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Labour plays the green card
Kathleen Nutt, Sunday Times (UK)
EVERY person in Scotland is to be offered a green loyalty card which will reward them for making purchases that help the environment.
The Scottish executive is behind the scheme, which ministers hope will offer an incentive to consumers to choose products that cut waste and reduce carbon emissions.
Those who buy energy efficient fridges, washing machines and light bulbs will earn bonus points. Purchases of eco-friendly cleaning products, fair-trade goods, bicycles, second-hand goods and insulation will also be rewarded.
The points will be redeemable on public transport and at local authority run theatres, museums, community and sports centres.
In the Netherlands, similar schemes have successfully run in Rotterdam and Amsterdam for the past four years. A year after its launch, a scheme in Rotterdam had 10,000 cardholders, with 86% earning their points through recycling.
The proposals have been welcomed by local authorities and retailers in Scotland, who say they are keen to participate.
The scheme is one of a number of new policy ideas being proposed in the run-up to next year’s Scottish election when the environment is expected to be a key battleground.
(27 Aug 2006)
Emissions still the burning issue
Rupert Posner, The Age (Australia)
The Climate Group’s Australian director, Rupert Posner, asks whether emissions trading is a good deal for Australian business.
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…The reality is that over recent years, as a scientific consensus has emerged and legislation has evolved, climate change has become a boardroom issue for many companies.
Of course, there are some who have stuck their heads in the sand but there are also many others who are leading the way on cutting energy use and developing low carbon products and services. Often they are discovering new business opportunities as a result.
One thing, in particular, that the business world is being asked to buy into is emissions trading. This is one of a relatively new breed of market-based environmental policy instruments aimed at reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as cost-effectively as possible.
Emissions trading remains a mystery to most companies. So what relevance does it have for the majority of people doing business? And, is a market-based solution really the answer to this potentially devastating environmental problem?
(28 Aug 2006)
Warming up the public to the truth
Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe
THE WEATHER Channel is iconic for its drenched Chicken Little reporters hanging desperately onto their hoods as they scream over whipping winds “Look behind me!” in front of bending trees, monster waves, downed power lines, and flooded streets. Now it claims it will deliver sober reflection on the slow-motion weather disaster of global warming.
That is quite a task, since the Weather Channel’s climate scientist admits that her station was “very conservative for a long time. It didn’t want to offend anyone.” It is also daunting because people like it a bit warmer.
“That really is a fundamental question, to see if we can get people’s attention about what 1 degree of warming is doing,” said Heidi Cullen, host of “The Climate Code,” which will air this fall. “I have a sound bite of Oprah Winfrey saying: `One degree of warming? That sounds great.’ But we’re already witnessing the extreme effects, like melting glaciers. One degree is not benign.”
Cullen was in Indianapolis to plug the show, telling members of the National Association of Black Journalists that the extreme effects may hit hardest in low-income, disproportionately African-American urban areas, as exemplified by Hurricane Katrina. The Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment warns that rising levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide may promote asthma, which is already costing $3.2 billion a year to treat children nationally. Asthma increased 160 percent for preschool-age children between 1980 and 1994, according to the center.
Perhaps the most pressing and provable danger is weather that is too warm. According to the Centers for Disease Control, nearly 9,000 people died around the nation from extreme heat exposure from 1979-2002 — more than from hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes combined.
It could get much worse, according to Laurence Kalkstein, president of the International Society of Biometeorology …
He said the heat risks are much higher in the urban North than the hotter South and Southwestern United States because northern housing structures, built for the cold, trap much more heat. “My personal observation from studying Philadelphia is that poor blacks living in “heat islands” are more vulnerable because either they don’t have access to AC [air conditioning] or people have window units but keep them off to save money, or because the elderly nail their windows shut because of crime,” Kalkstein said from his home in Florida.
…Weather Channel vice president Janet Johnson, an African-American, said that while melting ice sheets might seem irrelevant to a struggling family on the south side of Chicago (where 700 people died in a heat wave in 1995) or along the Gulf coast, people might be able to understand global warming better if they view it in terms of not being able to get flood insurance, or having higher medical bills, higher air-conditioning bills, and losing loved ones to the heat.
If people see the possible impact in those terms, they will not need Chicken Little. “It’s a tough story to tell,” Johnson said, “but we will go where the science goes. We hope we can convince people that a warmer winter is not a good thing.”
(23 Aug 2006)”People like Y’all at EB are finally getting the word heard in the halls of the MSM. Thanks for all the hard work.”
Climate change to drive radical changes in global tourism
Easier Travel News
In less than 25 years climate change will have a radical impact on the global travel industry, according to the Holiday 2030 report launched by Halifax Travel Insurance.
Changes in the global climate have already seen Britons encounter searing heat, stinging jelly fish and wildfires at their favourite Mediterranean resorts this summer. The Holiday 2030 report produced for Halifax Travel Insurance by Bill McGuire, Benfield Professor of Geohazards and Director of the Benfield-UCL Hazard Research Centre, will make interesting reading for all those involved in the global tourist industry.
…The Halifax Travel Insurance Holiday 2030 report predicts a fundamental shift in holiday destinations in less than 25 years with a reversal of the traditional trend for north to south ‘migration’ that accounts for 70 percent of all international travel. By 2030 the traditional British package holiday to a Mediterranean beach resort may be consigned to the scrap-heap of history replaced by a rise in tourists staying at home or engaging in health, cultural, sports and ‘beauty’ tourism. Increased temperatures will make Southern European beach destinations, such as Majorca and Ibiza, too hot for many travellers. Holidaymakers will be switching their main holidays from the summer to the winter and spring as they will be discouraged from travelling to southern European resorts by increased drought, flash floods and the loss of coastal real estate such as hotels, resorts and golf courses.
Conversely, climate change could have a positive impact on the British tourist industry.
(27 Aug 2006)
