11:41am UK, Wednesday February 27, 2008

Johan Eliasch, Cool Earth founder

The journey to school is probably not everyone’s favourite childhood memory. But growing up in Stockholm, the arrival of the winter snow in November was the happiest times of year.

It meant that for the next four months I could ski to school. I’d wake up, struggle with clumsy bindings and set off on a journey that should take 10 minutes but I’d stretch to half an hour.

Johan Eliasch and Frank Field

That was in the 1960s when snow was such a familiar part of the long Swedish winter it wasn’t even remarked upon.

Today, Stockholm’s children would be lucky to see a week of snowy weather.

Of course, it’s not the weather that has changed in the past 40 years. Europe’s climate has changed.

I’m sure you have a climate change trigger too, whether it’s remembering waking up and building snowmen before school or sledging down hills during wintry weekends.

For someone with a passion for skiing, it just happens to be skiing to school. For friends in Britain it is often longing for a cold, crisp Christmas.

The recognition that we are losing our cherished seasons is prompting an ever louder debate on climate change.

Not a day goes past without political statements on emission targets and Kyoto protocols. Every MP seems sure that global warming is the number one priority on their ‘to-do’ list.

Unfortunately, a ‘to-do’ list won’t avert a global crisis.

Like so many people, I despair of debate ever leading to effective action.

This prompted me to leap-frog a debate with action. Weaning society off a 100-year fossil fuel addiction is the only long-term solution.

But as anyone in business knows, doing what you can today is sometimes more important than what you can tomorrow.

For anyone serious about halting climate change this means only one thing - ending tropical deforestation.

It’s a little known fact that forest destruction releases as much carbon into the atmosphere each year as the entire US output.

Helping protect tropical forest by giving local communities incentives is the most effective way of reducing global emissions.

To start the ball rolling I bought 400,000 acres of rainforest to secure it with local communities. Along with Frank Field MP I have started a charity, Cool Earth, to help everyone do the same.

The logic of Cool Earth is very simple. With a donation of £35, ½ acre of at-risk rainforest can be secured along with the 130 tonnes of CO2 it stores. That’s equivalent to more than 10 times an average Briton’s annual carbon footprint.

Sceptics will ask how they can be sure sponsored forest is secure.

Cool Earth believes that only by creating a direct link with our forest projects can sponsors feel their commitment to tackling the climate crisis is being delivered. So that’s what we’re doing.

And by using high-resolution satellite imagery, regular biodiversity sampling and reports from our locally employed rangers, we provide reassurance that forest is being protected in your name.

And of course those who buy will be able to view their acre on GoogleMaps in real time and receive regular updates.

So this is how you can make a real difference and, with the valued support of Sir David Attenborough and Sir Nicholas Stern, Cool Earth offers a chance of halting a global crisis that politicians seem incapable of addressing.

It may not bring back the glorious winter snows of my childhood but it might just stabilise our changing climate.

Find out more about Cool Earth

From http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Sky-News-Archive/Article/20082851268984

See https://www.coolearth.org/

Imagine the impossible

by Simon Wilson

Robyn Williams wants us to do some transformative thinking, about science, sex and a perfect future.

Robyn Williams thinks that buses and trains should be free. They should run so often that they don’t need timetables, and they should be clean, safe and aesthetically pleasant. He also thinks that pornography should be taught in schools. With practical classes.

An Australian, Williams is a famous science journalist – a rare breed anywhere in the world – doing his bit to shake up the way we think. It’s not easy, what with science being so out of fashion. “All those students at university now,” he says, “do they actually like commerce? Law? Science is real. It’s about what’s in your gut or out the window. I find that compelling.”

Science is also, he says, full of fascinating and valuable ideas, and necessary to democracy, safety and the creation of wealth. And – “personally, I’d put this category first” – it’s a lot of fun.

His new book Future Perfect is a sampler for all this, a short and very lively series of provocations on transport, cities, media, education, religion, innovation, work, the environment and, yes, sex.

