Well, the International Whaling Commission has come and gone – and life in Anchorage seems to be getting back to normal. It’s a bit weird to be passing by the Captain Cook hotel, and not see any police surrounding it. The area where the Whales Broadcasting Corporation tent and inflatable was situated is just an empty street now.
Yesterday I hopped down to LA for the first day of WINDPOWER 2007, the wind energy industry’s annual conference and trade show. It’s not an event that will make a lot of waves in the media (despite high-profile speakers), but I wanted to provide GO readers with an inside look at how the wind industry sees itself and what that means for the rest of us. However, it’s such a huge event that even one day’s coverage demands multiple posts. I apologize for not getting part one up earlier, but here it is.
EcoGeek’s Ransom Riggs sat next to me at the morning press briefing featuring Sen. Tom Daschle, head of conference sponsor AWEA, Randall Swisher, and other energy big-wigs. Ransom's writeup provides a good overview of conclusions coming out of the briefing and the message of the conference in general, so we asked the EcoGeek if we could feature Ransom’s overview in addition to my thoughts and analysis.
To paraphrase Kermit: It isn’t easy being red, white, and blue. Arriving in London this past week was something of a shock to the system, a jolt of reality that was both delightful and disarming. The town seems to have gone carbon crazy, offering up a display of initiatives from both the public and private sectors that highlighted how far behind the U.S. has fallen. The consciousness about carbon here seems to be sky-high. Within minutes of deplaning at Heathrow on Wednesday, I was greeted by this intriguing headline: “GREEN LABELS FOR SHOPPERS.” Suffice to say, as someone who’s been tracking green consumer and labeling issues for nearly two decades, it caught my eye. The story, in the Evening Standard, turned out to be more than typical British tabloid hyperbole: Everything we buy could have “carbon footprint” labels to tell us how green the product is under a government plan unveiled today. Just as food carries warnings on salt, sugar, and fat, the new labels would carry a sign or figure to alert shoppers to the CO2 emissions used. The label could be based on a “traffic light” system that would show red for highly wasteful products and green for… (more)
(Posted by Joel Makower in Climate Change at 8:15 AM)
Editor's note: Yesterday, we discovered that both Green Options and EcoGeek have representatives visiting WindPower 2007, the American Wind Energy Association's annual convention and trade show. In order to give readers of both sites a wide range of coverage, we decided to join efforts and share our posts. This first one comes from EcoGeek writer Ransom Riggs, and was published earlier today.
Day one of the Windpower 2007 conference has come to an end, and having just rubbed elbows with something like 6,000 attendees, 400-plus exhibitors and national legislators and policymakers from around the country, I thought I'd try to make sense of it all. The confab was put on by the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), and heavily attended by many of folk who belong to it: wind energy producers, manufacturers who produce things like wind turbines, poles, and transmission lines and wind outreach and education organizations. The conference features tons of panels, discussions and presentations, but much of the talk at this year's Windpower focused on just a few issues:
Some 700 communities in Mali have installed biodiesel generators powered by oil from the hardy Jatropha curcas plant to meet their energy needs, according to Reuters. The Malian government is promoting cultivation of the inedible oilseed bush, commonly used as a hedge or medicinal plant, to provide electricity for lighting homes, running water pumps and grain mills, and other critical uses. Mali hopes to eventually power all of the country’s 12,000 villages with affordable, renewable energy sources. The landlocked West African nation, at the southern edge of the Sahara desert, is seeking to boost the standard of living of its 80-percent-rural population and to reduce migration from impoverished rural areas. “People have to have light, to have cool air, to be able to store vaccines, even to watch national television,” Aboubacar Samake, head of the jatropha program at the government-funded National Centre for Solar and Renewable Energy, told Reuters. “As things stand, a snake can bite someone in a village and they have to go to [the capital] Bamako to get a vaccine.” Energy self-sufficiency is another goal of the program. Private international companies have offered to develop the jatropha industry in Mali, but were told the biofuel would not… (more)
(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Energy at 7:42 AM)
by Adrian Muller Most of us perform a lot Web searches. In fact, American internet users alone pose about 4 billion queries per month, which generate most of the revenues in Internet advertising. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, in 2006 alone, the industry earned $16.9 billion. Melbourne-based Ripple has recently launched and Internet search engine that leverages the market for Internet advertising to make fighting poverty as easy as searching the Web. Users earn money for one of the four charitable causes simply by conducting their daily searches from the Ripple page (powered by Google) or by clicking on a ‘Give Panel’ located in the Ripple homepage. In the first case, a portion of any revenue earned by Google from the search is directed to Ripple, which passes 100% of this amount directly on to one of the four charities they have selected to help fight global poverty. In the second case, people can add between one and five cents to a cause just by visiting the website and viewing an advertiser’s message (Wishlist.com, AMP, Microsoft and Western Union so far). Right now the beneficiaries include the Oxfam Foundation, Oaktree Australia, WaterAid and the Grameen Foundation. All… (more)
(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Philanthropy at 7:36 AM)
Last Thursday and Friday, I was on the road again. This time, my travels took me to Bentonville, Arkansas… yep, the home of Wal-Mart. The company invited me down for its annual shareholders' meeting and the media events preceding it. Over the next few days, I'll devote a few posts to what I saw, and what I thought.
