Today, Tuesday April 22nd, is Earth Day, an annual event that was founded in 1970 and has grown into an international celebration of our collective commitment to building a safer, healthier and prosperous world for all of us, starting in the communities where we live. There are many ways to get involved and no action is too small. On April 22nd, go out and celebrate the earth, volunteer, let your elected officials know your priorities, organize an event – most of all have fun, meet new people, and make a difference where you live.

Download the Relocalization Network’s Action Handbook, outlining examples of relocalization projects, or the Earth Day Network’s Earth Day in a Box toolkit to get started and organize an event! Learn the basics on running a successful event from contacting the media to potential sources of funding. Make use of fliers with tips to reduce energy consumption at home, at school, at work and with your kids, courtesy of the Earth Day Network.

Get a move on. You haven’t got long.

Here in the London Borough of Bromley, de facto capital of the People’s Republic of Suburbia, the environmental bush telegraph is throbbing. Change Alley has received a personal invitation from the local branch of Friends of the Earth (FoE), printed on “rescued, redundant office letterhead paper”.

Tony Juniper, retiring Executive Director of FoE, is coming to Bromley on Tuesday May 6th. The local group is understandably quite proud of this coup, and is keen to get bums on seats.

“We are very excited about this and are hoping that he will share with us some of the highs and lows of his eighteen years at Friends of the Earth and his assessment of the current state of the planet”

If anyone’s in the area and fancies a shot (not literally!) at one of the UK’s big league enviros, here are the details:

The time: May 6th, 7.30 p.m.

The place: Friends’ Meeting House, Ravensbourne Road, Bromley (5 minutes walk from Bromley South station) map

Contact details: let them know you’re coming by emailing sheilabrown336@msn.com. At least, that’s the email on the invitation, it might well be sheilabrown33@msn.com.

There’s quite an interesting valedictory article by Tony Juniper here. It may supply raw material for some probing questions if you’re short of ideas. Here’s a few suggestions off the top of my head:

Why do all environmental campaigns boil everything down to one issue: climate change?

What happened to all the other environmental solutions apart from reducing our ‘carbon footprint’ (which isn’t actually a ‘footprint’ at all)?

Why are FoE and the other ‘green’ NGOs so dogmatic and black-and-white about issues like nuclear power and GM technology?

Why, when policemen, teachers and politicians look younger every day, do FoE members look so old ? Where are the young activists going?

See you there.

From the Avaaz website:

Climate negotiations in Bali are in crisis. Things were looking good till now: near-consensus on a delicate deal, including 2020 targets for rich countries, in return for which China and the developing world would do their part over time. IPCC scientists have said such targets are needed to prevent catastrophe. But Japan, the US and Canada are banding together to wreck the deal, and the rest of the world is starting to waver…

We can’t let three stubborn governments throw away the planet’s future. We have until the end of Friday to do everything we can. Please sign our emergency global petition below — we’ll deliver it through stunts at the summit, a full-page ad in the Financial Times in Asia, and directly to country delegates to stiffen their nerve against any bad compromise. Add your name to the campaign below now!

http://www.avaaz.org/en/bali_emergency/5.php?cl=42309820

Last month The Coffee House drew your attention to the
Worst EU Lobbying and Greenwash Awards 2007.
The winners were announced at a festive awards ceremony in the Witloof Cellar in Brussels on 4 December 2007.

Winner of the Worst EU Lobbying Award 2007

BMW, Daimler and Porsche – nominated together in the worst EU lobbying category – gained more than 30% of the votes. Their joint lobbying offensive, designed to water-down and delay the mandatory CO2 emission reduction targets proposed by the Commission after voluntary targets were not met, was deemed to be the worst and most deceptive by voters across Europe.

Winner of the Worst EU Greenwash Award 2007

The special greenwash prize for the most audacious attempts to gain unjustifiable green credentials was awarded to the German Atomic Forum, which received more than a third of votes cast. It was nominated for its campaign aimed at improving the image of nuclear energy. Under the slogan “Germany’s unloved climate protectionists” it featured images of nuclear power plants placed in unpolluted and unspoilt natural environments.

More than 6600 people across Europe took part in the online poll, which frankly was more than I would have expected. For a breakdown of the votes cast, click this link and also this one. Don’t forget to vote next year.

Photo: ‘Kivalina Sunrise’ by Vision Aerie

An island in a moonlit sea. A thin sliver of sand 6 miles long, under pressure from rising seas and erosion. A place with no future, named in an IPCC report as an example of the costs of relocating coastal communities. An indigenous community of 400 who desperately want to leave but who can’t afford to even if they had somewhere to go. Where is this? Somewhere in the Pacific? The Carterets, perhaps, or Tuvalu.

