Since the Big If pledge launched in March, when Age of Stupid actor Pete Postletwaite promised the UK Energy and Climate Change minister Ed Miliband that he would return his OBE if the government gave the go-ahead for a new coal power station Kingsnorth, thousands of people have joined him in making pledges of their own.

Greenpeace UK has been a core member of the Big If coalition from the start, together with a wide range of other organisations including the RSPB, World Development Movement, Oxfam and the Women’s Institute. Because if Kingsnorth and the other 10 plants planned to follow it get built, then we’ll have next to no chance of meeting our CO2 reduction targets and reining in runaway climate change.

The first major coalition event was the Mili-band – a symbolic surrounding of the Kingsnorth site in July, and others are planned in the near future. Each organisation has asked its supporters to pledge what they are prepared to do if Ed Miliband does give the go-ahead to new coal. The actual pledges vary depending on the nature of the organisation.

Greenpeace have already signed up nearly 6,000 people, who’ve variously agreed to either:

• vote at the next election for political candidates who oppose new coal;
• join a protest at the Department of Energy and Climate Change;
• take non-violent direct action to prevent the new plant being built;

…or make some other useful protest of their own devising.

From Greenpeace UK.

While around 75% of the general public in the UK and US say climate change is an important issue it is not seen as an immediate threat.

Dr Tom Crompton of WWF, who have produced a number of reports over the past few years. said there needs to be a shift away from short-term campaigning.

“The environmental movement has for too long focused on policy response, without considering the social and psychological barriers.” Dr Tom Crompton, WWF

A recent report published by the American Psychological Association suggests that anxiety and helplessness are the biggest barriers to individuals taking action against climate change.

Janet Swim, APA report chair, said it will help us to “understand how to get people to act” by looking at the reasons for inaction.

The report identified key barriers, including;

Uncertainty

Research has shown that uncertainty over climate change reduces the frequency of “green” behaviour.

Mistrust

Evidence shows that most people don’t believe the risk messages of scientists or government officials.

Social Comparison

People routinely compare their actions with those of others and derive subjective and descriptive norms from their observations about what is the “proper” course of action.

Undervaluing Risks

A study of more than 3,000 people in 18 countries showed that many people believe environmental conditions will worsen in 25 years. While this may be true, this thinking could lead people to believe that changes can be made later.

Lack of Control

People believe their actions would be too small to make a difference and choose to do nothing.

Perceived Behavioural Control

Because climate change is a global problem, many individuals understandably believe that they can do nothing about it.

Habit

Ingrained behaviours are extremely resistant to permanent change while others change slowly.

Are we like frogs placed in cold water, not truly perceiving the danger as the water heats and we are cooked to death? Divorced from a connection to nature, as many people are, it is more difficult to perceive the longer term. Will this research allow us to break through the barriers so we can achieve a true shift towards eco-conciousness?

From The Ecologist

Across the Amazon basin, river dwellers are adding new floors to their stilt houses, trying to stay above rising floodwaters that have killed 44 people and left 376,000 homeless.

Flooding is common in the world’s largest remaining tropical wilderness, but this year the waters rose higher and stayed longer than they have in decades, leaving fruit trees entirely submerged. Only four years ago, the same communities suffered an unprecedented drought that ruined crops and left mounds of river fish flapping and rotting in the mud.

“Something is telling us to us to be more careful with the planet. Changes are happening around the world, and we’re seeing them as well in Brazil.” President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva

Experts suspect global warming may be driving wild climate swings that appear to be punishing the Amazon with increasing frequency. “It’s the $1 million dollar question,” says Carlos Nobre, a climatologist with Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research.

While a definitive answer will take years of careful study, climatologists say the world should expect more extreme weather in the years ahead. Already, what happens in the Amazon could be affecting rainfall elsewhere, from Brazil’s agricultural heartland to the US grainbelt, as rising ocean temperatures and rain forest destruction cause shifts in global climate patterns.

More extreme climate

“It’s important to note that it’s likely that these types of record-breaking climate events will become more and more frequent in the near future,” Nobre said. “So we all have to brace for more extreme climate in the near future: It’s not for the next generation.”

The immediate cause of the unusually heavy rains across northern Brazil is an Atlantic Ocean weather system that usually moves on in March, but stayed put until May this year.

Almost simultaneously, southern Brazilian states far from the Amazon have suffered from an extended drought, caused by La Nina – a periodic cooling of waters in the Pacific Ocean. And La Nina alternates with El Nino, a heating up of Pacific waters that is blamed for catastrophic forest fires plaguing the Amazon in recent years.

Brazil’s government approved $440 million in emergency funding in response to the northern floods and southern drought.

From MSNBC/AP

Not every barrel of oil has the same carbon footprint – some extraction processes radically increase the amount of greenhouse gases which are released.

Greenpeace have been collaborating on research to identify the worst offenders, and the report (released to coincide with the company’s AGM) singles out Shell as the most carbon intensive oil company in the world, based on its total resources.

