Blogs & Ecology

Tomorrow morning, the gym will be quite crowded with new members hoping to start the year off right. It is one of the most common new year's resolutions of all time, and also one that sounds good in theory...but in practice, rarely lives up to expectations.

Petroleum Development Oman, the state owned oil company of Oman (partly controlled by Shell), is in discussions with geologists who claim they’ve found a type of rock that can be used to soak up huge quantities of carbon dioxide.

The rock, known as peridotite, is layered just under the surface of a desert in Oman. The peridotite was found to react chemically with CO2, forming solid minerals. What’s more, it absorbs hot water infused with a concentration of CO2 that engineers can drill deep into it.

What do you get when an advertising creative is allowed to let loose their creative juices on global warming? Right. The party continues! Glamorous places like New York and Paris are simply re-styled and being submerged under water - an event made out to be fun and luxurious. We have boats, after all.

The Petroleum Ceiling and the Limits of Growth

A group of 52 high profile investors announced the beginning of a massive letter writing campaign to urge businesses to sign on to the UN’s Global Compact. "Amid the current financial crisis, this underscores the importance of universal principles and the long-term management of environmental, social and governance issues," said Executive Director of the UN Global Compact, Georg Kell, "We applaud this effort, which represents the largest recruitment drive ever undertaken with respect to the UN Global Compact."

The new Global Carbon Budget's out. The numbers, compiled by the Australia-based Global Carbon Project, an international consortium of scientists that tracks emissions, show that despite an increase in the international community’s efforts to combat pollution, the growth rate of the emissions continued to speed up. The recalculations indicate that atmospheric CO2 concentration was 383 parts per million (ppm) in 2007. That means that our emissions have grown four times faster since 2000 than during the previous decade.

The Australian and New Zealand governments have been inundated with requests from over 100 organizations urging it to relax its immigration policies so that people from small islands in the Pacific that are under threat from global warming stand a better chance to emigrate.

The organizations, which are from across the Pacific Islands region wrote an open letter addressed to Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark requesting them to increase permanent immigration numbers. They also called for more extensive resettlement services.

The first casualties of global warming, when its effects really set in, will be the elderly. What are governments doing to prevent the worst impact? Little is known about any strategies or contingency plans in place. That is because the plans are only in the research stage.
In the UK, the first study assessing the impact of global warming on the elderly nationwide revealed that government measures are definitely needed to better protect older people from the future effects of climate change.

Not only is the world no longer "flat," greener jobs are coming to the USA as a result - in factories with 'down-home' supply chains. People don't need to lobby or protest to make it happen. By subsidizing it's own oil demand growth, China has effectively added a 9% tariff on its exports.

It's been a while since the last big to-do about adding limestone to the planet's oceanic waters, but researchers sponsored by oil company Shell are saying that they've found the ultimate solution this time.

Adding limestone extracts to the surface of the planet's oceans could dramatically lower the levels of CO2 into the atmosphere. This is because adding lime to seawater creates an increase in alkalinity, which in turn improves the water's ability to scrub the air clean of carbon.

Protocols for corporate greenhouse gas accounting that are based on the ISO 14064 standards, such as the WBCSD/WRI GHG Protocol, use the term "scope" to distinguish between different greenhouse gas emissions sources. There are three categories; Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3. For most registry’s or reporting agencies Scopes 1 and 2 are considered mandatory while Scope 3 is considered optional.

For years environmental management for businesses has been focused on the task of ensuring compliance with environmental regulations. Traditional business and financial analysis was not a critical component of their decision-making as much as simply ensuring that the organization was maintaining compliance status. Paper-based systems, Excel spreadsheets, and Access databases often satisfied the needs of most environmental professionals.

As the public debate continues on whether greenhouse gases contribute to global warming or whether we are going through a natural cycle, enormous political pressure and investment dollars are streaming into the solutions aspect of the debate. Discussions in North America on environmental policy and economic benefits are steaming ahead at all levels of government and in the corporate board room.

The first major global warming court case has yet to take place, but various attempts at landmark cases that will make litigation history have been made in the last year or so. Now a new case featuring a community of Alaskan Eskimos could move into the spotlight. Not least because the lawyers involved are the same as those that broke the tobacco industry ten years ago.

Low carbon societies can become a reality because technically and economically it is possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, say scientists from nine countries who researched the issue on behalf of the G8. They say that reducing global carbon emissions by half by 2050 is feasible if clever models are applied and outlined details of three extensive models in a peer reviewed article in Climate Policy.