As a person and consumer you have the power to do something about climate change. Never forget or think otherwise. Sure you may wonder how much you’ll actually help by replacing your CFLs, recycling etc but in the end all small things path up to something bigger and more meaningful, especially when many join in.

This is part one of a series of posts explaining and giving advice on what you can do to combat climate change from your home, in the store, when you travel and on your spare time. All the things listed are easy to do, some things will take a little longer, but most of them will help save you money (besides all the positive effects on our earth).

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How in earths name did they succeed with this one!?

Today Greenpeace activists made a visit to the World Energy Congress in Rome, Italy, to protest about the plans to continue allowing CO2 emissions to increase until year 2030 and the nuclear power expansion ideas. Two activists unfurled a five by seven metre banner reading “Stop Nuclear Madness – Energy Revolution Now” during the actual opening ceremony.

Update: Video and more after the jump.

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It’s time for a new week and a brand new “Question of the Week”. But first, let’s see how you voted on last weeks question “Would you vote for Al Gore in the (USA) presidential election 2008?“:

• Yes (33%)
• I don’t know? (33%)
• Yes – If I were a US citizen I would. (22%)
• No – Even If I were a US citizen I wouldn’t. (11%)
• No (0%)

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You can now see your own avatar next to your comments here on Green Blog. You can see an example here.

If you have a MyBlogLog or Gravatar account and you have filled in the correct information in the comment form your avatar will show up next to your comment name with a link back to your website and account. Isn’t that nifty or what!?

Update: If you want to use this feature on your own WordPress blog you will need to install the MyAvatars plugin.

We at Green Blog love small green and personal projects and movements (maybe because this blog is one of those?). That’s why we would like to tell you shortly about a guy named Jim and his project called DinkyCard.

Jim wants with his site DinkyCard “create a new, smaller international standard for the size of a business card to save some trees”.

It’s a good idea and if I personally would need a business card someday (in a distant future far away) I would definitely use 2′x1.75′ sized cards.

http://www.dinkycard.org

The future is looking grimmer as each day go by and each new report is released about the state of our fragile earth. Recently we could read that 6 billion people will perish by the end of the century and that we might already have passed the point of no return.

And now the International Energy Agency (IEA) says in a report that the worlds energy needs will increase with 50% in just 20 years. The enormous economic growth countries such as China and India are mainly responsible for this increase. The majority of the energy sources built in the coming 20 years will be based on fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas. You can read a summary of the report here.

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The demand for organic pig meat in Sweden is growing dramatically. A recent study shows that the sale of organic pig meat has increased with up to 78 % compared to last year. In Sweden today there are about 20 farmers who deliver organic pig meat, but that is far from enough to satisfy the consumers.

Margareta Thorgren, information director at Scan (one of the biggest meat producers in Sweden) says that “all organic meat produced in Sweden is being consumed” and states that “we could sell much more”. That is why Scan has requested that other farmers who deliver non-organic pig meat should adjust and start delivering EU-organic pigs.

And here lies the catch.

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Here comes another clever environment ad. This one is from the national power company Eskom in South Africa.

Related: Clever ad on bridge in Amsterdam

via WattWatt

Compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) are low energy efficient light bulbs that you probably already use in every lamp in your home. At least I hope you do, if not shame on you.

As we all also know CFLs have one bad side. They contain small amounts of mercury. These small amounts are not dangerous for you, but in vast amounts they are. That’s why it’s sad that there isn’t a global or major plan to recycle the broken and old CFLs.

But maybe that is starting to change? IKEA recently announced that they will, in USA, offer free recycling of any CFL that walks through its door, even if the CFL hasn’t been bought in one of the many IKEA stores.

It’s a great initiative from IKEA that hopefully other companies around the world will follow.

Image credit: Macinate. Image licensed under a
Creative-Commons license.

A new green political movement is growing that see the climate crisis as a revolutionary possibility to create a new world, a new world based on Eco-socialism.

In September 2001 a meeting regarding socialism and ecology was held outside of Paris in France. Two of the participants, Joel Kovel and Michael Lowy wrote an ecosocialistic manifesto.

The manifesto called for like-minded to getting together started to take form the 7-8th October when about 60 participants from around the world created the Ecosocialist International Network.

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