Archive for the ‘Climate Change’ Category

Don’t Demonise Carbon

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

One of the things that keep coming out of the multitude of environmental related blog posts or news articles is a sort of emphasis of how Carbon is a Bad Thing™. You see a lot of “carbon is to blame”, “carbon is evil”, “carbon is the culprit”, “zero carbon” and so on. Now those people know exactly what they mean by speaking harshly about Carbon, but I wonder if the message comes across as intended.

We need to remember that life on earth is first and foremost, carbon-based. From tiny algae to sequoias, from plancton to humans, carbon is our main building block, it’s within ourselves, in the food we eat and in the air we breathe. Carbon is the 4th most common element in the entire universe.

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Introducing Severn Cullis-Suzuki

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

This morning I was going round my usual round of news on Google News, when I came across an article about children raising their voices at Copenhagen. In it was prominently featured a (then) 12-year old Canadian girl called Severn Suzuki who gave the most amazing speech at a climate conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

I was pretty flabbergasted, not so much because I didn’t even know there was a conference of world leaders to discuss environmental issues as early as 1992, but the power of her speech is so moving, you’d think it ought to have made an impact on the then world leaders. Sadly we all know how bad the 90′s turned out to be, from an environmental perspective I mean.

To give you an idea, here’s a video of her speech 17 years ago:

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[Blog Action Day] What will it take to get rid of coal?

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Well since today is Blog Action Day, I thought I’d make it up for the fact that I haven’t blogged for a few days now. I’ve been trying very hard to bite my tongue about some of the stupid things both Westminster and Holyrood are planning to do to meet those so-called ambitious targets they’ve set themselves. I’m of course talking about Carbon Capture and Storage / Sequestration (the meaning of the acronym varies apparently).

But before that, some good news that have been popping up in the last few days:

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Why should we wait for Copenhagen?

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Okay folks, you’re gonna have to bear with me here, this is going to be a bit of an opinionated post, and if as a result you’re gonna flame me, be sure to do it with biomass ;)

It’s now less than 68 days before the International Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) starts and all over blogs and news there is a rising amount of expectations. Can we reach a deal? Can we get Obama to attend? Can we get China to cut their emissions? Isn’t it too late anyway? If you’re reading this, chances are there’s little you can do about any of those questions above.

Or is there?

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[Climate Week] Where are our leaders?

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

After a very promising first day, the second day was marked mostly with discussions from world leaders to (allegedly) kick start an agreement prior to the Copenhagen Summit in December. I’ll get back to that in a minute, but before a piece of news that caught my eye:

Airlines are set to cut their carbon emissions by 50% by 2050. That’s a long way to go 2050 isn’t it? Who’s to say what the industry will be like in 41 years? Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good initiative but it’s almost as if there is no room for research an development in the industry to come up with a revolutionary system that would allow planes (or whichever equivalent may be invented) to fly of purely green fuel. I’m a bit biased towards aviation I must say, the carbon footprint that a single return translatlantic flight slaps in your face compared to everything else is staggering. Sure planes are convenient and bizzarely way cheaper than they used to be (flying was always a luxury for businessmen until the advent of low cost airlines…) but I’ve always hoped for a better way to travel to one day come up. Zeppelins would be fun if they weren’t so slow ;)

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