This weekend at 8:30pm is WWF’s Earth Hour where people from around the world will be turning off their lights for an hour making known their stance against global warming and lobbying world governments to take effective measures against climate change – sign-up here.

It’s sort of hard to believe but environmental campaigners in America say.

The tenderness of the delicate American buttock is causing more environmental devastation than the country’s love of gas-guzzling cars, fast food or McMansions, according to green campaigners. At fault, they say, is the US public’s insistence on extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply products when they use the bathroom.

“This is a product that we use for less than three seconds and the ecological consequences of manufacturing it from trees is enormous,” said Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defence Council. Source: The Guardian.

Now is the Natural Resources Defence Council receiving funding from the Motor manufacturers? You have to wonder. Still in reality, we still need to cut down on our car usage regardless of the type of toilet paper we use.

When you take your old television to the local council for recycling or pay to have it recycled by the company supplying your replacement you don’t expect this.

Greenpeace fitted a broken unfixable television set with a tracker and took it to Hampshire County Council for recycling.

Instead of being safely dismantled in the UK or Europe, like it should have been, the council’s ‘recycling’ company, BJ Electronics, passed it on as ‘second-hand goods’ and it was shipped off to Nigeria to be sold or scrapped and dumped. Source: Greenpeace.

Not what you expect from your local council – who on earth can you trust? So what’s the answer? As Greenpeace suggest – avoid using hazardous components would be a start.

Hat Tip: Chicken Yoghurt.

We’ve heard of “painting the town red” a phrase reputedly made famous by Henry Beresford, 3rd Marquess of Waterford, but it seems we should be painting our towns white.

Hashem Akbari has a vision of a shiny, happy world. He sees polished roads and cities that gleam in the sunlight. Rooftops are bright and pavements light. Akbari wants to turn our cities into a giant mirror and he needs your help. And paint, lots of it.

Akbari is no architect and his grand plan is no conceptual art project. Based at the prestigious Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, Akbari is a scientist who has come up with a new way to fight global warming. It could be the easiest solution you’ve never heard of.

His big idea is based on principles as old as the whitewashed villages that scatter the hills of southern Europe and North Africa. Turn enough of the world’s black urban landscape white, he says, and it would reflect enough sunlight to delay global warming, and grant us some precious breathing space in the global struggle to control carbon emissions.

Akbari is poised to launch a campaign to paint the world white. He wants dozens of the world’s largest cities to unite in an effort to replace the dark-coloured materials used to cover roads and roofs with something a little more reflective. Source: The Guardian.

I’m no scientist, however it seems amazing that a white roof can reflect sunlight back out to space and to be picky, how much global warming is produced by the manufacture of white paint?

I know, it’s not a good idea to run a patio heater but why stop a headline? Anyway George Monbiot has some interesting comparisons between Aga’s and patio heaters.

Compare, for example, the campaign against patio heaters to the campaign against Aga’s. Patio heaters are a powerful symbol: heating the atmosphere is not a side-effect, it’s their purpose. But to match the fuel consumption of an Aga, a large domestic patio heater would have to run continuously at maximum output for three months a year. Patio heaters burn liquefied petroleum gas, while most Aga’s use oil, electricity or coal, which produce more CO2. A large Aga running on coal turns out 9 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year: five and a half times the total CO2 production of the average UK home. To match that, the patio heater would have to burn for 9 months.

So where is the campaign against Aga’s? There isn’t one. I’ve lost count of the number of aspirational middle-class greens I know who own one of these monsters and believe that they are somehow compatible (perhaps because they look good in a country kitchen) with a green lifestyle. The campaign against Aga’s – which starts here – will divide rich greens down the middle. Source: George Monbiot.

Yes, I won’t be buying an Aga – then again I couldn’t afford one.

The media is full of talk about global warming and carbon (CO2) emissions – The Guardian’s interactive CO2 emissions map is an effective way of presenting each countries emissions.

Greenpeace reports very few firms are showing true climate leadership. Despite many green claims, major companies like Dell, Microsoft, Lenovo, LG, Samsung and Apple are failing to support the necessary levels of global cuts in emissions and make the absolute cuts in their own emissions that are required to tackle climate change.

Hat Tip: CNET.

Well not quite – well OK – not even quite – but one day.

Dr. Gary A. Strobel of Montana State University has discovered a fungus, Gliocladium rosem, which produces diesel fuel – dubbed “myco-diesel”.

A tree fungus could provide green fuel that can be pumped directly into tanks, scientists say. The organism, found in the Patagonian rainforest, naturally produces a mixture of chemicals that is remarkably similar to diesel.

“This is the only organism that has ever been shown to produce such an important combination of fuel substances,” said Gary Strobel, a plant scientist from Montana State University who led the work. “We were totally surprised to learn that it was making a plethora of hydrocarbons.”

Many simple organisms, such as algae, are already known to make chemicals that are similar to the long-chain hydrocarbons present in transport fuel but, according to Strobel, none produce the explosive hydrocarbons with the high energy density of those in myco-diesel. Strobel said that the chemical mixture produced by his fungus could be used in a modern diesel engine without any modification.

Another advantage of the G. roseum fungus is its ability to eat up cellulose. This is a compound that, along with lignin, makes up the cell walls in plants and is indigestible by most animals. As such, it makes up much of the organic waste currently discarded, such as stalks and sawdust. Source: Balloon Juice.

See, it’s possible; we could grow our own oil.

Forget the Credit Crunch it’s nothing compared to the Nature Crunch says George Monbiot.

The financial crisis for which we must now pay so heavily prefigures the real collapse, when humanity bumps against its ecological limits.

As we goggle at the fluttering financial figures, a different set of numbers passes us by. On Friday, Pavan Sukhdev, the Deutsche Bank economist leading a European study on ecosystems, reported that we are losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year, as a result of deforestation alone. The losses incurred so far by the financial sector amount to between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion. Sukhdev arrived at his figure by estimating the value of the services – such as locking up carbon and providing freshwater – that forests perform, and calculating the cost of either replacing them or living without them. The credit crunch is petty when compared to the nature crunch. Read the Rest at Monboit.com.

My opinion on Nuclear Power oscillates between ambiguous and anti, reading Greenpeace’s Nuclear Reaction, tips me into the anti-camp. In Greenpeace’s words.

Nuclear Reaction, Greenpeace’s latest blog, records for history the meltdown of that most over-rated, over-subsidised and over-confident of industries, the nuclear industry.

The nuclear industry is always running late, is extremely high maintenance, constantly stealing from your wallet, and very likely to be ruining your life for years to come. If it was your boyfriend or girlfriend you’d have changed your name and fled to another country years ago.

So, want to hear about the nuclear reactor built in an earthquake zone? Or the one built with watery concrete? Or how taxpayers across the world will be financially (not to mention physically) liable in the event of a nuclear accident? What about how, if we want to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by just five percent with nuclear power, we need to be building a new reactor every week until 2030?
Want to meet the politicians, denialists and apologists with the 10,000-year radioactive legacies? See through their false promises and false hopes? Maybe find out how easy it is to build a “quick and dirty” reprocessing plant capable of turning black market nuclear waste into a bomb’s worth of plutonium every day?

Then join us. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll wish we were making it up.

Hat Tip: Chicken Yogurt.