The Volvo Experience

Volvo has launched a remarkable campaign in the Netherlands. People who purchase a Volvo C30 in the Netherlands can pick up there car in Göteborg (Sweden). The trip, visit to the Torslande car factory and Volvo museum are included in the car's price.

This is a nice initiative to promote Volvo and the Swedish culture, if it was not for the fact that the C30 is being assembled in Ghent (Belgium), located close to the Dutch border. These brand new cars have to travel over 1000 km north to reach Göteborg so there Dutch owners can fly to Sweden, pick them up and drive them through Denmark, Germany to finally reach the Netherlands.

This seems a bit of an odd strategy. You design and build a fuel efficient car, promote yourself as a green company then you ask your buyers to pick up the car on the other side of Europe.

picture: Google Maps

Will CCS be part of the solution?

Dealing with climate change can be done in different ways, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a possibility still in the development phase. The German pilot project shows us that CCS has a long way to go before becoming operational.

What is CCS and how can it help us in the struggle against climate change? The main idea is to capture and store CO2 so it does not reach the earth's atmosphere. This will be achieved by introducing a CCS technology near a large scale emitter of CO2, like a fossil fuel power plant. The CO2 is captured by scrubbing it from the air and can be stored underground.

The first pilot Carbon Capture and Storage power plant in Germany has not been successful so far:

"Vattenfall’s Schwarze Pumpe project in Spremberg, northern Germany, launched in a blaze of publicity last September, was a beacon of hope, the first scheme to link the three key stages of trapping, transporting and burying the greenhouse gases.

The Swedish company, however, surprised a recent conference when it admitted that the €70m (£60.3m) project was venting the CO2 straight into the atmosphere. “It was supposed to begin injecting by March or April of this year but we don’t have a permit. This is a result of the local public having questions about the safety of the project,” said Staffan Gortz, head of carbon capture and storage communication at Vattenfall. He said he did not expect to get a permit before next spring: “People are very, very sceptical.”

The spread of localised resistance is a force that some fear could sink Europe’s attempts to build 10 to 12 demonstration projects for carbon capture and storage (CCS) by 2015. The plan had been to transport up to 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the power plant each year and inject it into depleted gas reservoirs at a giant gasfield near the Polish border….

Stuart Haszeldine, a CCS expert at the University of Edinburgh, warned of the danger of opposition towards CCS snowballing into a “bandwagon of negativity” if too many early projects were rejected. “Once you’ve screwed up one or two of them, people are going to think ‘if they rejected this in Barendrecht, there must be a reason’,” he said."

The public opinion is very negative towards these new technologies. As time is running out we need to deal with this threat now and by opposing helpful measures we are only getting further away from our goal.

Sources:
Grist
The Guardian

What about the Water Footprint?

The Carbon Footprint finally seems to have taken off and now a new tool emerges the Water Footprint. Similar to the Carbon Footprint the Water Footprint can be used to calculate your water usage.

This tool can also be used in a more interesting way, manufacturers can label there products' footprint so consumers are aware how much water a certain item uses during it's manufacturing process. Did you know that for the production of one cup of fresh coffee you need 140 litres of water while the production of one kilogram of beef requires 16,000 litres of water.

An pioneer in this field is Raisio a Finnish food manufacturer who introduced a H2O label on its oat flakes.

According to the New York Times:

"Over the past couple of years, the idea of reporting carbon footprints for various products, as a way of allowing consumers to make informed choices about the items they buy, has gained wider acceptance. Now there are signs that other indicators — including water-use footprints — appear to be coming into the mix.

The label used by Raisio indicates the water that the plant uses for growth and production, as well as what’s discarded as waste water. The company said it was “the world’s first food company to add an H2O label to product packaging” and that it had developed its own calculation model because no internationally established formula and product label yet exists."

Would you keep in mind a carbon or water footprint when deciding which product you will purchase? Or do you think labeling is getting out of control?