Shell tops the list for three reasons:

• Its reliance on Nigerian crude oil, which is associated with huge levels of wasteful gas flaring
• Its investments in highly energy intensive liquefied natural gas
• Its massive gamble on Canada’s oil-bearing tar sands, for which the extraction process is so energy intensive that it produces up to five times more greenhouse gases than conventional oil

The bad news for Shell shareholders is that 30% of its total resources are now in tar sands. As the US moves to introduce carbon control legislation, and the world looks towards December’s Copenhagen summit for action to limit climate change, Shell is fighting a determined rearguard action – taking a lead in industry lobbying against similar measures being proposed by the Eurpean Union.

Investors are voicing their concerns

To be fair, tar sands are not just a problem for Shell. Investors around the world are voicing their concerns over tar sands investment.

30% of ConocoPhillips shareholders recently voted for a resolution demanding an assessment of the environmental impact of the company’s tar sands projects, and at the AGM of Norway’s Statoil’s annual meeting, significant support is expected for a motion calling for the company to end its tar sands investment altogether.

Shell’s tar sands liability and carbon exposure is currently greater than any other company, making a mockery of its claims to be leader on ‘responsible energy’.

It urgently needs to rethink its position. A strategy based on tar sands won’t just damage the climate, but will also increase risks to the company’s future and threaten the value of shareholders’ investments.

Download the report: Irresponsible Energy.

From Greenpeace UK

Caroline Lucas should be the luckiest woman in politics. More than 20 years ago she joined a minor, leftfield party: today its defining issue has become the biggest political issue in the world. Bingo! Only politics, of course, is not that simple.

As Winston Churchill famously pointed out, democracy has been described as “the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried”, and if you really want to see what he meant, spend an hour with the leader of the Green party.

European elections

Less than three weeks away from the European elections, the dilemmas facing Lucas are daunting. If she campaigns on climate change alone, she demotes her party to the status of a single-issue outfit. However, if she broadens its platform with a comprehensive policy package, she risks exiling it to the unelectably leftwing wilderness.

If the Greens ditch some of their policies in the interests of electability, they sacrifice their unique claim to integrity, and begin to look just like every other party. But their integrity is so precious to them that they have wasted the last 20 years fiddling over whether they can compromise their principles by putting on a suit and electing a single leader, while the planet has been burning.

They believe that only government action can save the planet now, so they are pinning all their hopes on Lucas taking the party’s one winnable Westminster seat, Brighton Pavilion, at the next general election. But even if she wins, does the party have enough time left to build a parliamentary movement? Probably not.

Climate change matters

Our electoral system makes a Green government all but unimaginable, and their core issue – climate change – is a nightmare to campaign on. No party has ever won by telling the country it can no longer enjoy the life it has taken for granted, and if Lucas tells voters the truth – that beating climate change means more than recycling plastic bags – she risks making her message disastrously unpopular.

What Lucas says about the environment must be pitched at voters who know that climate change matters, but still hope it can be tackled with some minor lifestyle adjustments. Her manifesto pledges a million new jobs in the green industries, in a more localised, low-carbon economy.

From The Guardian

Full interview with Caroline Lucas
Find out more about the Green Party

It’s about much more than unplugging your phone-charger! In a thought-provoking video, Cambridge University physicist, David Mackay, makes a passionate and personal analysis of the energy crisis.

The choices are clear, if we’re to wean ourselves off our addiction to fossil fuel, and avoid further – and potentially catastrophic – climate change, we need to reduce our energy consumption significantly (by as much as 90%).

We simply cannot generate enough electricity to feed our habit – it’s just not sustainable. No amount of so-called green or eco-friendly gadgets will make a difference. We need to re-evaluate what we use and how much of it we really need.

Renewable energy is, of course, essential to meeting our future energy needs but we’d have to cover half the country with wind turbines to produce enough electricity for our current demands.

The alternative is to build more nuclear power plants – hundreds more, in the UK alone – with all the associated risks that go with it. That’s a scary prospect!

It’s not a matter of IF, but WHEN. Either we start reducing our energy consumption today or our children and grandchildren will pay the price for our excesses. It’s not rocket science, it’s common sense.

David Mackay’s book, Sustainable energy – without the hot air (which might be more inclined to rocket science!), is available FREE online or in your local book store (where you’ll have to pay, of course) and local library.

Global warming is likely to overshoot a 2C (3.6F) rise, which is seen by the EU and many developing nations as a trigger for dangerous climate change, a poll of scientists showed on Tuesday.

Nine of the 11 experts, who were among authors of the final summary by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), also said the evidence that human activity is to blame for climate change had grown stronger in the past two years.

Giving personal views of recent research, most projected on average a faster melt of summer ice in the Arctic and a quicker rise in sea levels than estimated in the 2007 report, the most authoritative overview to date drawing on work by 2,500 experts.

“A lot of the impacts we’re seeing are running ahead of our expectations” William Hare, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

Ten of 11 experts said it was at best “unlikely” that the world would manage to limit warming to a 2C (3.6F) rise above pre-industrial levels.