Williams has been producing and presenting science programmes for the ABC since 1972. He’s a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, a visiting professor at the University of New South Wales and a former visiting professor at Balliol College, Oxford. He’s so famous, he’s had a star named after him. He’s so famous, he’s appeared in Dr Who and Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

His book is full of problems, of course. The world is in a mess. But it’s also full of solutions. Williams’s theme is that we already have so many of the ideas and even the resources to hold back climate change, sort out the traffic, make work more rewarding. What we lack is the will to put them into practice.

He’d like us to learn to think like David Attenborough, who reinvented natural world documentaries with Life on Earth. “They said, okay, let’s imagine the impossible. So they did. And they suddenly realised, about 85 percent of it could actually work. You can apply that to anything. Imagine the impossible, and then do it.”

Rather like John Lennon with a science degree? “Yes, I’ll take that. You know, lots of people sit around imagining their perfect house. So if you translate that thinking process to your village, to your town, to your school block, to the way that nature can be built into your city, well, dreaming about what it might be like in 20 or 30 years’ time, and then retrofitting it, is perfectly straightforward.”

Transformative thinking. First, the key question: what will make people stop driving their cars? Then, the big answer: make buses and trains free, frequent and flash. And then you work back from there.

He’s ready with statistics. Traffic jams cost Australia $13.8 billion a year. In some places, the price of public transport tickets pays for no more than the cost of issuing and collecting them.

Why are we stuck? “We need to invest, and people don’t like to pay taxes any more. They think that things come from the infrastructure fairy.”

But cutting taxes is now widely considered a mark of good government. How do you turn that perception around? “If you gave people a really exciting way of showing that you can invest money, in other words their money, in other words taxes, and that you could build things that would alleviate their problems, then I really do think people would accept that.”

In his own field, the media, Williams despairs that so many “documentaries” come from the “total bollocks school of science journalism”. Nonsensical ideas get treated far too seriously, and not just because they’re good for ratings and sales. He also blames “the knowledge supermarket”, where all ideas are intrinsically and equally valuable, and “the choice is up to the customer”.

“We need critical thinking to help us dispose of the dross. Our schools and universities should be the front lines of this, not dupes of snake-oil merchants.”

Williams was 13 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957. It’s incredible, he says, that 50 years later “we are not living in the space age … but in Blade Runner’s LA, a mixture of flash gear and squalid dysfunction”.

“Why are our lives not transformed rather than tricked up?”

One part of the answer, he suggests, is that despite rapid technological change, industry has turned away from innovation aimed at improving our lives. What we get is an endless stream of slightly better things to buy, and we accept this because we have been turned from citizens into consumers.

“Twenty years ago, Margaret Thatcher denied there was something called society. We were a bunch of individuals, or families, awash in an ocean of uninterest in community.”

Is he angry? He likes to think of himself as “laconic, like my friend John Clarke”.

Pessimistic? “On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I’m really optimistic. But then I look at the stupidity of our international institutions and I think, bloody hell.”

Despite this, he thinks industry is changing. Major insurance companies have declared they will not continue to do business “when the world is in havoc”. This, Williams suspects, will have a sobering effect on corporate minds.
So what about that porn? The logic goes like this. Some monkeys don’t seem to know how to have sex unless they see others doing it. Some researchers think porn may have a similar educational role for us. Now that we no longer sleep in groups crowded together in caves, we don’t see live sex any more. And yet we yearn to know more about it.

“Porn, in this analysis,” Williams says, “must therefore be seen as a modern cry for help … Young people need to know what their parts are for and what the fuss is about. Grown-ups need to build ways out of routine and repetition.”

And if these are legitimate needs, there must be better ways to fulfil them than the exploitative and joyless labourings of pornography. Which is why, he says, sex skills should be in the curriculum, taught by “attractive expert sex surrogates”.

“The chapter on sex is slightly whimsical,” he confesses, although it’s also a kind of intellectual cattle prod: Williams wants us to do some transformative thinking, about science as well as sex.

