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Jasper, Greenpeace South East Asia’s climate and energy campaigner, took time out from a coal industry conference in Bali to go coral diving.

Waking up early is always a pain, however, the prospect of going snorkelling in one of Bali’s best dive destinations is more than enough reason for me to drag myself out of bed at 5:00 a.m. Our destination is Menjangan Island, part of the Bali Barat National Park and Marine Reserve. Also known as ‘Deer Island’, it is home to one of Bali’s most popular scuba diving spots. Our mission is to bear witness to the amazing beauty of its coral reefs, which are threatened by massive bleaching due to sea temperature rise.

Following a bone-shaking 3-hour ride we arrive at the beach resort to catch the boat to Menjangan Island. With us is Professor Iyingketut Sudiarta of Warmadewa University in Denpasar, a marine biologist who has been studying Menjangan Island’s coral reefs. Our party boards two glass-bottomed boats, which afford us excellent, otherworldly views of the underwater world. We first head north east to check the area just outside the marine reserve. Our mood soon changes to one of depression and desolation as we find evidence of the appalling impacts this coral reef ecosystem has suffered. Professor Sudiarta tells us that reefs in the marine reserve suffered massive coral bleaching from the record high sea temperatures of the 1998 El Nino which hit 75-100% of the coral cover.

Continue reading Coral and Coal…

Get the popcorn folks, it’s the computer industry’s heavyweight championship fight of the century.

Michael Dell led with an uppercut to the chin when he announced Dell’s free worldwide recycling policy and challenged the industry to match it. Steve jobs staggered back to the ropes, dazed, then came back with a surprise left when he declared a phase out of the worst toxic chemicals in the Apple product line before Dell’s deadline, and a new commitment to eco-transparency. Yesterday, Dell shook it off and sucker-punched Jobs when he laid down his plans to become the greenest computer company in the world.

This is the kind of prize fight we love.

Continue reading Dell vs Apple: Eco-Rumble in the Electronic Jungle…

Our Green Bubble
SoundLlands on Google Earth
Chinese Smartmobbers use Mobile Phones to Protest Chemical Factory
It’s Not Just About Food Miles
Lab-Grown Meat for Ethical Carnivores

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(Posted by David Zaks in News and Views at 10:31 PM)

Posted by Dave (in Anchorage, Alaska)

© Dave Walsh

Alas no, the Japanese whaling fleet’s factory ship, the Nisshin Maru is not up for sale. This vessel, the Whale 2, was spotted by Greenpeace Japan’s whale campaigner, Junichi, Dutch video-guru Maarten and I in Homer, Alaska, at the weekend. We couldn’t help but notice that it had “RESEARCH” plastered all over it, along with a for sale sign. And it’s registered in Valdez, of course – where one of the worst environmental disasters ever occurred, when the tanker Exxon Valdez hit a reef, spilling 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound.

Continue reading Nisshin Maru up for sale? If only!…

Posted by Dave (in Anchorage, Alaska)

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.

Continue reading Anchorage Police and the Blue Whale…

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)