Source: Worldchanging

G8 summit in L'Aquila

L'Aquila (it), ravaged by a devastating earthquake earlier this year, hosted on the 8th, 9th and 10th of July 2009 the G8 summit. On the agenda: reaching an agreement on the climate change objectives.

The first day the G8 top came to the consensus that they will not allow a raise in temperature by more than two degrees Celsius in comparison to the level of the beginning of last century.

On the second day the G8 summit expanded with the emerging economies, the result: The emerging economies agree with the objectives but do not want to cut down there CO2 emissions with 50% by 2050.

During the last day they decided a change of course in there policy towards the fight against malnutricion. Instead of donating loads of food there will be investments in the third worlds' food production.

There have been made some important steps towards the climate change threath, let us hope they are sufficient and lead to action.

Reflection on The Green Week

The Green Week is now well behind us and it is time to take a moment and look back on this event. It has been a great opportunity for CHAMP to take part in a big and international event. We were able to reach many different actors and attend numerous conferences.

European commissioner for the environment Stavros Dimas said: “We need an ambitious international agreement at the Copenhagen conference in December followed by determined and effective international action. It is the future of our planet that is at stake and time is running out.” He added that, “Climate change is a cross-cutting issue that not only affects the natural environment we depend on but also has important impacts on our economies and social fabric.” We feel that the world is comming to crossroads, the decisions made in the upcomming COP15 will have a great influence in the outcome of climate change.

Picture by Sven Schultz

The Age of Stupid

Yesterdays evening event on the Green Week was a screening of the very new movie " The Age of Stupid", directed by Fanny Armstrong,a young and very dedicated British filmmaker.
Even if it was said before that this movie, of course, does not reflect the opinion of the European Commission, I think it was a very good decision of the organisers to show this movie at this event!
The auditorium was filled to the last seat and people were eagerly waiting outside to get in even half an hour before it started.

" The Age of Stupid" is a hybrid of animation, documentary and drama:
The Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?

In small "flashbacks" the movie shows what already has had happened in year 2008 - and still no action was taken! The great devastation after Hurricane Katrina,melting of the glaciers in the Alps and droughts and fire in the US aswell as in Southern Europe.

Additionally the film follows people from all over the world:
- There is the yound woman from Nigeria, whose life is strongly influenced by the devastation SHELL has left behind when exploiting the oil resources and whose only dream is to become a doctor, a good one,as she stresses.

- There is the young and successful Indian man who started the first Indian low-cost airline in 2005....no matter what people tell about climate change effetcs

- the old man, working as a mountaineering guide in the French Alps, who cannot believe his eyes that his beloved glaciers melt faster from year to year

- the man from New Orleans, struck by Katrina and working on an oil platform

- a sister and brother from Iraq, who fled to Jordan from the war and are deeply traumatized by what they had experienced in their young lifes

- and the British family, who tries to live as sustainable as possible. And the father of the family who sells windmills. Well, rather: he tries to sell windfarms to towns at the windy British countryside and is fought against with all the town inhabitants can find.

A very characterizing situation is shown when a British lady tells the filmers that, of course, she is concerened about climate change and of course she is in favur of renewable energies - but please not in her neighboorhood.

Let this be enough telling -the film is very worth seeing!

At The Age of Stupid you can find more information!

The Green Week day one

Dear visitors,

As you have read in the post below we are currently at The Green Week in Brussels, where we are spreading CHAMP and attending conferences about climate change. During the first day of The Green Week we got an introduction of what is expected of the Green Week with conferences and workgroups on different levels and with multiple accents. With over 4000 registered participants this years edition set a new record.

Throughout the conferences we notice big expectations for the upcoming COP15 and the hope for a unified response to climate change. Along with the current economical crisis, which will make a climate change mitigation harder. Though if dealt with properly will create prosperity and green jobs hence be a part of the solution to weather this economical storm.

Keep up to date and visit us for an refelction of the second day of The Green Week.