The successful budding entrepreneurs sold out their beautiful cotton bag at the Rotary Club event held at Lauderdale House on 17 March. Congratulations!

Photo: Channing Shool Greenagers attired with the Carbonica T-shirt.

All proceeds from the sale are for Rotary's Polio Campaign in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Join our campaign for a paperless future.

Every day we consume endless amounts of paper, all of which we can do without.

Utility bills can be received online, correspondence, bank statements. There is increasingly less and less justification for the paper existence of what is received in the post.

This is even more true of all the printed press.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

(1) Don't buy printed magazines or newspapers, read them online. It is cheaper, and you have more choice of content. Huge amounts of paper are used every day by the printed presses. It is the way of the past. Thankfully young people are not buying newspapers anymore. The average person only reads a small fraction of all the articles printed on a newspaper, so most of the paper is wasted. Paper can only be recycled a limited number of times, so the printed press is responsible for depleting our forests!

(2) Get your bills and bank statements online. It is easier to administer, keep track of and it reduces clutter. It makes it easier to pay bills also. No need of a paper shredder either.

(3) Buy e-books. Switch to e-books. They are cheaper than hardcopy books and the more demand there is the greater the number of titles on offer! This is obviously a growth industry at its infancy but it is going to be huge. Buy an e-reader. The current models (Sony and Kindle-2 - the latter only available in the US at the moment) store a few hundred titles at any given time.

(4) Don't print emails. If you need to keep an email to deal with later and you're afraid it will get lost in a sea of emails in your inbox, why not copy it to a "to-do" folder or paste it in a WORD document to deal with separately. If you need to share it with someone, forward it to them by email.

We are embracing the e-reader revolution with open arms. In association with Amazon.co.uk, you can purchase the Sony Reader by clicking on the link below. 

Carbonica will plant a tree for every purchase. How cool is that.

THE FUTURE IS PAPERLESS!

The new green film from Franny Amstrong, director of "McLibel".  

I finally got round to watching "The Age of Stupid", with some apprehension, because I suspected it would be an angry movie. Also, some of us can't stop thinking of Pete Postlethwaite as a rather gruesome character, after all the ghastly roles he's played, including Kobayashi, the somber and loyal assistant of Kaiser Soze in Bryan Singer's "Usual Suspects". As it turns out, "gruesome" is perfect for the role, and Postlethwaite is perfectly cast as a man living alone in 2055 and moaning about the past destruction of the world.

I suspected the film would be Greenpeace meets Michael Moore meets the town vicar. It's all of those things. Then you have the totally anti-climatic recommendation of former major of London Ken Livingstone, who said that everyone should be forcibly made to see this film. Oh dear! London is such a happier place now that he and his Stalinist ethos are banished. In fact a recommendation from him would be in my eyes enough reason not to see the film, a very comprehensive anti-recommendation, but I thought that given that we don't have many environmental movies on at the moment, I might as well give it a chance.

Having said all those things, I think it's an interesting film. Do go and see it.  

It does help raise awareness, which is essential, given that most of us are in limbo, and quite literally sleep-walking into a global disaster. So, the film does greater good than harm, and as we are all in the same boat, -by "we" meaning those of us who're environmental activists- but we don't all articulate our thoughts in the same way. Personally I think that doom doesn't sell (and has no impact if it's not articulated logically, like in Al Gore's "An inconvenient truth", as opposed to the bag of emotions presented in this movie) and doesn't particularly fix problems either.

It is much more effective in the fight against climate change to start thinking of solutions rather than waste any amount of energy finding whom to blame.

And onto the subject of blame, of which there's plenty in the movie.

Obviously the pet hate here is the oil industry and the global mega-emitter, the United States. Well, actually an Eurovision "zero points" on both accounts. As it happens, the main culprit of the situation we find ourselves in is not oil, but coal, which is hardly mentioned in the movie. And the US may be the main emitter now, but it wasn't several decades ago, and we mustn't forget that the problem we have now is very much an inherited problem, and the outcome of decades of industrial activity, so it is the accumulation of past emissions (current emissions will have an impact in the future). In fact, our generation is probably the greenest ever after the industrial revolution, and we all try to do our bit, including with our recycling, etc. If we compare this with the situation in the 1950s in a big city like London, the Big Smog of 1952 was the outcome of such a universal use of coal in households that people back then had a carbon footprint of astronomically orders of magnitude greater than that of present-day Londoners.

In spite of the wastefulness of our present day, and rampant consumerism, our industrial activity, and disposal of waste etc, we are much more efficient and greener in our industrial production and as a result we have a fraction of the carbon footprint than most people had in industrialised countries during the best part of the twentieth century.

The movie is sentimental about the past and perhaps indulges too much in castigating the present generation.

One can go too far with the blame game and cause more havoc than good. This reminds me how the green movement inadvertently contributed in a significant measure to the situation we're in now, by opposing nuclear energy with such fanatism during the last decades. If we are emitting too much CO2 because of our dependence on fossil fuels (coal, gas and oil, in that order) to generate electricity is due to the fact that we sidelined nuclear energy as our main source of energy. There are reasons for this. There was a widespread fear of all things nuclear because of the Cold War, the safety issues, concern about waste disposal, etc. But the main reason was that the green movement stalked the nuclear industry and lobbied governments very successfully until the coffin was well and properly nailed.

Actually radioactive waste decays to safe emission levels within 100 years and the myth that was created around the fact that waste was active for millennia was played and replayed by the likes of Greenpeace, and very successfully spun in the media. We all found it awfully romantic to see these brave men on speedboats chasing the nuclear waste boats as they dumped the nasty looking barrels of concrete-sealed waste in the Atlantic. No one could fail to find this outrageous and feel indignant at these wanton acts of environmental terrorism.

The angry activist can be a force of evil, quite unwittingly. If back then the debate had been constructively focused on finding better ways of dealing with nuclear waste, investing more in nuclear research, then today we would be in all likelihood living in a totally decarbonised society, tapping from the endless energy source that we can derive from that wonderful "free meal" that nature gives us: the atom.

Brunella

brunella@carbonica.org 

The Rotary Foundation are holding an art exhibition at Lauderdale House in Highgate, London, to raise funds for their Polio Campaign, in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The clever and enterprising girls from the Channing School will be present there selling their carbon neutral cotton bag, which they designed and is sponsored by Carbonica.

"Greenagers" will be selling their bags today 17th March between 7.30 and 10pm.  They will donate any profits from selling the bags towards Rotary's Polio Campaign.

Be there!

I wish them every success! I can also anticipate to you that you will be able to buy the bags online when our front page is relaunched later this week.

Brunella

brunella@carbonica.org

Social networking fans can turn away from niche green groups in Facebook and myspace: a new site for people with an interest in the environment has launched.

Cooltribe.com is the new Facebook for green people.

The format is similar to other networking sites, where visitors create profiles, make friends, message one another, share videos and media content. Members can create "tribes" - these range from being discussion groups on a given topic to a group of friends, companies, charities, etc.

I have tried it and I rather like it! (I was never into the social networking thing, but I think I might get into it). I would encourage people to take part and share their views/concerns. At the end of the day, it's vox populi the only thing that counts, and that's how politicians will finally pay heed to our concerns about global warming.

Brunella

brunella@carbonica.org

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