Environment : Activists

If industrialized countries are allowed to purchase the carbon rights of forests, groups from the Americas, Africa, and Asia fear their ancestral lands may be taken away. They worry that the benefactors of the carbon market will be governments or wealthy landholders, and not them.

Read more about indigenous activism here. 

The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.

Learn more about the jury at Maidstone Crown Court here. 

A group of campaigners from environmental NGO Greenpeace broke into a site owned by Syncrude Canada Ltd, a consortium of different oil companies, in Alberta to protest against the company's involvement in new oil sands developments.

The protesters blocked a waste water pipe and unfurled a banner labelling tar sands as 'the World's Dirtiest Oil'. The campaign group is urging the government of Alberta not to approve new licences for the extraction of oil sands.

Tensions are so high over a proposed dam in the Brazilian Amazon that violence broke out at a May meeting in the city of Altamira to discuss the project. A thousand indigenous people from 26 ethnic tribes crowded into a high school gymnasium. Members of the the Kayapó, Juruna, Arara, Xipaia, Kuruaia, and other tribes that live along the mighty river’s second longest tributary, the Xingu, don’t get together in Altamira very often. But the $6.6 billion dam, called the Belo Monte, that Brazil’s electric utility, Electronorte, plans to build along the 1,200-mile Xingu River will affect them all. It would be the world’s third largest dam, with a potential installed capacity of 11,181 MW—and its reservoir would flood 100,000 acres, putting many tribal lands underwater.

Read more on the Amazonian Dam here 

The "Space Race" of the 1960's grew out of Cold War tensions between the USA and "Soviet Union". In the several decades following the first Sputnik launch, each new rocket-propelled venture to follow symbolized the technological might of "Superpowered" enemies. Rockets, being smoking, roaring engines of war, as well as of moon landing, unfailingly got public attention.

Dr. James E. Hansen is, today, schedule to lob the 'ticking climate time bomb' metaphor into the hearing range of the US Congress. He his testimony will step beyond the science and venture into Federal policy making for climate action.

Read more about Dr. James E. Hansen's speech to congress.

More than 120 environment and development groups have questioned the credibility of proposed World Bank funds to help the poor fight global warming, even as the UN's climate change agency broadly welcomed them.

Last month 40 developing and industrialized countries agreed on two separate multi-billion dollar funds, managed by the World Bank and regional development banks, one to help developing countries cut their contribution to climate change and the other to help them prepare better for more storms and floods.

The NGOs doubted the World Bank's qualifications to fund projects which curb carbon emissions given its history of loans to coal plants, including one this year to an Indian plant which will use the latest, cleanest boilers.

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The team led by Shearman used pattern recognition software called eCognition to analyze satellite images from 2002 to 2007, and then compared them with vegetation maps from the 1970s, produced by the Australian Defence Forces. They also factored in population growth, logging rates and evidence of fire damage.

According to the new report, 46% of the area of forest that has been destroyed has been used by subsistence farmers – the population of PNG is growing at 3% per year. But the authors blamed loggers for most of the loss.

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Greenpeace urged industrialised nations to set up an international fund to fight deforestation but warned it would require at least 30 billion dollars torun per year.

The primary strategy of the fund would be to see rich nations give poorer ones money to preserve their natural forests instead of felling trees to create farmland.

Greenpeace asked that its proposal be made part of a blueprint for fighting deforestation in negotiations for a post-2012 climate deal.

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Britain's leading power generating companies have put rivalries aside to draw up plans to counter the expected wave of protests against a proposed new generation of coal-fired power plants.

More than 40 security and media executives from the "Big Six" energy companies, as well as an array of independent generators including Drax, met in London to discuss how to prevent demonstrators disrupting their planned expansion.

They discussed tactics for keeping demonstrators from entering power stations and potentially causing costly shutdowns. Companies fear this summer could see one of the strongest campaigns against coal-fired power stations by environmental groups for years.

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