Green news & views

Nokia's President and CEO unveiled a new concept Nokia mobile phone that is, at last, pretty environmentally friendly.

The new Nokia concept mobile, branded "Remade" is supposedly constructed from nothing new, thus reducing the carbon footprint of the device, using less raw materials, reducing landfill waste and making the whole production process more energy efficient.

The National Trust has a novel idea for environmental work this leap year with it's own Green Leap Day.

All of the Trust's 4800 staff are being encouraged to take February 29th off and focus their efforts into green projects. The idea is that staff will work on going green at home with numerous simple household tasks such as:

Over at the BBC there's a great video story on a car that runs on air.

The car, well, a small van actually, has a tiny engine that runs on compressed air and uses other fuels for longer journeys. That means that during the urban cycle the vehicle makes absolutely no emissions at all. Except, for now, a bit of noise.

Inventor Guy Negre, an ex Formula 1 engineer, said that:

The BBC has reported on another body of scientists adding their collective voice to the climate change debate.
This time it's the AGU, the American Geophysical Union, the world's largest organisation of earth & space scientists, that has revised its public policy to add further weight to the climate debate.

Globalisation is a fascinating concept: you buy goods that are cheap because they were made in a country where the production costs are lower and then you wonder why the company down the road making the same local goods at local prices goes out of business!

Japan's Oji Paper has admitted to lying "for decades" about the amount of recycled paper in their products.

The leading paper maker in Japan has come clean about the fact that, in one case, the amount of recycled fibre in their copy paper was not 50% as claimed but only between 5 and 10%.

Some of Oji Paper's envelopes were thought to contain as much as 70% recycled paper whereas the real content was just 30%.

*cough*

I beg your pardon?

Did you just say "You can drive a big truck and still be responsible"?

Those are the words of Jim Press, Vice Chairman of Chrysler, to the BBC as he sings the praises of the new 2008 Dodge Ram - a truck that has 5.7 litre 345 horse power V8 engine and is apparently 5% more fuel-efficient than its predecessor. With that in mind he adds that "it's kind to the environment".

The ill-considered rush to provide biofuels for Europe & the world has led to a number of negative environmental issues.

Where biofuel was once seen as an easy alternative to producing greener vehicles, it was thought that simply fuelling the same old vehicles with "greener" fuel would be the answer to the CO2 issues.

However the use of biofuel, mainly due to these negative issues, is almost negligible.

It looks like the deadlock at the UN Bali summit has been broken.
After two weeks of intense talks it would have been a shambolic waste of time, money and effort for the summit to end without an agreement, without a clear path, no roadmap to a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.
But which way did it go? What did the UN head, Ban Ki Moon, do to reach an agreement?

Whilst debating the subject of "Global Warming is a Hoax" with some people on the Internet (note that it was a pre-loaded debate and not "Is Global warming a Hoax?") I was kindly introduced to the following piece of footage.

Before you watch the following clip I just want to say that although we're proponents of the green movement we encourage open-minded debate and clarity of thought and we always have a healthy dose of scepticism in our thinking, be it toward the green and non-green sides of the argument.