Wrong. This is America. Kivalina Island, Alaska, 85 miles north of the Arctic Circle, is disappearing and has perhaps 15 years left to live. One option is a stronger sea wall, made of rock rather than sandbags. The Army Corps of Engineers estimates it would cost $33 million to protect the southern tip of the island. At the other end of the scale, relocating to a new purpose-built settlement on higher ground inland would cost at least $155 million, or about $387,000 a person. Some have suggested just giving the inhabitants the money and letting them loose, but this idea hasn’t generated much enthusiasm.

No-one seems to be prepared to take responsibility. The locals see a big storm as their only salvation. “If Kivalina floods or something really bad happens, then they’ll move us,” says the pastor. “That’s the only time we’ll get money.”

Welcome to the United States.

Los Angeles Times

Buy Nothing Day is almost upon us once again. On November 23rd in the US and Canada, the 24th for the rest of us, thousands of people around the world are planning to mark one of the busiest shopping days of the year by not spending any money.

You too can take a break from rampant consumerism and prove that a day without shopping won’t kill you. For more details see the UK BND site:

Everything we buy has an impact on our planet. Buy Nothing Day highlights the environmental and ethical consequences of consumerism. The developed countries – only 20% of the world population are consuming over 80% of the earth’s natural resources, causing a disproportionate level of environmental damage and unfair distribution of wealth.

As consumers we need to question the products we buy and challenge the companies who produce them. What are the true risks to the environment and developing countries? The argument is infinite – while it continues we should be looking for simple solutions – Buy Nothing Day is a good place to start.

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY!
This year, Buy Nothing Day will be biggest 24-hour moratorium against consumerism ever. People in around the UK will make a pact with themselves to take a break from shopping as a personal experiment or public statement and the best thing is – IT’S FREE!!!

Spinwatch, in conjunction with Corporate Europe Observatory, Friends of the Earth Europe and LobbyControl, are running The Worst EU Lobbying and Greenwash Awards 2007. This is your chance to vote for the “most deceptive, misleading, or otherwise problematic lobbying tactics in attempts to influence EU decision-making”.

Nominees in the ‘Worst EU Lobbying’ category are:

• BMW, Daimler and Porsche for their full-scale lobbying offensive to water-down and delay EU mandatory targets for car CO2 emissions;
• EU public affairs consultancy Cabinet Stewart for running the International Council of Capital Formation (ICCF) – this so-called ‘unique European think-tank’ is in fact a front group for US-based opponents of the Kyoto Protocol;
• Viscount Etienne Davignon, for advising EU Development Commissioner Louis Michel about African development issues, even though he sits on the board of Suez – a transnational corporation looking to expand its energy and water business into Africa;
• The European Public Affairs Consultancies Association (EPACA) for its high-profile counter-campaign against the European Commission’s plans for a lobby transparency register;
• Repsol for misshaping the EU’s research agenda on agrofuels to fit narrow commercial interests, at the expense of genuine measures to combat climate change.

Nominees in the ‘Worst EU Greenwash’ category are:

• Airbus for a series of adverts in which passenger jet silhouettes are filled with beautiful landscapes, implying that their planes are green and clean;
• BAE Systems for promoting deadly weapons as environmentally friendly;
• ExxonMobil for claiming it is reducing its greenhouse gas emissions while in reality its emissions are increasing;
• The German Atomic Forum for its campaign “unloved climate protectionists”, exploiting the public’s concern about climate change to promote nuclear energy;
• Shell for an advert suggesting that their oil refineries emit flowers not smoke.

Cast your votes here. Polls close at midnight on 27 November 2007. Award winners will be invited to receive their awards in person at the festive ‘Worst EU Lobbying’ Awards Ceremony in Brussels on Tuesday 4 December 2007.

Now this is what I pay my Greenpeace membership fees for, not wittering on about low energy light bulbs. In the early hours of Monday morning, a group of 50 Greenpeace activists occupied the Kingsnorth power station on the Medway estuary in Kent. One group immobilised the conveyor belts carrying coal into the plant then chained themselves to the machinery. A second group climbed a 200 metre ladder up the chimney, with supplies to hold it for several days and force it off the National Grid.

According to Greenpeace, “Coal is the most polluting of all fossil fuels; it just isn’t fit for purpose in the 21st century. No new coal fired power station has been built in the UK in over 30 years but now Gordon Brown may be giving the green light to a new coal rush.

