En gammal länk, från 28 mars i år. Platser före och under Earth Hour.

Titta här.

Earth Hour adalah sebuah program kampanye yang digalakkan oleh WWF (World Widelife Fund For Nature) bertujuan untuk mengajak masyarakat khususnya yang tinggal di kota besar seperti Jakarta untuk memadamkan lampu selama 1 jam sehingga dapat menyelamatkan bumi dari polusi.
Kemudian muncul pertanyaan  kenapa harus Earth Hour dan seberapa efektifnya dalam penyelamatan lingkungan hidup?
Earth Hour memang tidak wajib secara perundang-undangan artinya jika tidak melaksanakan maka tidak dikenakan sanksi hukum namun mungkin hal ini tidak berlaku bagi pelaku industri atau kantor-kantor. Meskipun begitu kita tetap harus melakukannya demi kehidupan kita yang lebih baik di bumi ini lagipula ini merupakan hal termudah bagi siapa pun untuk berpartisipasi dalam melestarikan lingkungan hidup. Kita tinggal menekan sakelar lampu kita ke posisi off(mati) dan menunggu selama satu jam jelas bukan hal yang sulit.
Kemudian seberapa efektif kah? menurut penelitian yang dilakukan WWF Indonesia, kota Jakarta mematikan mayoritas lampu selama 1 jam hasilnya:
• 300MW (cukup untuk mengistirahatkan 1 pembangkit listrik dan menyalakan 900 desa)

• Mengurangi beban biaya listrik Jakarta sekitar Rp 200 juta

• Mengurangi emisi sekitar 284 ton CO2

• Menyelamatkan lebih dari 284 pohon

• Menghasilkan O2 untuk lebih dari 568 orang

Tindakan kecil namun dengan hasil yang besar bukan?

Baik, disini saya juga ingin berbagi cerita mengenai Earth Hour yang dilaksanakan pada 28 Maret 2009.
Waktu itu saya lihat di TV dan pengumuman di situs jejaring sosial Facebook, yaitu himbauan untuk melaksanakan Program Earth Hour di tempat tinggalnya masing-masing.
Pada saat itu saya tinggal di kos kota Yogyakarta. Ketika sore, saya masih tetap menyalakan lampu dan saat pukul 21.00 WIB mulailah mematikan beberapa lampu kecuali lampu depan rumah karena alasan keamanan dan lampu dekat kamar mandi karena area lantai basah sehingga dikhawatirkan ada yang terpeleset selain itu semua lampu mati termasuk beberapa kamar teman saya yang kebetulan tidak ada di dalam.
Saya mengajak 2 teman yang ada di kos pada waktu itu, untuk mematikan lampu kamarnya dan berkumpul di balkon. kebetulan salah satu dari teman saya pandai main gitar dan show pun berlangsung ditengah kegelapan . Tidak terasa sekitar 2 jam kami masih bergelap2an dan hey! kita sudah melakukan program Earth Hour kata teman saya. Lampu kembali dinyalakan.

Sayangngya, tetangga-tetangga kami kurang peduli pada earth hour. Entah tidak tahu atau tidak mau tahu. Semoga program earth hour selanjutnya yaitu pada 27 Maret 2010 lebih merata lagi dengan bantuan media massa, blogger dan media-media informasi yang lain agar bisa menggugah masyarakat yang belum sadar untuk mencintai lingkungannya.  Selain itu kalau bisa tidak hanya lampu saja yang dimatikan namun peralatan elektronik lainnya yang mengkonsumsi listrik yang banyak, misalnya komputer desktop, pemanas, AC dan lain sebagainya.

Sebegitu mudahnya melakukan semua hal tersebut. Kita bisa melakukan semua ini dengan penuh keceriaan dan ini semua sebenarnya adalah untuk kita kembali. Kita yang merusak, kita juga yang harus memperbaikinya.

sumber: www.earthhour.wwf.or.id

part of an ongoing series of columns I’ve written, reprinted from the TU Rambler.

March, 2009.
This week, I want to talk about electricity.  [March 28] from 8:30 to 9:30 was the second annual “Earth Hour”—60 minutes when people around the world turned off their lights to raise awareness for climate change and energy consumption—so I figure it’s as good a time as any.

To begin, let’s start with lightbulbs. The incandescent bulbs that many people still use work by pumping electricity (itself produced by burning coal or other fossil fuels) through a loop of tungsten, which heats up until it glows white-hot and produces the light that you read by. The main problem with incandescent bulbs (besides the dirty fuel we burn to power them) is their energy efficiency (or lack thereof). You see, when that loop of tungsten lights up, it throws off an awful lot of heat, and most of that heat just floats away, never to be seen again. However, thanks to modern science, there is an alternative: the CFL (compact florescent lightbulb). These twisty-looking bulbs are way more energy-efficient than incandescents, which means that they last longer (so you don’t have to buy them as often) and produce the same amount of light for much less energy (which means less coal to burn). And no, they don’t make that sickly green color or annoying buzz that regular florescent tubes do.* So that’s another plus.