Avoiding the worst

The European Union, many developing nations and environmental groups say 2C above pre-industrial levels is the maximum to avoid the worst of rising sea levels, floods, droughts or heatwaves. Temperatures are already up 0.7C.

“The concentration of long-lived greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is already enough to cause warming of more than 2C above pre-industrial levels, and we are continuing to emit more and more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere” David Karoly, University of Melbourne

Officials from 175 nations are meeting in Bonn, Germany, for 11 days of negotiations lasting until 8th April on a new UN climate treaty due to be agreed in December.

Six of the scientists said world average annual temperatures would set a new record by 2015 – and another four projected that it would happen by 2020 – dismissing views from skeptics that global warming has stopped.

From Reuters

An ice bridge linking the Wilkins Ice Shelf, in Antarctica, has broken. Scientists say the collapse could mean the ice shelf, which is the size of Jamaica, is on the brink of breaking away and provides further evidence of rapid change in the region.

Sited on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, the Wilkins Ice Shelf has been retreating since the 1990s. Researchers regarded the ice bridge as an important barrier, holding the remnant shelf structure in place.

“The fact that it’s retreating and now has lost connection with one of its islands is really a strong indication that the warming on the Antarctic is having an effect on yet another ice shelf.” Professor David Vaughan, British Antarctic Survey

European Space Agency satellite pictures had indicated last week that cracks were starting to appear in the bridge. Newly created icebergs were seen to be floating in the sea on the western side of the peninsula, which juts up from the continent towards South America’s southern tip.

While the break-up of the Wilkins Ice Shelf will have no direct impact on sea level because the ice is floating, it heightens concerns over the impact of climate change on this part of Antarctica.

From BBC News

A last-ditch effort is being made to insert clearer green commitments into the global economic recovery package being discussed at the G20 summit tomorrow.

The move comes amid fears that the G20 summit is in danger of missing a unique opportunity to prevent the world from being locked into irreversible and catastrophic climate change.

Some senior British officials privately believe the framing of the G20 stimulus package to ensure it has a large green element will be as decisive in the battle against climate change as the outcome of the UN talks on climate change in Copenhagen.

“I think it [low-carbon recovery] deserves a higher profile. Everybody seems to be focusing on short-term recovery and getting long-term regulation of the banks right.” Professor Robert Watson, chief scientific adviser for DEFRA

Lord Stern, the government’s former climate change adviser, yesterday tried to increase the pressure on the G20 by arguing that the worst recession since the 1930s gave the world the opportunity to lay the foundations for growth over several decades, based on low-carbon technology and energy efficiency.

He said the argument that the first priority was to deal with the current economic crisis and postpone action on climate change was “wrong and should be confronted”.

Opportunity for ‘green’ recovery

Lord Stern called for the G20 leaders to send out a signal that the “difficult” work of getting the specifics of a deal in place needed to be done. “This is an opportunity to have a green recovery that lays the foundations of growth for the next two to three decades.”

Gordon Brown yesterday promised that a commitment to tackle the environment will be one of the five tests of the communique due to be released following the summit on Thursday, adding “there were long hours of hard negotiations ahead”.

“I haven’t heard anything that suggests the green recovery and climate change are a major part of the [G20] agenda. It would be a missed opportunity while they’re talking about the economy not to talk about how to transform it to low carbon.” Professor Robert Watson, chief scientific adviser for DEFRA

The draft G20 communique leaked at the weekend makes only the smallest reference to climate change, and appears to be vague on the subject of how green the $2trillion (£1.4trillion) stimulus package agreed by world leaders should be.

From The Guardian

Millions of people around the world turned off lights (and other electrical appliances) for one hour on Saturday to show their support for action on climate change.

Earth Hour, a WWF initiative, was supported by individuals as well as businesses, corporations and authorities, with lights going out in homes, public spaces and on world-famous landmarks.

But is it enough? The short answer is no! Turning off the lights for an hour was a protest on a global scale and sent a message to world leaders ahead of the UN Conference in Copenhagen later this year, but we need to do more if we’re serious about having an effect on climate change.

Turning off the lights, in itself, will have little impact on CO₂ emissions as we continue to pump millions of tonnes into the atmosphere each day.

So what else can we do?

We shouldn’t leave it to the politicians, we need to take responsibility for our own actions and act now to reduce our impact on the environment.

We could write a list, 10 pages long, of the things we can all do to make a difference but instead we found a graphic, in the form of a mind-map, you can use as wallpaper on your desktop to remind you of what you can do to help save the planet.

Click on the image (above) for a full-size version which you can save to your computer and put on your desktop (if you decide to print it be sure to use recycled paper and consider the electricity it will use).

You can also check out our list of ‘10 things you can do to help save the planet‘ for some quick and easy tips you can put into practice today! Don’t just leave it at Earth Hour – and don’t leave it to the politicians. Act now!

Tell us what you’re doing

We’d love to hear what you’re doing to reduce your impact on the planet and shrink your carbon footprint. Read what others have said and share your ideas by leaving a comment.