No New Coal for the UK! stop Eon Kingsnorth . . .

First, read more about reasons to oppose new coal fired power plants: http://www.nonewcoal.org.uk/

Then, consider making a small online action:
The noble art of Google bombing - of making a website rise up the search results by encouraging other websites to link to them in a particular way - is being harnessed by blogs campaigning against new coal-fired power stations, especially Kingsnorth. The idea is to make the No New Coal website appear at the top of the list anytime a search is done for 'Eon' (which is, of course, the company so intent on building a plant at Kingsnorth).

Anyone with a website, blog or profile on the likes of MySpace or Facebook can help out, so if you'd like to help here are instructions purloined from Climate Change Action, via Greenpeace, via Lizzie:

The more links to a site, the higher it climbs in Google rankings. So, if enough people make the word 'Eon' link to the No New Coal site, pretty soon it'll top the list of anyone searching for Eon. (This tactic was succesfully used a few years ago to make 'swivel-eyed loons' link to UKIP).

Two weeks ago www.nonewcoal.org.uk wasn't in the top 50 sites when searching for Eon. I just searched and it was at number 5! cool!

So a simple online action can help us get our electronic placards in their face without getting out on the cold winter streets.

If you have a website, blog, myspace, bebo, forum account, etc. then please place a link to http://www.nonewcoal.org.uk.

Ideally you write 'Eon' and place a hyperlink to http://www.nonewcoal.org.uk from that text. Anyone can do this! Blog comments/forums are easiest. Good websites are most effective.

If you're wondering what else to write, you could copy this whole piece.

To pip eon to the top will require a lot of effort so tell your friends, consider putting this simple action in your newsletters, spread the word online...

Notes:

* 1. It works best if you mention Eon several times in an article.
* 2. If you are posting the link in a blog post then put Eon in the title and the tags.
* 3.The more important the site the more kick nonewcoal.org.uk gets from the link.
* 4. If you are really determined then consider setting up a fake site like the EON CSR blog that way you can link loads of times to nonewcoal.org.uk from a site that is very relevent!
* http://eon-csr.blogspot.com/
* 5. Why not take this is seriously as a real world action and forward it to people with green blogs/campaign groups etc.

To see this post on the Greenpeace website visit http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/climate/google-bomb-eon-20081208

Movie night on Thirsday

Hi,

 

Does anybody from you have Life in Cold Blood?

We would like to show it on Thursday and it will be great if you can borrow 2 first series.

 

Thanks a lot

 

Lena

A bit of news and remember, meeting this Tuesday at 5pm in Conservatory!

Hi everyone,

 

Hope you’re having a good weekend.

 

First off, just wanted to remind you that we’re having our next meeting this Tuesday, Dec. 2, at 5pm in the Conservatory.

 

Second, if you haven’t done the carbon footprint survey yet, do it!

The link is here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=HfAlg_2f3hvg1ozb6mOIXrxQ_3d_3d

And then encourage your hallmates, officemates, and general silwoodmates to do it to if they haven’t already. The more we know about what Silwoodians are willing to change in their lives, and the more input we get from the campus community, the more luck we’ll have with our efforts to cut Silwood’s carbon footprint.

 

Third, I propose that as our first big club outing we all go to the National Climate March in London on Saturday, Dec. 6.

For more info see here: http://www.campaigncc.org

We can talk about it on Tuesday, but I think that if we want the government to take action, we need to make it visible and obvious that climate change is an issue we care about!

 

Next, (fourth for those of you who like counting, but I’m getting bored of it ;-) ), I thought I’d give you guys a little run-down of what we heard at the (really good!) panel talk on Climate Change on Thursday, hosted by the public interest research centre’s (http://pirc.info/) Climate Safety group (www.climatesafety.org).

The panel included Caroline Lucas (MEP for SE england and head of the green party), George Monbiot (author of Heat and various other books and environmental journalist bits), Jeremy Leggett (founder of a solar E company and general energy guy), Kevin Anderson (from the energy program of the Tyndall Centre, manchester), Tim Helweg-Larsen (director of pirc), and Leila Deen (activist for I’m not sure which groups, google seems to say World Development Movement and Plane Stupid).