So with all these benefits, you may be asking ‘what’s the catch?’ Normally, the catch would be the price; a CFL often costs three times as much as an incandescent bulb. However, the energy savings mean that they quickly pay for themselves. Like other energy-saving devices, CFLs are a sound investment.

Lightbulbs aren’t the only source of energy waste, though. It seems that every gadget we buy—iPods, cell phones, CrackBerrys, laptop computers—has its own charger. The problem is that many of these chargers continue to draw “phantom power” when we leave them plugged in (this, apparently, is due to the capacitors, transformers, and other gizmos inside them, which I don’t pretend to understand). In fact, as much as 10% of home electricity is wasted by turned-off-but-still-plugged-in electronic devices. The solution? Show those machines who’s boss and stop the waste at the source! Plug all your gadgets into a powerstrip, and then, when you’re not using them, use one switch to turn them all off at once!

*(Aside from their longer life, why anyone would want to use regular florescent lights anyway is totally beyond me. That greenish glow isn’t flattering to anybody. Like the late, great George Carlin said, “Didya ever notice how awful your face looks in a mirror in a restroom that has florescent lights? Every cut, scrape, scratch, scar, scab, bruise, boil, bump, pimple, zit, wart, welt and abscess you’ve had since birth all seem to come back at the same time! And all you can think is: “I gotta get the fuck outta here!””)

It is 25 days till world leaders meet in Copenhagen to nut out the next international agreement to respond  to climate change.

I have always believed the scientific arguments on climate change. For a couple of years a decade ago I shared an office in Cairns with the Environmental Defenders Office (EDO). I recall many conversations with Jan, the EDO project officer about climate change and the precious resource called water.

Fast forward a couple of years and I am in Brisbane working in the homelessness sector and I start a family. It is an understatement to say the birth of a child changes your life. For my husband, the type of life we could give our daughter and the planet we would bequeath to her were real preoccupations. He read up on climate change and knows far more than I. We talked about it quite a few times, and he told me he was really worried about what life would be like for our daughter in the future. I remember saying, ‘You can worry about climate change. I have other things to worry about’. My preoccupations centre around social issues  I continue to care about: homelessness,  poverty, social inclusion. But, my greatest endeavour is raising my 4 year old daughter. So I reckon  I am done, all full up.

That is until now. From this day, 10 November 2009 I am taking a stand. I am finding space in my busy life to do what I can to make a difference leading up to Copenhagen. So far, I have:

• followed Earth Hour on Twitter
• checked out Earth Hour videos on Youtube
• linked the Earth Hour website to my Face Book page
• created this blog post
• added a twibbon to my Twitter picture
• downloaded the Vote Earth iphone app which is free from the App Store (amazing app btw)

The Earth Hour website is fantastic: a great campaigning website with lots of tools for you to demonstrate to your friends, families and colleagues that you care about climate change and want our politicians to act.

There are easy things I can do everyday:

• add the Earth Hour link to my email address block
• send out regular tweets with info encouraging people to act
• raise this issue in conversation with people that I am not connected to online

With 25 days to go we have to do everything we can to get a result in Copenhagen. C’mon what are you going to do?

Michelle

At times it can seem the discussion swirling around climate change is so enormous that it’s easy for the issue to become a little abstract. The “Earth Hour” initiative has been a massive success in raising awareness and bringing the topic home (and this year’s campaign was all about empowerment, presenting the opportunity to “Vote Earth” through switching off.)  Still, regular people are often drowned out in the din of the conversation, left without a means to voice their individual concerns about climate change.

Which is why I applaud this Place ’09, an easy vehicle for anyone to raise their voice to the delegates attending the U.N. Copenhagen summit, simply by answering a decidedly straightforward question via Twitter: “What’s worth saving in #thisplace?”

As the site explains:

“Climate change can be so big, complex and politically charged. #thisplace is a project to remind delegates at Copenhagen to keep it simple.

The idea is to capture what’s happening now and what’s at stake due to climate change in a place that matters to you, in just 140 characters.

We are going to squeeze contributions from all around the world into a small book to give to delegates at the conference.

Then all the world’s shared problems, personal anxieties, hopes & dreams about climate change will be in their hands!”

Love this project – like Earth Hour, it’s a great way to get people thinking about the specific implications of global warming, as well as another tremendous way to let the masses be heard.

Spotted via Faris Yakob.

For months now, I’ve desired to write a piece on the ridiculousness of the environmental movement.  There really is no way to truly satisfy this movement short of renouncing technology and returning to a state of primitive culture.  Naturally, such a move would also require a vast reduction in the human population as primitive cultivation techniques could not sustain the current population levels.  I truly don’t think environmentalists think through the ultimate consequences of what they seek.  Or do they?  With all the talk of Mao perhaps they have.  Besides, paraphrasing my favorite political philosopher, “a healthy planet comes through the barrel of a gun.”

