Libby Rosenthal over at the International Herald Tribune’s Business of Green blog worries, just like me, about the lack of green issues being raised in the US primaries.

Having spent the last week in the United States and having watched all the presidential candidates debate, I’m struck by how little talk there is of climate change and what the United States intends to do about it!

The climate threat that faces us today is the important issue that should be among the top things discussed between the different presidential candidates. Cause the climate threat will affect everything from healthcare to immigration and Iraq to education and welfare.

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SLU, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, have started a rather massive campaign against global warming deniers. The message that: “without proper facts anyone can say anything” about climate change and its effects, will be advertised using the site http://ww.koldioxidensvänner.se (roughly translated to “the friends of co2).

The message will be advertised in the largest newspapers in Sweden. They will also fill Stockholm’s (the Swedish capital) subway with print ads (see image example below) and web advertisements on Aftonbladet.se, a large newspaper in Sweden (where you could probably find many global warming deniers).

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A new study by Kenneth Vogel from the University of Nebraska shows that farming switchgrass as biofuel will produce 540% more energy than is required to grow and manufacture it.

This can be compared to 25% for corn ethanol and 93% for soybean ethanol. But one of the more interesting and positive result from the study was that the emissions created by switchgrass would be around 94% lower than the emissions from petrol. That means switchgrass would be almost carbon neutral.

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Did you know that it takes 15 000 litres of water to produce one kilo meat from an animal who is being feed with grains. 150 litres of water is needed to produce one kilo of grains.

Here is a rather old, but good, documentary about Greenpeace’s famous Rainbow Warrior.

The documentary tells the story about the very first Rainbow Warrior who were sunk by the French foreign intelligence agency (DGSE) while docked in Auckland harbour, New Zealand, on 10 July 1985.

Video after the jump. (more…)

The 30 December 2007 the 82 year old Bert Bolin, a Swedish meteorologist who served as the first chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), passed away.

He was one of the people who played a key roll in the launch of UNs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He served as its chairman during 1988 to 1998.

Many people believe he was the single most important person when it comes to our understanding and knowledge about the climate, even more important than Al Gore.

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In our latest web poll here on Green Blog we asked if you thought the Bali Climate Conference would be a success. Here are the results:

A majority of the people said yes. They thought that the climate conference would be a success but that the result probably wouldn’t be enough.

Around 25% of you thought that the conference would be a failure. But on the same time you wished it would turn out to be a success.

13% hadn’t really any idea how the outcome would be. And just as many thought that world leaders would fail once again making the climate conference a total failure.

None of you thought that world leaders would come together and “do the right thing”.

Our new web poll question: Is nuclear energy “green”?

Cast your votes!

Are you a frequent RSS-reader? Yes? No? It doesn’t matter! Now you don’t just have to read to get your weekly dose of green news, blogs and rants. It’s time to start listen. It’s time to discover the green podcasts.

The folks over at iTunes have collected some of the best environment related podcasts from around the web in one nice, free, corner.

You will find green podcasts from the famous Grist and TreeHugger to the Lazy Environmentalist and The Sierra Club.

To be able to subscribe to any of the podcasts you will need to download and install iTunes. It’s free and works on both Windows (XP or Vista) and Mac OS X.

In December last year Italy decided to join Australia and Ireland to ban incandescent light bulbs. The Italian budget committee voted in favour of an incandescent light bulb ban from the Green MP Angello Bonelli. The ban will take place in 2011.

More European countries are planning on following Irelands and Italy’s “bright” decision in a, very, near future.

The European Lamp Companies Federation plans for a incandescent light bulb phase out by year 2019. This just shows that government guidelines and actions do make more difference than what the private sector could accomplish.

Image credit: So It’s Come To This. Image licensed under a
Creative-Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works license.

Do you remember, when Al Gore said he would do everything in his powers to influence the American people and politicians to value the climate issue much higher, placing it among the other top issues that would be heatedly discussed among the president candidates and the, hmm, two(!), political parties?

Well, I am no US political expert. Heck, I am not even an US citizen. But from what I’ve heard and seen so far the discussions and talks about the climate threat have gone pretty much un-noticed.

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