caravia/green

Interesting discussion about Carbon management.

" If you thought that IT and information security were massive cost centers, you ain't seen nothing yet. Get ready for carbon management--you can start by freeing up a corner office for a new executive, the Carbon Information Manager. This person will have one eye on the constantly evolving state of carbon regulation, and the other eye on the million-and-one new metrics and targets that every corner of the enterprise will have to meet. Or so says a new "Best Practices" report put out by the Carbon Disclosure Project in conjunction with IBM.

Reading through the 20-page document [PDF], it became clear to me that mounting an all-out propaganda assault on the scientific consensus around anthropogenic climate change will cost far less money than the added organizational overhead necessary to really cut carbon emissions. And in an odd turn, it's also clear that more regulation could make carbon management cheaper, insofar as there's just enough regulation at present to create expensive mandates, but not enough to provide the clarity in metrics and terminology that's needed to carry out those mandates. But if you're skeptical about either of these points, just take a look at the CDP report."

Ecological minded people living in houses in the trees in Costa Rica.

Resilience is the new mode word, all speak about it, the capacity of an ecosystem to absorb schocks and resist and adapt.

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Ecosystem resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to tolerate disturbance without collapsing into a qualitatively different state that is controlled by a different set of processes. A resilient ecosystem can withstand shocks and rebuild itself when necessary. Resilience in social systems has the added capacity of humans to anticipate and plan for the future. Humans are part of the natural world. We depend on ecological systems for our survival and we continuously impact the ecosystems in which we live from the local to global scale. Resilience is a property of these linked social-ecological systems (SES). "Resilience" as applied to ecosystems, or to integrated systems of people and the natural environment, has three defining characteristics:

* The amount of change the system can undergo and still retain the same controls on function and structure
* The degree to which the system is capable of self-organization
* The ability to build and increase the capacity for learning and adaptation"

The Grendex Index compares different countries relation to green consumtion and ecology. In their survey Brazil and India are the most green countries in the world, US the least.
They rate people's consumtion of readymade food, bottled water, cars, clothes, travel and other variables.

Great idea, to build bikes of bamboo and not of metal makes them affordable and ecologically clean to people in the Third World and in cities where you want invest in biosdegradable materials.

Does your food travel more than you? Eat local, my friends!

Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops, an authoritative new study shows, undermining repeated claims that a switch to the controversial technology is needed to solve the growing world food crisis.

The study - carried out over the past three years at the University of Kansas in the US grain belt - has found that GM soya produces about 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent, contradicting assertions by advocates of the technology that it increases yields.

Professor Barney Gordon, of the university's department of agronomy, said he started the research - reported in the journal Better Crops - because many farmers who had changed over to the GM crop had "noticed that yields are not as high as expected even under optimal conditions". He added: "People were asking the question 'how come I don't get as high a yield as I used to?'"

He grew a Monsanto GM soybean and an almost identical conventional variety in the same field. The modified crop produced only 70 bushels of grain per acre, compared with 77 bushels from the non-GM one.

Kosher green alternatives to the most important Jewish holidays are presented on Sustainableblog, one of my favorite green blogs.