In the US, Federal scientists have been pressured by the White House to play down global warming, advocacy groups testified Tuesday at the Democrats’ first investigative hearing since taking control of Congress.

The hearing focused on allegations White House officials for years have micromanaged the government’s climate programs and have closely controlled what scientists have been allowed to tell the public. Continue Reading »

The UK government have officially acknowledged that the production of meat and milk is more harmful to the environment and climate change than other foods because of the way they are produced, packaged, transported or cooked. Continue Reading »

Greenpeace: Car manufacturers are trying to sabotage a new European climate law that would force them to improve the efficiency of their new vehicles. But there’s time to act to make sure that Europe’s cars are cleaner and greener in future.

Last week in Brussels, a behind the scenes tussle was raging that had implications for the future of our planet. The European Environment Commissioner had intended to announce new measures that would force car manufacturers to produce more efficient cars.

European cars, he proposed, would have to reduce the average emissions of their new cars 120g of carbon dioxide per kilometre by 2012. It was a simple and attainable measure that would have an immediate impact on reducing Europe’s spiralling greenhouse gas emissions. Continue Reading »

Is it possible for communities to become sustainable ‘from the bottom up’? It seems to be happening in Calderdale in West Yorkshire. A group of activists have formed the ‘Calderdale Climate Challenge’ to help people work together to reduce their personal contribution to climate change at home, at school, at work and at leisure.

The group was boldly launched last year, with an e-briefing sent far and wide, including to the staff of Calderdale Council. The challenge was launched at the end of last year via an email newsletter which was sent to, amongst many others, 3000 Calderdale Council staff. The project is co-ordinated by Anthony Rae explains that in the Calderdale area, ‘Streets, homes and workplaces have suffered from the flooding, along with the disruption and expense that go with it.’

Calderdale is a hot-spot of sustainable activity - Treesponsibility work on ecological restoration, and have already planted 60,000 trees and hedge plants in the area. Local businesses can fund local tree planting through Treesponsibilty’s CO2mmitment programme.

The Soil Associations conference a few days ago was called “One Planet Agriculture - Preparing for a post-peak oil food and farming future”

The conference focused on the urgent need to develop new models of localised food and farming systems. This is in anticipation of the central role that farmers and growers will play in averting climate change and delivering food security in an era of scarce and expensive energy.You can download ‘PodCasts’ (also known as MP3 audio files) of some of the key speakers who between them put forward the case that we have reached ‘peak oil’ and then look at ways some communities are preparing themselves (Transition towns) etc.

If you don’t have the time to listen to all of the speeches, the most notable ones are:

• Energy Shortages: How soon and how serious? - Dr Colin Campbell
• Climate change and peak oil: The two great oversights of our time - Dr Jeremy Leggett
• Energy descent plans: The Kinsale and Totnes projects - Rob Hopkins

The last one by Rob Hopkins is particularly inspiring!

Download & listen to them here: http://soilassociation.org/conference
Rob Hopkins website can be found at: http://www.transitiontowns.org/Totnes/

From BBC News website:

Chief executives of some of the largest companies in the US have urged President George W Bush to introduce measures to tackle global warming. The executives from nine corporations said Mr Bush should support a mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr Bush will address the issue in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, but will not introduce binding rules for emissions, the White House says. President Bush has in the past rejected mandatory controls on greenhouse gases.

The US withdrew from the Kyoto protocol in 2001 (GreenVeg note:  although the US withdrew from Kyoto, several US cities and states have independently ratified the agreement. Concerns now however, are that Kyoto agreed CO2 levels etc are far too high to have a real impact on fighting global warming).

Read the full article on the BBC News website here.

This article (which I have Anglicised slightly) was posted in an email list by ‘InfoNature.org’ - thought it might be in interesting read. Continue Reading »

This evening, BBC1 aired a program with the above title. The Radio Times described it as…

“This sober, scientific programme looks at the scale of climate change that Britain faces in coming decades and what it might do to our way of life and countryside. The wise presence of David Attenborough, shaking his grey locks mournfully as he delivers dire warnings, is enough to make anyone take it seriously. But the programme is closely argued, too, with lively reports from Matt Allwright and Kate Humble that include a few surprises: changes to rainfall could pose as many problems as rising temperatures, for instance. Just ask the woman in Bewdley on the banks of the Severn, who after several inundations has wryly renamed her house ‘Dunfloodin’. “

I guess for the average Briton, this programme (if watched and believed) would be a bit of a shocker, although us hardened environmentalists will already be wise to it’s words of wisdom. The programme was great on it’s shock tactics but pretty light on the actions that people should taking to avoid the worse-case scenario.

They showed a Lotus sports car that runs on bio-ethanol and has a 0-60 time of 3.8 seconds - 0.3 seconds faster than it’s petrol equivalent. Why do they focus on performance and sports cars? They made a scant remark about the downside to bio-fuels - ie the amount of land required, yet failed to actually quantify it at all (if we switched to bio-fuels, we’d need more productive land for this alone that we currently have available in the UK.

The programme needed to clearly state the need for change - not just an acknowledgement of the situation, but the need for individuals to change their mind-sets and attitudes, and face up the hard decisions governments will have to make.

As George Monbiot points out in his book ‘Heat’, “People place their hope in unproven technologies, that ’scientists’ won’t let the collapse of the biosphere happen. Within the necessary timeframe, indeed, so our imaginations tell us, in the nick of time, they will deliver us from evil by inventing a device which harnesses nuclear fusion, artificial photosynthesis, hydrinos or solar power on the moon.” He continues “To succumb to hope of this nature is as dangerous as to succumb to despair.”

A round-up of the week in climate change from the Climate Change News blog.

“This week the blogosphere has been dealing with questions of transport, future energy solutions, negawatts as a source of energy, carbon offsets, weird weather, China’s development and environmental devastation, and continued business innovation.”

Includes concerns about the sustainability of biofuels,

“We need to stop the web of biodiversity being destroyed by monocultures grown in the name of climate change mitigation. And we need to speak out against anybody, no matter their scientific degree or qualification, who claims that monocultures can stabilize the climate”

a study of how to meet energy demands affordably through efficiency, and a look at carbon offsets offered by MyClimate. Many links to original news articles.

Reading George Monbiot’s latest book, ‘Heat’, he talk about energy options. When referring to coal and nuclear, he says that given the choice between the ‘mountain top removal’ that’s taking place in the Appalachian’s for coal and nuclear, I’d go nuclear. This is not what I thought he’d say, so I looked into what’s happening in the Appalachian mountains in a little more detail.

So far, over 450 mountains have been removed. Yes, removed. They blow them up bit by bit and dump all the debris into the valleys where the coal is extracted from the rock. The toxic slurry left behind causes massive environmental problems in itself, whilst the rock debris causes river flows to change. Continue Reading »