Today the government in UK unveiled plans to build around 7000 wind turbines off the coast of Britain. According to John Hutton, the Secretary of State for Business, these wind turbines would generate enough electricity for every home in the UK by year 2020.

The new wind farms would not just create 33 gigawatts of clean electricity it would also create jobs and boost the economy by making the UK’s wind industry two times the size of any other countries.

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Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo, Norway:

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Honorable members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen.

I have a purpose here today. It is a purpose I have tried to serve for many years. I have prayed that God would show me a way to accomplish it.

Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be. One hundred and nineteen years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years before his death. Wrongly believing the inventor had just died, a newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his life’s work, unfairly labeling him “The Merchant of Death” because of his invention – dynamite. Shaken by this condemnation, the inventor made a fateful choice to serve the cause of peace.

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This past Saturday it was Climate Walks! Climate Walks is a global demonstration day for the climate. It is being held in thousands of cities in nearly 100 different countries on the same day.

In Berlin, Germany, around 1500-2000 people demonstrated. In London over 10 000 people joined up. In Belgium around 3500 people demonstrated around the EU headquarter. In Sweden demonstrations were held in all major cities. In Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, around 1000-1200 people demonstrated, in the rain and cold, against the inaction against climate change.

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CoolEarth Solar have patented a design for inflatable solar collectors that, according to the company, are about 400 times cheaper than the more expensive and ordinary polished aluminium mirrors. If their statistics turns out to be correct this will be a huge economic breakthrough for solar power.

Their design is 400x cheaper than polished aluminum mirrors, will withstand 130 mph winds, lasts a year, repairs with tape, takes 15 minutes to change out, costs $2 per balloon, or 18 cents per watt, compared to $5 per watt for conventional installations, and has a minimal effect on the ground underneath the array!

Learn more about these inflatable solar panels by watching the video after the jump. (more…)

The Danish design agency Saatchi & Saatchi has made this pretty simple and straightforward environment ad:

To make people realize that saving the planet starts with them saving paper, we took a standard paper dispenser and made a simple modification with green foil and the silhouette of South America. This allowed us to prove that the survival of the forest is directly connected to what people consume.

You can see a larger version of the ad here. You can also check out this clever ad on a bridge in Amsterdam.

Yesterday the Swedish political party Christian Democrats made a public announcement that they were supporting the idea of higher gasoline prices as a way to combat climate change.

If you follow Swedish politics (like I am sure most of you here do, right?) you would know that this new decision from the Christian Democrats breaks their old ballot promise to cut (!) gas prices. Anders Wijkman (ChrDem) says this decision is based on the fact that they have become more aware of the climate threat.

This means that now all political parties in Sweden that are represented in the Riksdag believe that higher gasoline prices are necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Swedish transportation section is currently one of the biggest CO2 emitters and counts for about 20% of all CO2 emissions yearly in Sweden.

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Interested in the currently ongoing climate conference in Bali? Sure you are, and luckily you don’t need to travel to Bali to get firsthand information about what is happening at the meeting. Just watch UN’s live webcast over at http://www.un.org/webcast/unfccc

Please note that you need RealPlayer to be able to see the webcast. If you don’t have RealPlayer you can download it for free here.

Image credit: David Steven. Image licensed under a
Creative-Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works license.

That has been the question these past days and here are the results:

• No (78%)
• Yes (11%)
• I don’t know really… (11%)

The large majority of the voters think their elected officials don’t do enough to combat climate change. Only about 11% thought they did enough, just as many had no idea really.

The result of the poll are pretty obvious if you look at what little is being done to slow down the sources and effects of climate change. But one has to wonder what the majority of the “no” voters do to push for more actions from their governments. What especially do you do to make your voice heard on the political level? Please share your thoughts, ideas and experiences with us.

The new question is related to the current ongoing UN climate conference on Bali: Do you think the Bali Climate Conference will be a success?

Tomorrow UN’s climate meeting starts on Bali in Indonesia. During the eleven days the meeting is held the world’s leaders will try to agree on how to properly combat climate change. This is the only chance we got to unite globally against climate change and its doomsday effects, so we (they) better not screw it up. But you shouldn’t have to high hopes on the results as there are many strong and greedy powers that will try to diminish the meeting and the end result.

But hopefully reason and science will prevail. Here are five reasons why you should be a little optimistic about the Bali meeting:

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Nicholas Stern, a British economist and academic who is most known for the Stern Review, said during a public lecture in Manchester that climate change is the greatest market failure that the world has seen.

The problem of climate change involves a fundamental failure of markets: those who damage others by emitting greenhouse gases generally do not pay.

Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen. The evidence on the seriousness of the risks from inaction or delayed action is now overwhelming. We risk damages on a scale larger than the two world wars of the last century. The problem is global and the response must be a collaboration on a global scale.

Via the Guardian