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What A Week It Was: Apocadocuments from
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global warming  ~ contamination  ~ climate impacts  ~ economic myopia  ~ carbon emissions  ~ governmental idiocy  ~ arctic meltdown  ~ smart policy  ~ rising sea level  ~ heavy metals  ~ algal bloom  



ApocaDocuments (3) matching "smart policy" from this week
[see full week] ~ [see all stories tagged "smart policy"]
Fri, Nov 13, 2009
from Telegraph.co.uk:
Threat of climate change should be treated like war say engineers
The Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) said it would be almost impossible for the UK to meet ambitious climate change targets to cut greenhouse gases by 80 per cent by 2050 without drastic action. The only way to reach the target would be to "go to war" against carbon emissions, its report said. This would mean setting up a Department of Climate Security to act like the War Cabinet and co-ordinate action across every other Government department. Unemployed people would be trained in making homes more energy efficient, factories would make solar panels and schools would encourage pupils to adopt more sustainable lifestyles. Money would be pumped into wind turbines, nuclear power stations and solar panels as a matter of urgency. ...


We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight in the factories, we shall fight in our lifestyles. This is our finest hour.

ApocaDoc
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Tue, Nov 10, 2009
from Doc Jim:
From the ApocaDesk
Hundreds packed the IUPUI Campus Center in Indianapolis on Monday afternoon, Nov. 9, to listen to a "professional bummer-outer." Yes, that's what Bill McKibben called himself as he opened his talk.
    It was 20 years ago that McKibben published what is now considered the first general-reader book about climate change, The End of Nature. Yet, 20 years later, we are still in the pickle of a lifetime, on the brink of climate collapse for many species on the planet, including our own. It's easy to conclude, here on the eve of Copenhagen climate talks, that no progress has been made as our planet's peril becomes more irrefutable every day.
    McKibben, though, is fresh from the success of International Day of Climate Action Day, Oct. 24, instigated by his 350.org group, and is in no bummer-outer mode at all. International Day of Climate Action Day was a world-wide public protest/awareness-raising, that included 5200 actions on planet Earth, all pertaining to a single data point: 350 ppm.
    350 ppm is the level of CO2 emissions that our planet can handle -- without stirring up extreme weather patterns or disturbing the hydrologic cycle or causing mass extinction or massive climate migration, etc. You know, the kind of thing we ApocaDocs post every day.
    You know that we've already far exceeded 350; we're hovering around 390, in fact, but still, 182 countries were represented and McKibben's slideshow at IUPUI of the actions people made were poignant and inspiring. See www.350.org to see the photos. CNN called it the "most widespread day of political action in the planet's history."
   In his talk, McKibben walked us through a short history of consumerism, pointing out that 1956 was the peak year for people responding a survey that they were "very satisfied" with their lives. Now, that number is around one quarter of those surveyed. The reason for this deterioration of happiness is that we've lost our "web of connections." People cite "half the number of friends" that they used to have (and we're not counting the amorphous, quasi-fictional friends we have on Facebook).
    Over these 50 years, he says, "We've built bigger and bigger houses farther apart from each other," encouraging that lack of human contact. Meanwhile, the consumer lifestyle created by readily-available (and affordable) fossil fuels is beginning to run out. And the effects of global warming are now visible almost everywhere, from the melting arctic ice to the desertification of Australia.
McKibben says our average global temp has risen one degree -- many scientists believe we'll go up 4 or 5 degrees if we don't change, fast, and McKibben remarks "we don't want to know" what a world like that will be.
    To free ourselves from the trap of consumerism, we need to head in a "new direction"... that direction being how we deal with food. McKibben calls food "our basic economy" -- and points out that it's the resurgence of farmers markets that has created the context for people to interact again. Food, he points out, is usually a net gain when it comes to energy issues, but is definitely a plus when it comes to taste as well as the overall experience of buying locally-grown produce, conversing with farmers and growers, as well as other customers.
    Given McKibben's activism with Step It Up and now 350.org, this college prof and Sunday School teacher has moved far beyond his role as writer -- and bummer-outer. In fact, McKibben is one of the most vital voices we have, inciting us to think deeply about sustainability and how the "local" is linked to the "global." ...


McKibben McRocks!

ApocaDoc
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Mon, Nov 9, 2009
from Agence France-Presse:
Copenhagen failure would be 'suicide': Maldives
The president of the Maldives has warned that a failure to agree a deal on limiting greenhouse gas emissions in Copenhagen next month would be an act of "collective suicide". "At the moment every country arrives at climate negotiations seeking to keep their own emissions as high as possible," President Mohamed Nasheed said here. "This is the logic of the madhouse, a recipe for collective suicide. "We don't want a global suicide pact. We want a global survival pact."... Nasheed opened a two-day forum for 11 countries considered the most vulnerable to climate change, urging them to go carbon neutral to show the rich world the way forward. ...


One world leader seems to be flying over this crazy cuckoo's nest.

ApocaDoc
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