The following reprint makes my points with nearly the sense of humor I would have employed.  The author is another anonymous blogger but interestingly from the other side of the political universe.  Although I wonder about that.  He tells us he’s not a conservative yet then he tells us he opposes “pretty much everything the President is doing.”  Well, I’ll let him pick it up now.

Reprint from Therefore I Think. (Slightly abridged.)

Human technology threatens the planet

In his 2007 book “The World Without Us” author Alan Weisman hoped “…to produce a book about the present state of our planet that would be noticed and read by as wide an audience as possible…I’m grateful that its offbeat point of departure — seeing our world minus the distraction of ourselves — has worked so well…” [Emphasis mine.]  He talks about how the planet would “recover” once humanity is gone.  An interesting note is that one of the cover quotes praising the book is from the organizer of the 350.org demonstrations this last weekend.

Before I go any further, let me clarify a few assumptions some may be making, based on my previous posts and this one:

1. I am not a republican.

2. I am not a conservative.

3. I am not white.

4. And, despite my not agreeing with pretty much everything the President is doing, I am not a racist.

Back to the topic at hand:

So what are these people after?  They want to (as Ayn Rand once wrote) “return to the primitive.”  Many want an egalitarian society where someone’s need is a warrant on your life.  Pretty much all want to level the playing field, not by raising the standard of living where it is low, but by lowering the standard of living where it is high – i.e., advanced industrial nations like the U.S.  They want to take down capitalism because according to their altruistic morality, it is wrong or at best a necessary evil.

What makes me say this?  Let’s start with www.350.org and their own view on global warming:

“Global warming is caused by releasing what are called greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The most common greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide. Many of the activities we do every day like turn the lights on, cook food, or heat or cool our homes rely on energy sources like coal and oil that emit carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases.”

Everything that humans do has an impact on the environment.  To enjoy our high standard of living – from the lights we use to push back the darkness, to the vehicles we drive or fly to save time traveling, to the appliances we use to free up time to be with our family or work more productively, to cooking the food we eat with a stove rather than an open fire, to heating or cooling our homes so that we can be comfortable – these activities and many more create an “environmental footprint.”  So, basically every life-sustaining activity we humans do – including many of the things that have raised our life expectancy – is “bad for the environment.”  According to this premise, the earth would be better off if we were either dead or lived like our distant ancestors – and that is what is preferred.

Try and reduce your “footprint” by using cloth diapers and you get chastised for the excess water you’re using to clean them.  Use compact fluorescent bulbs to save energy and discover that they contain mercury.  Advocate for solar panels or wind mills to harness alternative energies (as inefficient and impractical at this point as they are) and get yelled at for trying to disturb ecosystems or pristine land.  You can’t win because environmental footprint is the measure by which nature is disturbed.  The less it is disturbed the better, so the more you disturb it by living like a human being, the more guilty you are.  Keith Lockitch of the Ayn Rand Center likens this to the guilt of Original Sin – making one feel guilty for their very existence.

How about these ideas to reduce your carbon footprint:

- Victoria University’s research fellow Brenda Vale, an authority on “sustainable architecture,” recently co-authored the book “Time to Eat the Dog.”  The book looks at ways to “modify” behavior to save energy.  In September 2008, Ms. Vale told a Wellington city council in New Zealand “a big dog can have a carbon footprint that is the equivalent to a small car and therefore the best way forward, if you are going to have a pet, is to make sure it is edible.”  Vale says edible animals for pets like pigs, chickens, or rabbits would be better for the environment.

Time to meet your maker, Fido.

- But another study written in World Watch Magazine states that the carbon footprint of livestock (like chickens and pigs – see above) has been underestimated, and that the only true alternative to reduce your “carbon footprint” is to be a vegetarian.  If someone wants to be a vegetarian, go for it; I was a vegetarian for a couple of years and was fine.  Because I was having trouble gaining weight while on a work out regimen, I started to eat meat again; in other words if the choice is my health or that of an animal, I choose me.  Call me crazy.  Anyways, the kicker is the last sentence in the article:

“Unfortunately, meat consumption provides yet another illustration of the global inequalities and injustices associated with climate change, where consumption in industrialized countries directly degrades the quality of life in developing countries.” [Emphasis mine.]

This is very important because this is the premise (taken in a larger context away from just food consumption) of the environmentalist movement across the globe, and is the guiding principle in the ideas being floated for the climate treaty hoped to be agreed upon in December.

- Forget the animals; go to the source of the “footprint” problem says New York Times contributer Andrew Revkin.  During an October 14 climate panel he said:

As part of a cap and trade scheme, “if you can measurably somehow divert fertility rate…shouldn’t there be a carbon value for that?”  He says further: “Probably the single most concrete and substantive thing an American, young American, could do to lower our carbon footprint is not turning off the light or driving a Prius, it’s having fewer kids, having fewer children.”  He has blogged in the past: “More children equal more carbon dioxide emissions.”