“In December last year, E.ON applied to build a new coal plant that would emit as much carbon dioxide as the world’s 24 lowest emitting countries combined. Worse, it could keep pumping out emissions for another 50 years. And it will only be 45 per cent efficient, in an age when power stations can reach 95 per cent efficiency. E.ON, the German group behind the plan for the new coal plant, is Britain’s single biggest greenhouse gas polluter.

“Brown’s repeatedly been asked to veto the plans; he’s refused. In fact, his government has convened a coal forum to bring forward ways of strengthening the industry, and working to ensure that the UK has the right framework to secure the long-term future of coal-fired generation.”

It’s worth noting that E.ON is planning to implement one of the first large scale community heating schemes in the UK, with the potential for tens of thousands of Kent homes to be heated by excess steam from its proposed cleaner coal development at Kingsnorth. E.ON press release

It’s also interesting that Greenpeace aren’t against coal as such, but the inefficiencies of coal-powered generation. They don’t mean the conventional idea of inefficiency, where energy is ‘lost’ along the generation chain, but something called ‘carbon intensity’, the amount of usable energy associated with a certain level of CO2 emissions.

“The point is really, the overall efficiency of the plant: just how much energy (heat+electricity) do you get out of it for the CO2 emissions. There’s a strong case for setting a bar, a minimum carbon intensity standard, below which any new fossil fuel plant would be ruled out. A sensible place to put this might be at the same level as a good quality gas-fuelled CHP plant; any plant with more CO2 emissions per unit of useful energy produced than this would be ruled out. A CHP plant running purely on coal certainly wouldn’t meet this standard. And one the size of Kingsnorth and only supplying 100,000 homes would be way, way off. But a state of the art CHP plant, like those in Denmark, running on a mixture of fuels that included some coal along with a significant amount of sustainable biofuels might well meet the standard.

“So, basically: We support super-efficient, multi-fuel CHP as the most efficient, flexible form of generating energy with the most scope for getting even cleaner in the future (by increasing the amount of cleaner fuels it uses as they become available). We certainly wouldn’t support a CHP plant run purely on coal as the emissions would still be much too high. But, depending on the overall efficiency, we might accept that coal could be used as a part of the mix going into a multi-fuel CHP plant.”

While Greenpeace demonstrates a disappointingly high level of pragmatism and willingness to compromise, E.ON maintain that despite the protestors’ efforts the plant is still operational. BBC News

For updates and opinions , go to Bex’s Greenpeace blog.

Thousands of badgers will be gassed or snared if the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) gets its way. Until the 1980′s, gassing of badger setts was routinely employed as a means of controlling the spread of bovine tuberculosis (TB). British farmers and successive UK governments have long believed that TB was spread by badgers and infecting the national dairy herd. Badgers are protected in the UK by the Protection of Badgers Act 1992. They may not be killed, nor their setts interfered with, except on license from the government, the only exception being for TB control.

On June 18th, the Independent Scientific Group on Cattle TB (ISG) published its Final Report, Bovine TB: The Scientific Evidence, after nearly ten years work. In a press release, the ISG stated:

“… no practicable method of badger culling can reduce the incidence of cattle TB to any meaningful extent, and several culling approaches may make matters worse. The ISG also conclude that rigidly applied control measures targeted at cattle can reverse the rising incidence of disease, and halt its geographical spread”.

Despite compelling scientific evidence that badger culling is useless and in some scenarios worse than useless, and we’d be better off controlling TB through the cattle herds, the farming community is still calling for the elimination of badger populations. Although the work of gassing, snaring or shooting would have to be done under licences issued by the government, wildlife groups fear that this will be unpoliceable and result in widespread cruelty and suffering. Gassing is an indiscriminate killing method that affects many other wildlife species.

The Black and White Campaign website has more details on the issues. Please sign their online petition.

There’s been a lot of disagreement about the Live Earth project, its motivation and usefulness. There’s always room for a bit more.

Off-Grid journalist Brendan Montague tells the tale of how British environmentalists who first conceived the idea of a climate change concert were forced into the margins and their attempts to reduce carbon emissions replaced with a series of hopeless gimmicks.
They claim Live Earth became a huge PR-driven machine with multi-national companies who have disputable green credentials – like Smart cars, Pepsi and Philips – jumping on the green bandwagon. With Al Gore, eager to maintain the momentum of his ‘Inconvenient Truth’ vehicle, also clambering on board, the project became “a monster with the organizers handing over £1million just to off-set the carbon being generated by 100 acts flying to seven cities”.

“The Twisted Path To Live Earth”