Because the future does work. He’s seen it. When the Olympics came to Sydney in 2000, he says, the whole city embraced the concept that it could be a vastly better place. They imagined the impossible, and set about creating it.

“You could see the spirits lift. People took public transport, which in many instances was free. A major city was transformed, and we welcomed people of all nationalities. It was an astonishing experience. It’s that kind of ambition, and goodwill, that I think can transform. It’s not just a pipe dream. It happened. I was there.”

So we put our cities on a project footing and watch them hum? “Yes.”

From; http://www.listener.co.nz/issue/3510/features/9415/imagine_the_impossible.html;jsessionid=D2F90E56CFE8BE5663B713BD126E042B

-----------------
Jack of Nothing
Master of www.insanity.co.nz
-----------------

Life might seem peaceful, but there is big corruption and mind control going on. This can be seen in the separation of rich and poor, Rape of the environment and wars.

We should change to small local communities that don’t rely on petrol and big government. Stop being consumers. That takes the power away from corrupt people! There is a huge movement of people trying to do that (for environmental & health reasons).

All of their power is from money, capitalism and mind control.. if we free ourselves from that grip, then they have no control over us.. All we need is a majority number. It’s much easier for people to join a community of real life. It’s very hard to convince people about a massive conspiracy like this.

The solution is the same. Tune in, Drop out.

I found this at one of my regular visit pages Google Earth Blog.

I was born black, I live black
And I’ma die probably because I’m black
Because some cracker that knows I’m black
Better than you nigga, is probably gonna put
A bullet in the back of my head!

Yeah our lives fucked up, no doubt
All this shit we go through every day
Sometimes a nigga don’t know what the fuck to do
But see I got my niggas
And we gone organize a people army
And we gone get control over our own lives
And I mean that shit right there from the bottom of my shit
I Ching

Yeah, yeah imagine havin no runnin’ water to drink
Chemicals contaminate the pipes leadin’ to your sink
Just think, if the grocery stores close they doors
And they saturate the streets with tanks and start martial law
Would you be ready for civil war
Could you take the life of somebody you know
Or have feelings for if necessary? I got cousins in the military
But far as I’m concerned they died, when they registered

Yo, this world is oh so cold, I think about my ancestors
Being sold, and it make me wanna break the mold
Fuck the gold and the party, train yourself, clean your shottie
Tell me what you gone do to get free, we need more than MC’s
We need Hueys, and revolutionaries
The niggas on the streets today, it’s kinda scary
The smell around my way ain’t roses or strawberries
In fact it’s kinda poisonous, bringing out the boy in us
But I’ma stand up on my own, like a man do
Dominate the land and make wealth, like Fu-Manchu
Yes the peoples army stick together like glue
We represent the I-Ching and to this we stand true
Military formation, anyone participation is welcome
Each one teach one, son help son
Just one gun is all it take to get it started
Living in the wilderness of the west we cold hearted

If you don’t think it could happen think again my son
Be prepared for the worst that’s yet to come
We want freedom, prophecies and ancient wisdom
Cataclysm, niggas be like fuck, the system

If you don’t think it could happen think again my son
Be prepared for the worst that’s yet to come
We want freedom, prophecies and ancient wisdom
Cataclysm, niggas be like fuck, the system

I don’t wanna be no movie star, I don’t wanna drive no fancy car
I just wanna be free, to live my life, to live my own life

Yeah, I’m for peace
But I’ll kill ya if ya fuckwith my moms or my niece
See we all want peace, but the problem is
Crackers want a bigger piece

Got it where the niggas can’t get a piece
That’s why police get stabbed and shot
‘Cuz a nigga can’t eat if the ave is hot
Locked up you get three hot meals and one cot

Then you sit and rot, never even got a fair shot
That’s where a whole lotta niggas end up
My man moms even got sent up, tryin to keep the rent up
When I’m bent up I think alot about the reason I’m here

