Why I Decided To Fight Climate Change

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/

This is the conclusion of a message I have transcribed and edited from a talk Ishvara gave on November 4, 2007. - TG.

Ishvara:

In this awareness there is much to do, but none of it can be done in the old ways. I implore you, I encourage you to give up the old ways of doing things, the old ways of seeing, and listen to what love says. Love says: “It is all right.” Love says, “There is a way.” Love says: “Love, and see what happens.” This is not the conditional love of consensus reality. This is the absolute love of the universe that is empowerment, that is the very core and source of all that you are, and it is up to you to embrace this love. It is up to you to love, and you begin with the most difficult person in the world to love: yourself. You may think, “I can love myself. I’m the best person I know.” But you really don’t love yourself. You are afraid and judgmental of yourself. You are resistant to yourself. You don’t approve of yourself. You want to be something else. You don’t like the way it is. Loving yourself is a most difficult thing.

Loving yourself means loving your pain, your suffering, your past, your present. Yet if you realize that love is simply unconditional acceptance of what is, that may make it a bit easier. It is not defeat to accept what is. When you totally accept what is, you would be amazed at the intelligence the cells bring into play. You would be amazed about how you are led to various processes and awarenesses, and perhaps you will find within those something which helps you. This awareness is not at all “anti-help.” Yet it does not involve seeking help from a belief or concept of the past. It involves embracing something new, something unique, something that is not the way of the world, something that may not seem logical.

Everything is subtle in the New Consciousness. The smallest amounts of energy affect the cells. Consequently, one’s thinking affects the cells: One’s fears, one’s beliefs, and one’s conditioning affect the cells. As long as you are resisting what is, that effect continues. When you surrender to what is you are allowing love to penetrate into the very depths of the cells. You are allowing love to flood your being with acceptance, self-acceptance and other-acceptance. It doesn’t mean that you are going to like or change everyone. It doesn’t mean a whole lot other than that your body will begin to benefit from it, and when your body benefits from it, others will benefit. It is not an experience that takes place in isolation. It is a shared experience. You realize you are designed to help each other in this process, to inspire, encourage, and support each other, to create a community of help, of care, of compassion, of love, of being, to create a life that you know and live from the core of your existence, from even the smallest awareness you hope for.

Disappointment with the world is natural, because you know the world could be so much different. But disappointment with yourself is not natural. You are not to be disappointed with yourself. You are to know within yourself that you are doing everything you can, that you are expanding, connecting, and achieving as much as you can in the moment. If you think you are failing, you experience the failure. If you think you “can’t,” then you can’t. This is not magical thinking. It is practical thinking. You see, you have before you conditions, beliefs, and concepts. These have shaped the body. They have affected your life. That is the way it is. There is no blame or fault, but you need to know about it. You need to realize that there is more to you than those things.

Some live their lives in a very restricted way. To have to deal with a condition, something they have inherited, something that was caused from the outside, is a problem for them. Yet the power of the human being is the ability to overcome whatever is put before you. Whatever appears to be an obstacle is not actually an obstacle but an opportunity for empowerment, for a greater realization, for hope. You need not close yourself to love, because it is the very Life force. When you think you are wrong, or feel guilty, or embrace separation or isolation, you are closing yourself to love. You need to be open to receiving.

It is funny, but the best way to be open to receiving is to be giving, to give love: I give you the opportunity to love me, because when you can love me, you will love yourself. When you can love me unconditionally, you will love yourself unconditionally. When you can share that love with others, you will experience transformation and healing. You will become more compassionate, patient and understanding, and then you will know the secret of Life. The secret of Life is simply: to be seen. All that human beings want is to be seen. All that you want is to be seen. Being seen is being recognized, and with recognition comes respect, allowing, and acceptance. You live in a world that is so fearful, so resistant to acknowledging others, so resistant to being love. There is fear that you will be overwhelmed, taken advantage of, or misused. The fear keeps you locked into a pit of despair and separation.

So stop doing things to make yourself better. Start doing things to acknowledge yourself where you are, with honesty and openness. I have seen over and over again that the moment a person admits where they are, where-they-are changes. It is quite magical. You don’t have to do something with it. You simply acknowledge it, and that acknowledgment somehow begins to transform the morphic field in which you have been trapped. It begins to let something else in, and then the body starts feeling something new, something different, something unique. It starts feeling hope, and hope is what everyone needs now, because consensus reality, this conditional world, has become hopeless. People are feeling powerless and helpless, but it need not be that way. You can embrace Life as it is and become empowered.

You can acknowledge the truth of your being, being open to your place in this existence, going beyond the systems and structures of the world, realizing that this awareness, this Space, has no boundary or border. This Space is everywhere, and thus it can help. It can support and encourage, because it is the Space of love: love that knows no other, love that has no outside or inside, love that is.

I come to you as love. I need you to love me so that I continue to love you. It cannot be one-sided. It is a continuous flow which opens the possibilities of your life. To love and to be loved is the same love: love without a boundary, love that is not taken, love that is. Embrace love as you embrace this Life. Find places of compassion and patience in your experience, and be real. What is real continues to exist, what is false will fall away as one surrenders all of it, moment by moment.

Copyright © 2008 by Alaya®.
EnLifement™ 2002

This message comes to you from Alaya, a nonprofit organization. Alaya depends upon financial contributions for its continued existence. For information on how to make a tax-deductible contribution to Alaya, go to http://www.alaya.org/Pages/alayastore-donate.html .
Thank you for your support.

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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

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

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

Based in Auckland, New Zealand.

Drinking eight glasses of water a day is healthy, right? Wrong.

Mobile phones ‘more dangerous than smoking’

PS: Don’t stay in the same room as a operating microwave. I’m sure someday they’ll discover that is bad too.

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

http://www.earthhour.org/

The whole article here.

Go ahead and steal movies too, actors make wayyyy
too much money.

The whole article here.

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

“Weil claims that there’s an innate need for humans to alter
consciousness, and that there is no such thing as good drugs
and bad drugs, merely that some individuals have good or bad
relationshops with these substances.”

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.

• 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.