Green Options

Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed has told his cabinet members to get ready for an underwater cabinet meeting later this month.

Maldives is a collection of islands and atolls in the Indian Ocean that is less than 2 meters above sea level. Therefore, it is the first country expected to go underwater due to climate change.

Last month, I wrote about the world’s largest leather exporter leaving the Amazon. This week there is even bigger news. The world’s largest meat exporter is leaving.

The US Treasury gave another $550 million in stimulus funds for renewable energy this week. This brings the total to over $1 billion.

A new report released today says that if we shift our economy — to a greener, low-carbon economy — we will have more jobs, not fewer.

Earlier this week, Tony Blair (former prime minister of the UK) and the Climate Group reported that if we worked to avoid climate change we’d create 10 million new jobs by 2020 — worldwide. Another recent study by Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council says that such a shift could increase employment in the EU by 2.7 million jobs by 2030.

One more report, released today by the Global Climate Network (an alliance of nine influential think tanks) comes to similar conclusions.

As the world arrives at the UN ahead of Copenhagen, the US has more to lose than China in an escalating war of words over climate change leadership.

Climate Action Will Pay for Itself, and More.

The United Nations (UN) stated earlier this month that the cost of avoiding climate change was at least 1% of global GDP — $500-600 billion dollars. Despite this major cost, Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the UK, and The Climate Group, presented a report to the UN yesterday saying that a strong climate deal will “boost growth in all major economies & create millions of new jobs.”

The United Nations (UN) released a report on September 1 that gives their strongest criticism of climate change funding to date. They say that rich, developed nations really need to step it up in the battle to control and reduce climate change. They say that funding should be about 27 times higher than it currently is ($500-600 billion compared to $21 billion annually).

The UN states that it does not “shy away… from insisting that the advanced countries will have to deliver resources and leadership on a much larger scale than has been the case to date.” This is a bold statement and a humungous lead-in to the Copenhagen climate conference in December.

If you are thinking about going vegetarian, here is a list of things that should help you to actually do it,… and to stick to it once you’ve started.

In a press release by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) today, we can see that people in developed countries actually use several times more water than they “use” — the water used indirectly to create our products is several times more than the water we use ourselves. According to the WWF, “German households use 124 litres of water a day directly, individual Germans use 5288 litres of water a day when the water requirements of producing their food, clothes and other consumption items are included.”

After writing an article last week on if the UN was making a mistake in their plans for gorilla conservation, titled “Are Gorillas Doomed, Is the UN Making a Huge Mistake,” I got a lot of great feedback from readers. In the article I pointed out some of the things that we as individuals can do to help gorillas. Reader, naturalist, and artist Dave Derrick commented that there is an art for gorillas program on the Year of the Gorilla 2009 Website (http://www.yog2009.org) that he is a part of. Special thanks to Dave for pointing this out. You can check out Dave’s Artwork who’s proceeds go to gorilla conservation here. The art for gorilla program also has some fine photographic prints available for sale.

In a previous post, I listed five of the best things I think you can do in order to live a sustainable lifestyle — #6-10. Now, here is the top five list.