Do you really need any analysis of this point of view?  Yet it is absolutely consistent with the more “mainstream” ideas of environmentalism.  Nature = good.  Humans = bad.  He might as well say, “China’s got it right.  One child per couple.  After that I propose, for the good of the planet, forced sterilization.  Sacrifice your fertility to Mother Earth.”

As I’ve stated before, the current flurry of activity – from the 350.org campaign to the current climate bill moving its way through Congress (and backed by the President) is the climate conference in Copenhagen this December where many leaders hope to iron out a binding climate treaty.  At the very least they hope to lay the ground work for one later down the road.  President Obama is aiming for a treaty by the end of his first term.

A perfect analogy for all of this is Earth Hour.  On March 28, people in an estimated 1,000 cities in 80 countries turned out the lights for one hour; this included homes, office spaces, and national landmarks; non-essential lights is what they called it.  Begun in 2007, Earth Hour is supposed to bring awareness to our carbon footprint, dependence on energy, and global warming.

Here’s the House of Parliament in London before:

Here’s the House of Parliament during Earth Hour:

It’s a great analogy to what they’re ultimately after: lights-out on our civilization.  It’s ironic (and hopefully not prophetic) that near the end of Atlas Shrugged, protagonist John Galt says that they (the men of the mind; the producers and creators on strike) would know when it was time to return to the world and when the collectivists’ experiment had run its course – when the lights of the world’s great cities had gone out.

The future of humanity under extreme environmental policies

Final note from the editor:

Not exactly the future I envisioned for my kids, but hey, it’s about the smallest carbon footprint a human can have.  But wait, even cavemen produce waste, burn fuels, and kill animals.  These cavemen have obviously killed animals.  Tsk, Tsk. Vegan cavemen, now that would be better.  Naturally the ultimate environmentalist would like a planet devoid of humans but they’ll never admit it.

In his 2007 book “The World Without Us” author Alan Weisman hoped “…to produce a book about the present state of our planet that would be noticed and read by as wide an audience as possible…I’m grateful that its offbeat point of departure — seeing our world minus the distraction of ourselves — has worked so well…” [Emphasis mine.]  He talks about how the planet would “recover” once humanity is gone.  An interesting note is that one of the cover quotes praising the book is from the organizer of the 350.org demonstrations this last weekend.

Before I go any further, let me clarify a few assumptions some may be making, based on my previous posts and this one:

1. I am not a republican.

2. I am not a conservative.

3. I am not white.

4. And, despite my not agreeing with pretty much everything the President is doing, I am not a racist.

Back to the topic at hand:

So what are these people after?  They want to (as Ayn Rand once wrote) “return to the primitive.”  Many want an egalitarian society where someone’s need is a warrant on your life.  Pretty much all want to level the playing field, not by raising the standard of living where it is low, but by lowering the standard of living where it is high – i.e., advanced industrial nations like the U.S.  They want to take down capitalism because according to their altruistic morality, it is wrong or at best a necessary evil.

What makes me say this?  Let’s start with www.350.org and their own view on global warming:

“Global warming is caused by releasing what are called greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The most common greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide. Many of the activities we do every day like turn the lights on, cook food, or heat or cool our homes rely on energy sources like coal and oil that emit carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases.”

Everything that humans do has an impact on the environment.  To enjoy our high standard of living – from the lights we use to push back the darkness, to the vehicles we drive or fly to save time traveling, to the appliances we use to free up time to be with our family or work more productively, to cooking the food we eat with a stove rather than an open fire, to heating or cooling our homes so that we can be comfortable – these activities and many more create an “environmental footprint.”  So, basically every life-sustaining activity we humans do – including many of the things that have raised our life expectancy – is “bad for the environment.”  According to this premise, the earth would be better off if we were either dead or lived like our distant ancestors – and that is what is preferred.

Try and reduce your “footprint” by using cloth diapers and you get chastised for the excess water you’re using to clean them.  Use compact fluorescent bulbs to save energy and discover that they contain mercury.  Advocate for solar panels or wind mills to harness alternative energies (as inefficient and impractical at this point as they are) and get yelled at for trying to disturb ecosystems or pristine land.  You can’t win because environmental footprint is the measure by which nature is disturbed.  The less it is disturbed the better, so the more you disturb it by living like a human being, the more guilty you are.  Keith Lockitch of the Ayn Rand Center likens this to the guilt of Original Sin – making one feel guilty for their very existence.

