a fair, ambitious and binding treaty coming out of Copenhagen.

After several years working in the anti poverty movement, I have come to see how the struggle against poverty and the struggle against climate change are inextricably linked. My experience in working with the anti-apartheid and social justice movements has taught me that when humanity faces a major challenge, a major injustice, it is only when decent men and women are prepared to stand up and be counted that change actually occurs. I believe that Greenpeace is an organisation that can make a difference and help men and women around the world to find a voice, to stand up and create change.

Being asked to lead Greenpeace is one of the greatest privileges I can imagine. When I was first asked to consider taking over this role I was on day 19 of a 25 day hunger fast to protest against the government of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. I was feeling rather weak and wondered if I was really up to the challenge of such an important role. I also wondered whether it was too soon to leave the work I had become so involved in on behalf of the poor. When I later told my daughter she said that she would never talk to me again if I did not seriously consider the offer. She also pointed out to me that Greenpeace has always worked for the poor, just in a different way. For her, Greenpeace and its supporters are the real activists, the real heroes who dedicate their lives to the struggle for climate justice. My daughter’s enthusiasm is the enthusiasm of the younger generation which will have to deal with the consequences of the decisions my generation is making now. Her enthusiasm gives me hope that we will be able to face the grave danger of climate change and come up with solutions which will preserve this planet for her and future generations.

I am deeply honoured to join Greenpeace as International Executive Director, especially at this point in time.

I am proud to be part of an organisation that is ready to stand up to power, to stop people in the streets, to master the science, to debate with the politicians, to use all peaceful means possible to create a green, peaceful and more equitable world. I am convinced that we can develop a sustainable future for this planet, but it needs all of us to get involved. I am incredibly honoured and excited and look forward to working with you all.

I have the privilege to be the assistant to Gerd Leipold, who this week steps down as Executive Director and Chief Troublemaker at Greenpeace International.

While nobody is surprised that Greenpeace's leader is an activist --Gerd has been arrested in Germany and the Pacific and a few places in between -- not many people realise he is also a scientist. He studied physics, meteorology and oceanography in Munich and Hamburg, then worked at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and modeled ocean currents as part of the Institute's climate research.

Gerd was destined to be a man of action, not an academic. In 1980 he joined Greenpeace. For the next decade he played a key role at Greenpeace Germany. Under his management, our office there developed from a small pool of volunteers to the largest environmental organization in Germany.

And while many would have been content to shape an Executive Director role along traditional bureaucratic lines, Gerd continued to participate in spectacular Greenpeace actions, invent campaigns, and repurpose existing ones.

He flew over the Berlin wall in a hot-air balloon in 1983 to protest the nuclear weapons tests of the four occupying powers who then controlled Berlin. He took up leadership of Greenpeace's global campaign against atomic tests and nuclear weapons and led offices in 15 countries into a new effort: the "Nuclear Free Seas" campaign which took the Greenpeace disarmament campaign and set it to work in the place where Greenpeace operated best.

Since 1987, Gerd has continuously contributed to the Boards and Executive Committees of Greenpeace offices in the Soviet Union (1987-89), Germany (1992-98), and Scandinavia (1998-2001).

2001 was the year when Gerd became Executive Director of Greenpeace International. In that position he has been a "lead from the front" campaigner taking on the worlds' most powerful players, and promoting the spirit of "One Greenpeace".

We'll be honoring Gerd's efforts this week at a party here at our Amsterdam headquarters. We're encouraging all those who have worked with Gerd over the years to leave stories and remembrances here, to be printed and included in his farewell book.

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.

The worms, found in a gray whale skeleton off the coast of California, prompted scientists to designate them as representatives of an entirely new genus, dubbed Osedax. They belonged to a taxonomic family of marine worms that lack mouths and anuses, and rely entirely on bacteria to absorb and excrete nutrients. But Osedax was unique: Adult males were extremely small, and lived in colonies inside the females. Even more strikingly, they occupied an evolutionary niche comprised entirely of fallen whales.

“Picture the bottom of the ocean. Anything below 1000 meters is fed entirely by ‘marine snow’ — the things that are supported by photosynthesis at the top of the ocean, and the things that eat them, and eventually fall to the ocean floor,” said Robert Vrijenhoek, a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. “When a whale drops into your neighborhood, it’s roughly equivalent to 2000 years of marine snow falling in a millisecond.”

Ah, the diversity of life on our freaky planet.

Amchitka is the rock concert that launched Greenpeace. It's also the concert that launched a ship: the Phyllis McCormack, which sailed out into the first Greenpeace action protesting US nuclear testing in the Aleutian Islands.

Tapes Unearthed
Read Bruce's original entry

After 39 years “in hiding”, today Greenpeace released “Amchitka: the 1970 concert that launched Greenpeace”, a 2-CD recording of the pivotal benefit concert that started a movement.
the 1970 concert that launched Greenpeace

On Oct 16th 1970, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and Phil Ochs played a benefit concert in Vancouver, BC that funded the first voyage of Greenpeace. Nearly four decades later, the artists and family have generously donated their music to help the environment again – all proceeds of the CD will go to Greenpeace.

This rare recording is a piece of Greenpeace history, a piece of Canadian history and unexpectedly, a rare musical gem.

The album captures a young Joni Mitchell surfing the acclaim of “Ladies of the Canyon” and about to release her landmark “Blue” album. James Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James” album has just gone platinum – that night. And Phil Ochs provides a political edge fitting to the evening. Never before released tunes...Joni Mitchell performing soon-to-be classics (not yet committed to vinyl)…and an amazing Joni and James duet capture the magic of the evening.