There were a lot of interesting bits and details that I won’t write out today (maybe tomorrow), but the main points were:

-The climate change problem is likely even more serious than people are making out so far – the effects of even a 2 degree C increase in global average temperature could be really terrible, especially considering positive feedback loops triggered by the melting of sea ice and methane release from melting permafrost.

-to prevent this, carbon emissions need to peak soon, and then drop dramatically – which means that real, big, changes need to be made. Each of us recycling more and remembering to turn off lights will not be enough – system-wide, country-wide changes are necessary.

-George Monbiot set out a practical plan for how to achieve necessary reductions in the UK – read more about his plan in the climate safety report (download it at www.climatesafety.org).

-Our action is needed! Everyone agrees that solutions to the energy/climate problem exist – we don’t need new technologies, just better infrastructure, etc – the job ahead is to educate everyone about the problems and solutions, and convince governments to take confident action. Furthermore, everyone agrees that there are lots of things to be done, tipping points to push, etc – we should all just pick something to push for and go for it!

Nothing too new I guess . . . I’ll send along more details soon.

Ok, that’s all for now!

See you Tuesday!
best

Yael

 

 

--------------------------------------------

PhD student, Division of Biology

Imperial College London

Silwood Park Campus

Ascot, Berkshire SL5 7PY UK

+44 (0) 20 759 42255

 

2008 Silwood Carbon Footprint Survey launched today

Lizzie launched today this year's survey on Silwood's Carbon footprint. Of course all green club members are expected to do the survey. Please also talk to your friends and colleagues and tell them that it is important for all of us to answer these 10 questions.
Here's the official invitation:

Help Silwood go CARBON NEUTRAL!!

Dear Silwoodians,


The Green Club invites you to take part in this year's exciting Silwood Carbon Footprint survey! We’re particularly interested in transportation, as we think this probably accounts for a large part of Silwood’s carbon footprint. The survey is only 10 questions long and should take less than 5 minutes of your time. Please please do complete the survey even if you did it last year. There are some new questions, and in order to see if the measures we’ve put in place are having an impact we need to be able to analyse the changes between years.

To complete the survey, just click on the following link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=HfAlg_2f3hvg1ozb6mOIXrxQ_3d_3d

As if the warm green glow you’ll get from completing the survey isn’t enough, three lucky winners will receive a copy of A User's Guide to the 21st Century by Alex Steffan (see http://www.amazon.co.uk/Worldchanging-Users-Guide-21st-Century/dp/0810970856/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226874816&sr=8-1 for more info), and one top prize winner will also receive a bottle of organic sparkling wine from Sussex! For your chance to win, after you’ve completed the survey send an email to silwoodgreenclub@gmail.com to be included in our fabulous prize draw!

The deadline for completing the survey is Friday 12th December, and winners will be announced after the fun run on Silwood Christmas Day (Friday 19th December).

We are a campus full of ecologists and conservationists – if we can’t do something about our carbon footprint then how can we expect anyone to? If everyone spends just five minutes to complete this survey it really will help us to make Silwood greener.

That all-important link again: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=HfAlg_2f3hvg1ozb6mOIXrxQ_3d_3d

Many thanks in advance for completing the survey and being such super green Silwoodians,
The Silwood Green Club

thinking about future events, and a bit of news

This is a long post so here's a table of contents(!)

1-Can anyone help organize the flying debate?

2-National Tree Week events

3-Anyone want to contribute to Will’s conservation website?

4-The Rector’s Q&A session

5-A few more ideas related to our strategy for a college environmental policy

6-info emails are all going to be on the blog as well

First off, we talked a little while ago about organizing a debate about academic-related flights (for fieldwork, conferences, meetings, etc.) Hanno said he would be interested in helping organize this – is there anyone else who can help him?

And if there’s enough interest in this event, let’s pick a date! It would be cool to do it before Christmas I think.

