Author: valeriu

Greenpeace – Making Waves: MEPs show themselves to be a bit dim

The numbers are in and sadly they weren’t quite what we were hoping for. Despite the huge amount of emails you sent to MEPs, asking them to support a ban on inefficient light bulbs across the EU (and thank you for that!), not enough signed up to adopt the declaration.

We needed 400 MEPs across Europe to put their names down to this bright idea to take it forward. Yet despite a frantic round of last-minute phone calls from our European campaigners to their MEPs, we only saw 197 signatures before the deadline.

It doesn’t mean this is the end of the road – far from it. We’ll still be lobbying the EU to push for energy efficiency legislation and working on national governments to pull their fingers out. And if you’ve joined the 7steps programme, you’ll already know what else you can do for the energy [r]evolution. If you haven’t, are you waiting for hell to freeze over? No, wait, that doesn’t quite work…

SkyTrust, Greensulate, and the Brevity of a Decade

Article PhotoA Decade of Global Warming As a general principle, it seems that the older we are, the more difficulty we have wrapping our brains around the truly alarming timetable accelerations we’re now being given by experts in everything from climate change to species loss to poverty alleviation. To put it simply, things are getting worse more quickly than we thought, and much more quickly than we’re making things better. Prospects of planetary collapse we once thought native to the next century, or the century after that, are looming as possibilities for the next decade or two. Things are spiraling seriously downwards, so we need to change our thinking and move with a speed unseen since World War Two. Our understanding of climate change, in particular, has morphed quickly this year. We now understand that our deadline to undertake serious steps might best be measured in years, a decade at best, and that action needs to be dramatic and sustained. But our popular culture has not, to put it mildly, caught up to this new reality. That’s why this MTV video is powerful and welcome, driving home artistically the magnitude of the problem and the brevity of a decade (3,650 days… (more)

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Media at 10:31 PM)

The Future of Carbon-Free Transport: Groningen, Netherlands

Article Photoby Warren Karlenzig The future of carbon-free transport lives strong in Groningen. This Dutch city of 185,000 proves that bicycle transportation can reign supreme: people there make about 150,000 trips by bicycle every day. Bicycles and pedestrians entirely rule the medieval-era city hub, cruising along on car-free dedicated pathways and short cuts with no traffic signals in some instances. But people also commute on bikes in large numbers from suburban housing spread out around the city to downtown jobs, via a ring-and-spoke network of paths. Overall, 37 percent of area commutes are made on bikes. Boasting an official town bicycle planner, Groningen has created an infrastructure it refers to “continuous and integral,” which includes massive surface and underground bicycle parking facilities, dedicated bike paths, and two-way bike lanes even on one-way auto streets. Since the early 1980s, 30 city bicycle parking facilities have been developed, including one underground facility at the central train station that sells bikes, repairs bikes and offers valet and secure parking for more than 4,000 bikes. Parking is financed through a low-cost annual membership program that costs $50 a year, while bike valet positions create significant numbers of jobs at the public parking facilities and also… (more)

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Transportation at 9:31 PM)