March 2008

Welcome to the second of an almost-monthly column on Greenpeace past and present by Rex Weyler - author, journalist, ecologist and long-time Greenpeace trouble-maker. You can sign up to receive your own copy by email.

Elle magazine announces that eco-friendly fashions are hip and features Stella McCartney vegan, silk dress sandals at $495, which would work well on a date in the $100,000 Tesla electric sports car. "In this epoch of global warming," declares Green Guide online fashion consultant Anne Wallace, "fall fashion rules are undergoing climate change: it's OK to wear knee-high faux fur boots with a light cotton skirt and wool sweater." Vogue magazine advises, "prepare for erratic weather by putting warmer wraps over something skimpy." Like your awareness of the issues?

Awesomeness on the web this week includes:

• Mashing statistics and art is Seattle-based Chris Jordan, who has produced these amazing and profoundly depressing visualisations of the resources we use and the waste we produce.
• Cycling can be bad for your health in a spontaneous combustion kind of way.
• John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, wants to sue Al Gore for fraud over climate change.
• Two absurdly healthy outward bound types are about to begin walking the entire length of the Amazon river (the first people to do so, appearently) to document "the different experiences and opinions of the people that live and work in the Amazon rainforest", as well as raising awareness about climate change.
• A slideshow of stunning images from the new book, Fragile Earth, was the Guardian's most popular web page for a couple of days this week.

The ROCA 3 CHP plant in Rotterdam provides electricty and heat to 400,000 homes

Due to popular demand (well, demand anyway), The Weekly Geek now has its very own RSS feed.

Back in 1882, Thomas Edison built the United States' first electric power plant. Pearl Street Station, which supplied the good folks of Lower Manhattan with electricity for lighting and steam for manufacturing, was around 50 per cent efficient.

125 years on, the typical UK power plant is just 38 per cent efficient. But those modern power plants that have been built on the same principles as Edison's are reaching efficiency levels of up to 95 per cent.

So how did Edison do it? And where are we going so wrong?

In this week's slightly tardy Weekly Geek, we're looking at combined heat and power (CHP): the system Edison was using, and the heart of any truly clean and efficient decentralised energy system. (Those who read the first Weekly Geek on decentralised energy may notice a fair bit of crossover.)

One of the world's premier economic forums, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), has openly identified environmental degradation as the greatest threat we face. While this is hardly news to those of us who've long been aware of the grave damage we've been inflicting on the planet in recent decades, for a mainstream economic organisation such as OECD it represents a fairly seismic change in thinking.

The key theme of its new report, 'Environmental Outlook to 2030', is that tackling climate change, pollution and other environmental hazards is urgently necessary to avoid irreversible damage.

Following last week's direct action maelstrom at Heathrow and the Houses of Parliament, the media has been courting the people involved with features popping up all over the place about the so-called new generation of eco-activists.

A particularly interesting piece went out last night on Radio 4: Graham Thompson (described by the Evening Standard as the "daddy" of the parliament protest group) appeared on The Moral Maze to argue the case that civil disobedience is an acceptable part of protest in the democratic process. Listen again for the inevitable seven days.

Meanwhile on the Guardian's Environment Weekly podcast, our own climate campaigner Joss Garman was in the studio to talk about the 'new breed' of activist. Listen again for... well, forever probably.

But if I come across one more reference to Swampy...

Kingsnorth in Kent is to be the main focus of this year's Camp for Climate Action. From 4th to 11th of August climate activists will gather at the site of E.On's proposed new coal-fired power station, the first to be built in the UK for 30 years.

Greenpeace activists were demonstrating ouside The Japenese Foreign Ministry in Tokyo yesterday, where members of a dozen African and Pacific nations met to discuss whaling with Japanese bureaucrats. Representatives from Tanzania, Palau, Micronesia and Eritrea, all of which have received substantial 'fisheries aid' in recent years, were among Whaling Commission (IWC) and support Japan's latest bid to overturn the moritorium which currently bans commercial whaling.

Greenpeace volunteers and Lake Murray clansmen marking out boundaries in 2006

Long-time readers may remember that two years ago a team of Greenpeace campaigners and volunteers arrived at Lake Murray in Papua New Guinea to establish a forest rescue station. They were invited by local clans to help mark out and document the boundaries of their traditional lands, and also to train people in eco-forestry techniques.

Last week, the first fruits of that project were delivered in the form of a shipment of timber from Lake Murray arriving in Sydney. Sep Galeva, a landowner and one of the key players in the eco-timber project, explained to the press how working on this community initiative has helped protect their part of the rainforest from industrial logging.