How about these ideas to reduce your carbon footprint:

- Victoria University’s research fellow Brenda Vale, an authority on “sustainable architecture,” recently co-authored the book “Time to Eat the Dog.”  The book looks at ways to “modify” behavior to save energy.  In September 2008, Ms. Vale told a Wellington city council in New Zealand “a big dog can have a carbon footprint that is the equivalent to a small car and therefore the best way forward, if you are going to have a pet, is to make sure it is edible.”  Vale says edible animals for pets like pigs, chickens, or rabbits would be better for the environment.

Time to meet your maker, Fido.

OR

MAKE YOUR CHOICE

- But another study written in World Watch Magazine states that the carbon footprint of livestock (like chickens and pigs – see above) has been underestimated, and that the only true alternative to reduce your “carbon footprint” is to be a vegetarian.  If someone wants to be a vegetarian, go for it; I was a vegetarian for a couple of years and was fine.  Because I was having trouble gaining weight while on a work out regimen, I started to eat meat again; in other words if the choice is my health or that of an animal, I choose me.  Call me crazy.  Anyways, the kicker is the last sentence in the article:

“Unfortunately, meat consumption provides yet another illustration of the global inequalities and injustices associated with climate change, where consumption in industrialized countries directly degrades the quality of life in developing countries.” [Emphasis mine.]

This is very important because this is the premise (taken in a larger context away from just food consumption) of the environmentalist movement across the globe, and is the guiding principle in the ideas being floated for the climate treaty hoped to be agreed upon in December.

- Forget the animals; go to the source of the “footprint” problem says New York Times contributer Andrew Revkin.  During an October 14 climate panel he said:

As part of a cap and trade scheme, “if you can measurably somehow divert fertility rate…shouldn’t there be a carbon value for that?”  He says further: “Probably the single most concrete and substantive thing an American, young American, could do to lower our carbon footprint is not turning off the light or driving a Prius, it’s having fewer kids, having fewer children.”  He has blogged in the past: “More children equal more carbon dioxide emissions.”

Do you really need any analysis of this point of view?  Yet it is absolutely consistent with the more “mainstream” ideas of environmentalism.  Nature = good.  Humans = bad.  He might as well say, “China’s got it right.  One child per couple.  After that I propose, for the good of the planet, forced sterilization.  Sacrifice your fertility to Mother Earth.”

As I’ve stated before, the current flurry of activity – from the 350.org campaign to the current climate bill moving its way through Congress (and backed by the President) is the climate conference in Copenhagen this December where many leaders hope to iron out a binding climate treaty.  At the very least they hope to lay the ground work for one later down the road.  President Obama is aiming for a treaty by the end of his first term.

I’ll devote another post to the proposed treaty and the UN Convention for Climate Change in Copenhagen.  It’s important we all understand what is at stake, and to write about it in this post would make this tediously long.

A perfect analogy for all of this is Earth Hour.  On March 28, people in an estimated 1,000 cities in 80 countries turned out the lights for one hour; this included homes, office spaces, and national landmarks; non-essential lights is what they called it.  Begun in 2007, Earth Hour is supposed to bring awareness to our carbon footprint, dependence on energy, and global warming.

Here’s the House of Parliament in London before:

Here’s the House of Parliament during Earth Hour:

It’s a great analogy to what they’re ultimately after: lights-out on our civilization.  It’s ironic (and hopefully not prophetic) that near the end of Atlas Shrugged, protagonist John Galt says that they (the men of the mind; the producers and creators on strike) would know when it was time to return to the world and when the collectivists’ experiment had run its course – when the lights of the world’s great cities had gone out.

Light pollution is not a very widely heard term. I read this first in some off-beat self-improvement/spiritual magazine as a kid. Years later I mentioned this while my Environmental Studies teacher was counting different kinds of pollution. And No wonder she thought I was on some kind of prank.
So, what is light pollution? Well, as per the earlier version I read, this leads to disturbed biological clocks in human. I remember when 9 PM used to mean late-night. Now this is hardly evening. Then 4 AM was a wake up time. Now 4 AM is the new midnight. We have distanced ourselves from natural light (which is again rare in cities). This has led to sleeplessness, abnormal blood pressure, unhealthy food habits etc. But well, humans adjust so fast and in a few more years people will find it hard to believe that there were man who used to go to bed at 9-10PM and used to wake up at 4-5AM. So perhaps in long run, there is not much harm except a little unfit society.

Birds, already rare in cities, are the second victim of this abnormality. They find it hard to adjust with this new 24*7 “illuminated” world. They hit glass windows, develop diseases and eventually die.

But they are also not the reason I chose to write today.

I am not a big time star-gazer. But in old summer days when I used to sleep on terrace, I remember gazing at stars and trying to identify constellations. Now when I don’t own a terrace, I rarely gaze at stars or praise the cool and beautiful moon. But whenever I try to, I am troubled by two things- one the tall buildings around me and second the disappeared stars due to intense lights. I am hardly able to see a dozen stars. The starry-night will now be just a word to be read in old books. When man started to roam in sea, stars were his best friends. But a few more years and the next generations will know nothing of even the pole-star [Dhruva-tara].

