Tag Archives: environment

Copenhagen, Hopenhagen, Nopenhagen

Climate Change
Save a few trees

It saddens me to read in The Straits Times that at the end of the whole Copenhagen COP15 summit, the only statement issued was just a whimper, a short simple declaration that does not commit anything very much promising. The US$30b fund is an improvement that I found encouraging, but otherwise all the wrangling and politicking was disgusting and disappointing.

As an environmentalist, I guess I always had greater expectations about COP15 and what governments should be doing. But even as my expectations were lowered by the day as I tracked the summit through the newspapers, I am still disappointed that there will not be real leadership and guts to tackle climate change. Reading The Economist, in particular, seems to increase that pessimism. Local politics ultimately rules the day, and sadly local politics are heavily influenced by lobby groups like the oil industry, as well as naysayers who do not believe in the concept of climate change.

It does not help matters that recently there were <a href="leaked emails of data collected on climate science being ‘massaged’. It only proves the skeptics and naysayers that climate change is an agenda usurped by those against capitalism and the Western world, against development and industrialisation. It was already difficult to convince people, or to convince even ourselves, that the economy would not be affected by measures to fight climate change. This ‘Climategate’ might only sour perceptions about environmentalists, environmental scientists and those who support the climate change notion as rogues who are trying to stop the world from getting wealthier.

Very hard to feel very optimistic. I visited the Hopenhagen website, and on its index page it asks for input from visitors to its website for what hopes the visitors have for the environment / climate and what is it that keeps them optimistic. I could not think of anything positive to write about, knowing that the legal, political and economic hurdles were so huge. I closed the website window without typing anything.

So tell me, what keeps you optimistic about resolving climate change?

Decaying Plastics, Melting Ice

Dripping Off
Dripping Off

We are dependent on oil not only for energy but something almost as ubiquitous in modern day products. Shaking off other aspects of our dependence on oil is thus as important as diversifying sources of energy. And some Koreans just found out how to make an alternative kind of plastic way faster.

Meanwhile, Brian Palmer wrote a piece on Slate.com about how we might be able to overcome bacteria resistance to anti-biotics, a problem we have faced since the invention of anti-biotics. Fighting evolution is not the ultimate solution, as Palmer argued; he believes we need to adapt the rules of evolution and manipulate the bacteria with other strategies to overcome the problem.

Johann Hari writes on moreIntelligentLife about how Arctic is changing as experienced by the Inuits living there. Many of us may know about climate change and perhaps some of the sciences behind it but our lives goes on pretty much the same except for periodic violent weather we might intuitively attribute to climate change. To climate scientist, arctic is at the front line of this phenomenon and Hari writes convincingly about the reality of climate change in the arctic and how the lives of the Inuits are affected. The writing reflects a deep respect for those who lives in the arctic; something lacking in most other appeals for attention to global climate change. Ultimately though, it reflects how people are all looking at the problem with different lenses and focusing on different consequences. If anything is to be done at all, we’ll have to connect the different groups together.

On other green matters, Nina Shen Rastogi asks on Slate.com, Should You Flush Your Drugs Down the Toilet?

How many lightbulbs does it take to change a planet?

Problem is, how many people it takes to make the change?
Problem is, how many people it takes to make the change?

95, according to Tony Juniper, Executive Director of Friends of the Earth in UK, in his book of the same title. When I first saw this book at Central Library, I thought it had tips and nitty-gritty details about how one can do his part for the environment in his daily actions. Coming from his background as an activist, this book is far from a step-by-step guide but instead a huge tome for policymakers to think about the many environmental issues that plague us ranging from climate change to biodiversity. His perspective is very British but the vast range of recommendations are very useful in any context. Some of his 95 ideas are quite overlapping and repetitive and not all are very solidly supported by data, but otherwise he makes quite good arguments for his recommendations. He infuses a lot of his personal experiences with Friends of the Earth, and it touches me to see how much has been done by activist groups for the environment, despite its being David in a David-versus-Goliath battle against Big Government and Big Multinationals.

I cant possibly list all 95 ideas here, but I have spent the past few days compiling them into Word document. I dont own this book after all, and it will be good for me to remember and keep in mind all these ideas that can come in very useful in future if I decide to go into environmental activism. An idea I found interesting is the creation of corridors for wildlife to migrate as a result of climate change, rather than creating static, fixed-border reserves that do not allow animals to migrate poleward for instance in the event of rising temperatures due to global warming. It seemed like quite a “duh!” solution but it has not been implemented yet. His being an expert on birds brings another dimension to his ideas, which care a lot for biodiversity and bring a very local, on-the-ground view about the effects of environmental ruin on wildlife.

The book is not just a must-read for environmentalists and environment activists but also for policymakers and politicians who need to know and be concerned about the environment because of its wide-ranging impact not just on biodiversity but also on equality and democracy for example. He supports his ideas with justifications that are economic as well, so he is not exactly one who advocates for a poorer quality of life for us all so that Earth can be saved.

Go borrow this book from the library now!