Al Gore has just sent out this email:

“A few hours from now I will step on stage in Detroit, Michigan to announce my support for Senator Barack Obama. From now through Election Day, I intend to do whatever I can to make sure he is elected President of the United States.

Over the next four years, we are going to face many difficult challenges — including bringing our troops home from Iraq, fixing our economy, and solving the climate crisis. Barack Obama is clearly the candidate best able to solve these problems and bring change to America.

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Top British climate scientist Professor James Lovelock FRS has warned that over 6 billion people will die this century due to unaddressed climate change. Already 16 million people die avoidably in the world each year due to deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease (see: “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007). It is already clear from declining agricultural production due to drought and massive storm surge disasters in India, Bangladesh, Burma and the US that global warming is already impacting on global avoidable mortality.

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Nidhi Jamwa from the Centre for Science and Environment India asks in the organisations journal Down to Earth “why green projects in India are hot favourite of international NGOs?”

Nidhi Jamwa focuses on a recently started green Sierra Club initiative in India that will try “to explore other ways of creating a robust dialogue on developing a green economy” and to “network, collaborate and share information”:

“There it goes again. It is always India and China that are the two emerging villains of climate change. The developed world has built their infrastructure and created wealth, based on technologies that are high on carbon emissions. Even now, it refuses to deliver on its promise to bring down carbon emissions. Yet goes about patronising the developing world on the need for green economy.

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The Caribbean monk seal has gone “the way of the dodo” and been officially listed as extinct by the US Government. The Caribbean monk seal is, so far, the only seal species to go extinct due to human causes.

“Humans left the Caribbean monk seal population unsustainable after overhunting them, Unfortunately, this led to their demise and labels the species as the only seal to go extinct from human causes.”

The last time anyone sighted the Caribbean monk seal was in 1952, over 50 years ago, at Seranilla Bank, between Jamaica and the Yucatan Peninsula. In 1967 the USA listed the species as endangered due to human activities.

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Imagine for a second that oil prices in the USA today were at the same levels as those in Europe, and have been from the start. And yes. That means gasoline for $8 per gallon.

How would the world look like? Would we have a war in Iraq? Would we have a better climate? Would we have less terrorism? Would the US economy be in a better shape?

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Today the U.S. Department of Interior formally listed the polar bear as a “threatened” species.

Environmental organisations have called for the polar bears to be listed on the “endangered” species list hoping it could lead to actions to combat climate change.

Unfortunately interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne wouldn’t want to label the polar bears as “endangered” but rather as a “threatened” species. That means they’ve successfully downplayed the threat to polar bears from climate change and won’t need to take any serious actions to protect the polar bears from the constantly increasing levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

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Chris Jordan wants to show the “contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics.” Each of his artwork portrays a specific amount of something. For example the above image shows 426000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day.

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China is number one, in greenhouse gas emissions that is. A report from the University of California says that Chinas greenhouse gas emissions have been “underestimated” and that the country probably took the number one position from USA in 2006-2007.

According to the research “unchecked future growth will dwarf any emissions cuts made by rich nations under the Kyoto Protocol.”

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Today it’s Earth Day. You didn’t know? Oh, no need to feel so bad about it.

Earth Day was founded in USA in September 1969. At a conference in Seattle, Washington, the US senator Gaylord Nelson announced that in the spring of next year there would be a nationwide grassroots demonstration for the environment.

Gaylord Nelson wanted the nationwide environmental protests to trigger such massive feedback that the political and national agenda would take environmental issues more seriously. “It was a gamble,” he recalls, “but it worked.”

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Australia is having an “Australia 2020 Summit” in which1,000 chosen delegates will gather in Canberra for 2 days to discuss ideas for a better Australia (http://australia2020.gov.au) . Australians had the opportunity of submitted ideas on 10 topics and these have now been placed on the Web (http://australia2020.gov.au). Topic #3 is Sustainability and Climate Change - population, sustainability, climate change and water.

I did my duty as a citizen of Australia and of Planet Earth and sent them 255 Ideas (see: http://australia2020ideas.blogspot.com/…/) which I then edited back to about 200 in the formal submission (see: http://australia2020ideas.blogspot.com/…/).

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