There has been some change in people’s view about 24*7 illumination and few cities across the globe have observed few earth-hours to enjoy darkness.But this is not a significant effort. There is not much to do or anyone will bother to do, but sure I will miss the real stars disappeared from my sky.

Lastly one of my favorite from Calvin and Hobbes-

Calvin and hobbes

Leo Burnett Malaysia picked up a Gold Effie at the Malaysia Effie Awards for its Earth Hour effort on behalf of the World Wild Fund for Nature.

Launched during a period when the country faced political and social turmoil, the campaign to bring awareness to global warming carried an appropriate theme: “Who Says Malaysians Are Not United?”  By urging all citizens to set aside differences to come together as “One Malaysia,” the effort inspired more than six million people to pledge support and switch off their lights this past March.

The campaign was executed across multiple channels, spanning TV, radio, print, OOH and digital, and included an interactive microsite and a Facebook group that became the largest country-specific Earth Hour group in the world.  Further, the agency secured 100% of the ad space for free… according to WWF Malaysia, TV and radio value alone totaled more than (U.S.) $2.7 million.

From Tan Kien Eng, CEO of Leo Burnett Group Singapore and Malaysia:

“We are most honored to get a Gold Award for our first time entering Effies. This is the best testimony of our ability to conceptualize and implement creative campaigns that are relevant, engaging and effective for our clients. The award is not ours alone. It belongs to all Malaysians who played a role in making it a success. I would like to take this opportunity on behalf of WWF and Leo Burnett to thank all Malaysians, the Prime Minister and Prime Minister department, the various ministries and government bodies, celebrities, media partners, corporations and building owners for making Earth Hour Malaysia a success.  I would also like to send our tribute to Yasmin Ahmad, the late Executive Creative Director of Leo Burnett. The campaign this year would not have been so successful without Yasmin as the ambassador. She was the true idol of One Malaysia, and a true idol of all Malaysians.”

I was supposed to write a very cute blog entry on the Rags2Riches bags I own. You know, the ones designed by famous Filipino designer Rajo Laurel and made lovingly by the Payatas women’s own creative hands, but I got sidetracked when I read in Lola Akinmade’s blog that October 15 of every year is actually Blog Action Day, a day set aside by blogger members to discuss a pressing social issue which is also a global issue.

Today is October 16 in my side of the world. This means I missed this once-a-year opportunity to be one with the world in making a stand about something.  This year, bloggers talked about climate change, and these are what I’ve learned:

1. We can register for Blog Action Day here. I hope to be part of it next year! =)

2. What is probably the most important meeting of our lives will take place on December 7, 2009 at Copenhagen. On this day, world leaders will meet to forge a global climate deal. For people in the Philippines, this strikes a chord in us because of the lives and the livelihood lost when Typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng wreaked havoc in Luzon.  The Tcktcktck campaign is the world’s largest and most diverse mandate that aims to show our leaders that we are ready for a bold climate deal in Copenhagen. Learn more about it here. And then Vote Earth here.

3. October 24 is the International Day of Climate Action. Learn the 411 of 350 here.

4. Blogging can make a difference. =)

Malaysian President Mohamed Nasheed will chair the meeting on October 17 ahead of the world climate change summit in Copenhagen in December. The 14-member cabinet were taught scuba-diving basics over the weekend.

The cabinet will don wet suits and scuba equipment and dive to a depth of six metres. They will then ratify a pledge calling on other nations to slash greenhouse gas emissions ahead of the Copenhagen meeting. Cabinet members will communicate using whiteboards and hand signals. The Maldivian archipelago is on the front line of climate change.

A very nice and innovative gesture by the leaders of Malaysia. It goes to show that only words are not enough to tackle the climate change issue. Serious actions, which encourage the common man to act, are what is required from the world top leaders, for a global movement to save our dear planet.

So all those who have access to the decision makers of the nations, please urge them to act and act fast; for the time is not far before our dear earth becomes inhabitable and the scientists have not yet come up with an alternate earth where we can migrate to.

ACT NOW, PLEASE!!!

I don’t know how many of you know this, but once the Earth warms to a certain temperature, it gets trapped in a cycle where it gets warmer all by itself. You might think this temperature must be some improbably high number. But it’s not; we are 2 degrees away from it.

You might also think global warming has nothing to do with you; controlling the global rise in temperature is a job for our various governments. That might be partially true, but you can play a part too. I am not asking you to go out and petition and protest, especially in draconic Singapore. Simply put into practice the ways of energy conservation you have been hearing about but ignoring. You can start with the simplest methods that have minimal impact on your lifestyle; switch off electrical appliances when they are not in use (both the machine itself and at the power source), adjust the temperature of your air conditioners to 25 degrees, set a timer before you sleep and close your doors. If you are truly concerned, you can make lifestyle changes; cut down your meat intake (livestock like cows produce too much methane and consume too much resources like water and corn) and stick to local and regional produce to reduce your carbon footprint. I’m sure you can find tons of other ways online.