Thursday's media event was jam-packed with activities, starting with a tour of Bentonville's Sam's Club. Opened in September 2006, this store was a far cry from the one I remember going to with my parents years ago: as opposed to looking and feeling like a warehouse (which it basically was), the Bentonville store was bright and inviting.
Zeray Alemseged is an Ethiopian paleontologist who claims responsibility for an amazing discovery: the world’s oldest child skeleton. In northeastern Ethiopia, he’s discovered a skeleton of a three year old girl which is 3.3 million years old. The skeleton, called Selam, is a member of the species Australopithicus. The fossil he discovered comes from an enormously remote part of the country – driving from Addis Ababa, it took 27 hours to drive the first 400km, and four hours to do the last few kilometers. It’s an area rich in history – stone tools dating from 2.6 million years ago, flutes from 35,0000 years ago, and gorgeous beads from 75,000 years ago. When he arrived at the dig site, he was the first human to drive a car to the spot. Photos show us an incredibly remote, harsh desert – he reminds us that this land had very different carrying capacity in the past: “It is an extinct game part, where our ancestors weren’t especially successful” in hunting large mammals like elephants. Selam’s skeleton was encased in a sandstone block, because she was buried by the river. Alemseged speaks about the sense of wonder and responsibility of holding this block in… (more)
(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Pulling Back the Curtain at 7:34 AM)
Historian Kenneth Vickery is a pinch-speaker today, filling in for George Ayittey. It’s awfully hard to fill Ayittey’s shoes, but Ayittey has been well represented by early speakers, and Vickery has a useful set of stories to tell – historical stories from the continent from the past millennium. He starts with his own story – a young graduate student, hitchhiking from Nairobi to Arusha, and collecting stories from the man kind enough to pick him up and the people he encountered on the trip. He found “people with stories, intertwined with the stories of their ancestors,” and was convinced that there was a life’ss work in collecting these stories. He tells us three historical stories, points of inflection that could have radically changed the course of events had they played out differently, offering a story from Mark Twain, that “history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” He starts with the encounter between kingdoms in the early 16th century – the Portuguese, and the Kingdom of the Kongo, based in what is now northern Angola. The Kongo Kingdom is a “classic late iron age” society – it had a surplus production of food, organized pottery and textile industries, copper… (more)
(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Business at 7:31 AM)
Image source: Nature.comEditor's note: This week, Shirley and Jimmy take on the subject of radical environmentalism. Are acts of vandalism, break-ins and civil disobedience always wrong, or do they sometimes serve a greater purpose?
Shirley: Fake blood tossed onto socialites wearing fur coats. Late-night liberation of laboratory animals. Wholesale destruction of Hummers and gas-guzzlers in California parking lots. The lists of exploits by some radical animal-rights and extreme environmental groups reads more like rap sheets than a honorable curriculum vitae. For reasonable stewards of the Earth, breaking and entry, theft, destruction of physical property and other mayhem serve no purpose.
Or do they? I don't condone violence or criminal acts as a means of conveying a message, however well-intended the message might be. But I have to admit that, sometimes — just sometimes — a crazy or even slightly illegal (as if there is such a thing in the eyes of the law) act by a group like, say, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) brings to light a practice that's been kept in the dark largely because it's unpleasant, harmful or cruel. The act of sneaking hidden cameras into poultry processing plants, for example, opened a lot of people's eyes to just how unnecessarily inhumane the methods of turning chickens into wings and nuggets actually are. So is there an argument to be made that maybe, just maybe, the occasional whack attack by radical vegans or Luddites is a justifiable act of civil disobedience? I'd have to say, cautiously, yes.