I think about the things I fear in the comin years
Ahead of me, I’m ready for whatever they bring though
I’d go against a tank wit a shank for my dreams
And that’s my fuck’n word

One day the whole world will smoke herb
And niggas won’t get took to jail for hangin on the curb

If you don’t think it could happen think again my son
Be prepared for the worst that’s yet to come
We want freedom, prophecies and ancient wisdom
Cataclysm, niggas be like fuck the system

If you don’t think it could happen think again my son
Be prepared for the worst that’s yet to come
We want freedom, prophecies and ancient wisdom
Cataclysm, niggas be like fuck the system

I don’t wanna be no movie star, I don’t wanna drive no fancy car
I just wanna be free, to live my life, to live my own life

If you don’t think it could happen think again my son
Be prepared for the worst that’s yet to come
We want freedom, prophecies and ancient wisdom
Cataclysm, niggas be like fuck the system

I don’t wanna be no movie star, I don’t wanna drive no fancy car
I just wanna be free, to live my life, to live my own life

“It’s not about Do’s and Dont’s, It’s about (high) quality and (low) quantity” - Antony Steele

I don’t usually like to encourage people to buy stuff, but since you probably do (and we all must a little), then at least choose something that doesn’t destroy the earth. Go to EcoStore (also available in supermarkets).

Based in Auckland, New Zealand.

“The people united will never be defeated”

Switch It Off - 8pm Saturday March 29, 2008.

I hate to send people to an aweful website, but it’s for a good
cause.

http://www.earthhour.org/

You got to watch this, takes about 20min.

http://www.ottmarliebert.com/diary/?p=3474

Calculate your carbon emissions here

I was quite supprised, we (family of two people) came out with  220 CO2 emissions. 52% was from our power company, 44% from cars and 4% from waste.

We don’t drive much, but I figured cars would’ve been the worst, obviously not.

http://www.cleanenergyguide.org.nz/

What is more important?

• Helping Others & fighting for change to our destructive ways, or
• Living our own lives & saving ourselves.

Stuff to think about.

The first point can also be seen as us attempting to stop global warming. The second point is the assumption that it’s gonna happen, and I should be prepared to survive.

• Link Here

• Link Here

Be The Change

Buy Local ”Shop at your local farmers market, or check the origin of goods at your
supermarket. Fresh, local, and in-season food means fewer carbon miles (and it’s yummier).” - From the Greenpeace mag 108

I don’t know why writers suck so bad, just say it. Buy local because then you’re not paying for that banana to come 1/2 way around the world ! You probably consume more petrol by WHAT YOU PURCAHSE, not from you car !

Also, get over it, saving 25% power buy changing all your good light bulbs into new
ugly (mercury containing) fluro power savers, will not save bugger all. If you want
to save power, turn your air con off or your heater down. Heck, just turn some
lights off.

PS: Don’t be near one of those new bulbs if you break one! And please dispose of
them properally. If you dump them like normal, the mercury will do more damage to
the planet (Are we trying to save it or kill it ?).

“When you feel that you need something, or have to do something, it’s like a compulsion; there’s no choice. And a life without choice is no fun. But you can get your choice back by changing your language. Instead of “I need X” you can say “I choose X because I want Y”. As you begin to realise that everything’s a personal choice, you will start to relax. Once you truly realise this, you’ll also realise that you don’t actually need anything (although there’s plenty that you may choose to have). The ironic thing is that once you realise that you don’t need anything, you can relax, let go, and discover that you’re free to have whatever you like.”

Quote from Instant happiness cards, salad

There is a global awaking happening now. People are beginning to see that the state of the world isn’t good.  Ignorance is bliss, so we are drinking and distracting ourselves in an attempts to hold on the the bliss, trying to stay at the party right to the end, if you will.  The consumerism party is over and there is a huge mess to cleanup.  This however is not bad as it will lead to a happier and better world,  We all just need to partisipate in the change.

Here

What’s the worst that can happen? Watch it, Share it, Do something.