You’ll be able to purchase a downloadable digital copy of the album within the next day or so, or order a hard copy of the CD, which is a beautiful package that includes a 48 page booklet with never before seen photos from the concert and an excellent first hand account essay of the making of the concert.

Check out songs from Amchitka now

>>Amchitka on Facebook
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GetSatisfaction is a website where people leave feedback for companies - questions, problems, praise even. 21 Google employees are registered with the website, and they often respond to feedback there. Every climate-related inquiry or comment there helps keep the pressure on Google...

Well, lots of people have taken up the challenge, and Google employee Neil Fraser is posting replies to the green IT questions as they come in. The questions regarding Copenhagen however -- like this one -- are unanswered.

Eric Schmidt has significant pull with the White House, not just on technology issues but climate change policy too. Google's CEO would earn a lot of respect internationally if he would just call on Obama to go to Copenhagen.

But when we've asked Google to call on Obama to go to Copenhagen -- so far -- there's only been silence. Feel free to join in (you can reply to a Copenhagen-related question, or post a fresh one yourself).

I am of course talking vegemite or marmite?

If we can resolve the politics of that thorny issue, we could save the tuna!

Okay, that's not true - but it make you look. Take a look at this too: Channel 7 News from Australia was on board the Espy during our recent Defending the Pacific tour. They saw for themselves the overfishing of the tuna stocks and have now made sure that most of Australia has seen it too.....you can check out their news report here.

Well that is all very well in Australia, but the tuna in the Mediterranean are in trouble too and any self-respecting northern cousin would NEVER eat vegemite - "Try Marmite" is surely the answer.

Right now and next month there are also real political debates that actually could save the tuna. In December the Western Central Pacific Fisheries Commission meets and we want them to commit to close to fishing the high seas areas the Espy just spent the last three months defending.

We want marine reserves worldwide to protect all fish stocks, but tuna are in really urgent need of help. In the last fifty years 90% of all the stock has gone.
This week the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) meets in Brazil. We call it the International Conspiracy to Catch All Tuna so that will tell you how bad it is has been at its job. Made up of 47 governments (plus the EU) from around the world that have collectively fished out the bluefin tuna of the Med. Last month their own scientists demonstrated that the stocks were so low they should be protected by a ban on all trade, but ICCAT has been notorious at ignoring the scientists advice.

I'm told you can't buy vegemite or marmite in Brazil, but unless there is serious action by those 48 governments, you might be able to see tuna being sold out.

Sign our petition calling for 40 percent of the world's oceans to be set aside as Marine Reserves.

The New York Times has an editorial today calling on the Senate to pass a strong chemical security bill:

The requirements are reasonable, vital and long overdue. If terrorists were to attack a chemical plant near an American city or large town, they could unleash a toxic cloud that could endanger the lives of hundreds of thousands.

Environmental groups, most notably Greenpeace, and organized labor have been pushing Congress to enact tough chemical plant security legislation, but the chemical industry — concerned about the cost — has long resisted.

...

While the House was considering the issue, the Clorox Company announced earlier this month that it was choosing to convert all of its factories that use chlorine gas — a lethal substance — to safer chemical processes. Greenpeace estimates that that will eliminate the risk to the more than 13 million Americans who live in range of Clorox’s facilities.

Do you hear me politicians in Washington? Listen up: Lead, follow, or get the heck out of the way.

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.

The Associated Press wanted to clear up the confusion in a recent article titled “AP IMPACT: Statisticians reject global cooling” By Seth Borenstein. In this article, AP asked several independent statisticians to look at a set of data and see if they could find any trends. They did not disclose what the data was. Unsurprisingly the experts found no true temperature declines over time. (Read full article here)

"To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous," said Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford.

Ben Santer, a climate scientist at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Lab, called the "global cooling" efforts "a concerted strategy to obfuscate and generate confusion in the minds of the public and policymakers" ahead of international climate talks in December in Copenhagen.

Now it is more important than ever, with the climate summit in Copenhagen coming up, to be well-informed about the real implications these “confusions” about Climate Change can have for us and for future generations.

Radiohead are “one of the more diligent acts when it comes to reducing their impact on the environment,” Carroll reports. “They’ve promoted the idea of city-based gigs over festivals such as Glastonbury to ensure audiences can use available public transport. They also maintain separate equipment for European and US tours to lessen transport emissions and used a LED lighting system on the road to reduce their power needs.”

And when he's not campaigning for peace in Burma, the Irish musician Damien Rice cares about trees. In 2006, he “curated the Big Tree stage at 2006’s Electric Picnic, after which 20 native trees were planted by the Native Woodland Trust for every act that performed on the stage. He has also worked and fund-raised for the Global Green movement advocating green buildings and cities.”

Read the article for the entire list of musicians and their green deeds.

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.

Maybe it's the economy taking up all the worry space, maybe it's the massive disinformation campaign from coal and oil companies or maybe it's just climate change is not an easy thing to communicate. It's like a boiling frog. Maybe we need to do a better job communicating.

Clearly, what we're doing now isn't enough.

Mike is a Web Editor for GP USA and was onboard the Esperanza serving as a webbie for the Defending Our Oceans campaign. On his blog he writes, "the tour was a really amazing experience for me and seeing as I’m still trying to process all of it, I thought I’d share just a few more videos about life onboard a Greenpeace ship."

Video tour of the Esperanza from Mike G on Vimeo.

Before leaving Vanuatu for the second leg of the Pacific tour, the onboard videographer did a quick dive test to check his underwater camera. He swam under the Esperanza and filmed the whole thing. Mike writes, "I thought the footage was pretty amazing and definitely worth sharing with you all. But to make it even more interesting, I asked the Esperanza's chief engineer, Freddy, to narrate what we were seeing."

Esperanza hull dive from Mike G on Vimeo.