You might think your effort alone will be too minimal to make a difference, and you will be right. But if everyone thinks that way, change will never come. If everyone makes an effort, the combined effects will be felt. Just think of the amount of energy saved during Earth Hour; even though I believe it is purely symbolic, it demonstrates how a concerted effort can make a real impact.

A good video to see how an increase of  a few degrees can devastate the world is “Six Degrees That Could Change the World” (You will need to download the Veoh player to watch it), which shows degree by degree how global warming will blight our landscape, maybe forever. Below is an article from ST that describes how bad the climate situation is.

Change starts small, and it starts with you.

From ST:

Apocalypse is just 2 degrees away
By Gwynne Dyer, For The Straits Times

MY YOUNGEST daughter is 17, so she will have lived most of her life before the worst of the warming hits. But her later years will not be easy, and her children will have it very hard from the start. As for their children, I just don’t know.

It is the Met Office’s job to make forecasts, and its forecast for the 2060s is an average global temperature that is as much as 4 deg C warmer. Speaking this week at a conference called ‘4 degrees and beyond’ at Oxford University, Dr Richard Betts, head of climate impacts at the British Meteorological Office’s Hadley Centre, one of the world’s most important centres for climate research, laid it all out.

‘We’ve always talked about these very severe impacts affecting only future generations,’ said Dr Betts. ‘But people alive today could live to see a 4 deg C rise. People will say it’s an extreme scenario, and it is an extreme scenario, but it’s also a plausible scenario.’

All we have to do is go on burning fossil fuels at the rate we do now, and we will be there by the 2080s. Keep increasing our carbon dioxide emissions in pace with economic growth, as we have done over the past decade, and we will be there by the 2060s. ‘There’ is not a good place to be.

At an average of 4 deg C warmer, 15 per cent of the world’s farmland would have become useless due to heat and drought, and crop yields would have fallen sharply for half of the rest: an overall 30 per cent to 40 per cent fall in global food production. Since the world’s population would have grown by two billion by then, there will be only half the food per person that we have now. Many people will starve.

In western and southern Africa, average temperatures will be up to 10 deg C higher than now. There will be severe drying in Central America, on both sides of the Mediterranean, and in a broad band across the Middle East, northern India and South-east Asia. With the glaciers gone, Asia’s great rivers will be mostly dry in the summer. Even 1m of sea level rise will take out half the world’s food-rich river deltas, from the Nile to the Mekong.

So there will be famines and massive waves of refugees, and ruthless measures taken to hold borders shut against them. The bitter irony is that the old-rich countries whose emissions did the most to bring on this disaster will suffer least from it, at least in the early stages. By and large, the farther away you are from the equator, the less you will be hurt by the changes.

In Britain, with 4 deg C hotter temperatures, there would doubtless be severe food rationing, but the country could still just feed itself if it farmed every available piece of land: The heat would not be lethal, and it would still be raining. That is one advantage of being an island surrounded by sea; the other is that it is easier to avoid being completely overrun by refugees. Britain would be almost unrecognisable, but it would be seen as one of the luckiest places on the planet.

The trouble is that 4 deg C hotter is not a destination. It is a way-station on the way to 5 deg C or 6 deg C hotter, where all the ice on the planet melts and the only habitable land is what’s still above sea level around the Arctic Ocean. Once we have passed 2 deg C hotter, we are at ever-greater risk of triggering the big ‘feedback’ that takes control of the warming process out of our hands.

At the moment, we are in control of the situation if we want to be, for it is our excess emissions of greenhouse gases that are causing the warming. But if melting permafrost and warming oceans begin to give up the immense amounts of greenhouse gases that they contain, then we find ourselves on a climate escalator that inexorably takes us up through 3 deg C, 4 deg C, 5 deg C and 6 deg C hotter with no way to get off.

The point where we lose control, most scientists believe, is when the average global temperature reaches between 2 deg C and 3 deg C warmer. After that, it hardly matters whether human beings cut their own emissions, because the natural emissions triggered by the warming will overwhelm all our efforts. If we do not stop at 2 deg C, our current civilisation is probably doomed.

That is why the leaders of all the world’s big industrial and developing countries, meeting in Italy last summer, adopted 2 deg C hotter as their joint ‘never exceed’ goal. (Interestingly, they did not explain the reasoning behind that goal to the rest of us. Mustn’t frighten the children, I suppose.)

Meanwhile, the people tasked with negotiating a new climate treaty at Copenhagen in December struggle bravely onwards, but show no signs of coming up with a deal that will hold us under the 2 deg C increase mark. Global emissions must start dropping by 3 per cent a year right away, but over the past decade they have been rising at 3 per cent annually.

Everybody involved in the process understands the stakes and agrees on the goal. Almost everybody knows what the treaty will eventually look like, but they do not believe they can yet sell that deal to the folks back home, so it probably won’t happen this year. Or next.

Tick tock…

The writer is a London-based independent journalist.

I dag gik den danske version af earth hours hjemmeside online:

Siden er et projekt der er lavet herinde på arbejdet, og syntes faktisk det er blevet super fedt!

Se sitet på www.wwf.dk/earthhour og husk at slukke lyset den 16. december

Desi cu intarziere, s-a rezolvat problema lumii pe strada mea…aceasta problema o invocasem acum ceva vreme in articolul despre earth-hour-aleea-calinesti.

Am trimis acum vreo 3 luni un mail semnat catre primarie, iar acum 4-5 zile am primit si un raspuns oficial, printr-o hartie semnata de primar. si astazi s-a produs minunea: lumina pe Aleea calinesti…

I stumbled into a brilliant Social Movement Marketing case study at Mashable’s Summer of Social Good Conference last week. Andy Ridley, the executive director of Earth Hour, presented an inspiring case study of the work his organization (WWF) has been doing.

Previously I’ve discussed how successful social movements are able to balance a seemingly contradictory dynamic: They empower individuals by forming one collective identity. Followers of a movement join a group of many to achieve personal betterment; the way mackerel form schools to increase the chances of survival for each individual fish.

Abstruse as this may be, Earth Hour is a perfect example of how to work this balance in the cause world.

You may have participated in Earth Hour without even knowing it. In Sydney, Australia in 2007, Earth Hour convinced 2 million people to shut off their lights for an hour at the same time. The stunt has now become an annual global event that, in 2009 saw 4,000 cities and 1 billion people participate. (Watch a great video about it here.)

For one organization to inspire one fifth of the planet to act in unison, they needed for all participants to bear the responsibility of promoting the movement. Earth Hour’s brand, manifested in its culture of joy, communion, and hope, transcends geography, nationality, and class. However, it was Earth Hour’s ability to let people personalize the brand that really generated a movement.

People took those core virtues of joy, communion, and hope and ran with them. Some people organized candlelit beer pong, some organized rock concerts, some hosted dinner parties, some had bon fires, and the ideas went on and on. From Israel to Iowa, people took ownership of the movement, but everything remained in the context of the culture of Earth Hour.

However, we must recognize that this wasn’t the luck of the draw. Earth Hour set out to encourage people to personalize the brand or movement. They offered access to download any of the promotional creative work to use as templates, created a forum for people to share materials they had created on their own, and made available all of the social networking tools necessary for people to take the reins of the movement.

Brands must offer both the collective identity and the personal reason to believe. Earth Hour mastered both and changed the world, at least for 60 minutes. As the media landscape changes to favor individuals, relinquishing brand ownership to the people will inevitably be necessary…all we can do now is set the context.

Med det här inlägget vill jag mest visa hur mycket Fairtrade det finns i affärerna. Detta är vår lilla samling på det som har lockat oss mest. Det finns utöver det här mycket mörk choklad i hyllorna för dig som tycker bättre om det. Det lockar dock inte oss i det här hemmet.

Det här står i vår hylla (sen har vi massor av fler förpackningar av diverse varor som ännu inte är slut). Ni ser ju i helhet vad det är och får annars gärna fråga. Jag kan rekommendera allt som finns på bilderna. Speciellt de varor som har fått både KRAV-märkning och Fairtrade.

Mjölken från Arla är inte Fairtrade utan står där eftersom den stöttade Earth hour.

Har du missat vad Fairtrade är? Läs gärna mer här och här! Du kan också använda sökfunktionen i menyn till höger för att hitta fler inlägg som jag har skrivit om Fairtrade.

English conclusion:

(I just want to show how much Fairtrade there are on the market. This is our collection of Fairtrade products and we also have a lot of more which isn’t there yet. You should really look after this when you buy food or candy the next time!

You can read more about Fairtrade on their website).

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991 caused a lot of destruction. Most prominent of them was setting the oil wells of Kuwait on fire. Imagine the herculean task of extinguishing these oil well fires, which raged both horizontally and vertically. Here are a series of 5 videos which shows how the experts managed to do it and what they used to achieve that. Salute to the ingenuity of the master mind, who decided to use the jet engine on the water nozzle to create that impact, which burst the fire (video 3 – notice the change of water flow between 3.23 & 3.59 onwards).

Este vídeo mostra como foi desenvolvida a campanha Earth Hour. Mostra todo envolvimento, o esforço de mídia e toda mobilização em prol da campanha.

Em contrapartida o vídeo abaixo mostra a importância dada aqui por terras tupininquins a campanha da WWF.

Pra quem não lembra foram feitas algumas “menções honrosas” nos principais telejornais, jornais e revistas.