Second, National Tree Week is this coming week – there’s an events listing here: http://www.treecouncil.org.uk/?q=node/43

Unfortunately there don’t appear to be any events in Berkshire or Surrey, and the London planting events all seem like small group things, but this looks like fun if you’re looking for something to do next Saturday:

Date: Saturday 29 November, 11am-5pm
Organiser: Islington Council
Borough: Islington
Location: Highbury Fields, Top Field, Highbury Corner, N1
Event details: As part of National Tree Week, Islington Council has organised an event to celebrate trees in Islington. The event, "Love Your Trees" will take place on Saturday 29 November from 11am to 5pm. There will be various activities including: Aerial adventure in the trees; Tree sculpture unveiling; Tree listening; Tree walks; Tree dressing; Lighting of trees in time for Christmas; Stalls and information about trees; Tree giveaway; Paper making, plus lots more including refreshments and competitions. The event is free of charge and open to people and children of all ages. There will be BSL interpreters available on the day. We will do our best to meet the specific access needs of people. They are urged to contact Greenspace on 020 7527 3288 or greenspace@islington.gov.uk
Contact: Greenspace, Islington Council, Jake Tibbetts 020 7527 3288 greenspace@islington.gov.uk Text GREENSPACE plus your message to 80800

also, there’s this tree planting day with Trees for Cities coming up, not during tree week but still sounds fun!

Woodland Christmas Fun Day

Date: Saturday, December 13th 2008 from 11:00 – 15:00

Location: Hanworth Park, Feltham. Access to event site from junction of Uxbridge Road and Woodlawn Drive, turning down the entrance to Feltham Airparcs Leisure Centre. Signs will be provided from here!

Come and celebrate a Christmas-carnival fun day, while helping to plant native trees and shrubs within Hanworth Park. Activities will include a live band, carnival games, face painting, woodland and Christmas crafts, magician and stilt walker, clowns and balloon modelers and various community stalls. An appearance from Father Christmas will also be a highlight on the day! Free refreshments of Christmas-style snacks and tea and coffee will also be available.

At the last meeting Will talked about a website that he runs with articles and news related to conservation . . . and that he’s looking for contributors, either for one-off articles or regular columns/editorials. If you’re interested in contributing, get in touch with him!

And for those of you who couldn’t make it to the Q&A session with the rector on Tuesday, an update on that –

We decided at Monday’s meeting to focus on Imperial’s environmental policy (or lack thereof), trying not to sound too aggressive but still drawing attention to Imperial’s poor standing in UK university green rankings.

So as the first question in the session, I said something like:

“We know that Imperial has been taking steps towards increased environmental sustainability, but the college is still among the lowest in green rankings of UK universities such as People and Planet’s Green League. Since we’re world leaders in science and technology, we think we should also be leaders in sustainability. What is the college’s commitment to improvement, especially in terms of a comprehensive environmental policy, and hiring a dedicated sustainability manager?”

The rector’s answer was promising in that energy efficiency/technology seems to be a college interest, but still not completely satisfactory. He started off by saying that he thought the league tables were unfair because as a science school, Imperial will have higher energy consumption than schools with big humanities departments (which I think is valid in itself, but not enough of an excuse as the leagure ranking is largely about other measures, including environmental policy). He said that the old rector, Sir Richard Sykes, commissioned Prof. David Gann to develop a report about (I think) changing environmental attitudes and the college Carbon footprint – this report should be presented to college management and published on the web by December or so. He also said that he’s been discussing with Jen Morgan, the student union pres, how to build enthusiasm for environmental sustainability, and discussed one of the new buildings in SK, which is full of new energy technology (ground pump heat exchange, experimental 3^rd & 4^th generation PV cells on roof, novel building heat/energy management technology). Then he made two promises: that all new buildings would be examples of green building, and that he will use David Gann’s report to think about how to reduce the college’s Carbon footprint.

I’m going to email him now to follow up and try and get more information.

There were also a few more ideas for the environmental policy strategy that came up in Monday’s meeting –

-using nationwide award schemes (environmental versions of schemes like Investment in People) to motivate the college

-suggesting that staff contracts include a clause (modeled on similar clauses regarding the college’s Health and Safety and ethical policies) that staff will uphold the college’s environmental policy

And finally, I’m going to start posting club-wide info emails directly to the blog, so you can go straight to the blog to find this sort of info and news instead of having to save all the emails.

whoof. thanks for reading – see you soon,

Yael

meeting Nov. 4: what's next!

First off, thanks to everyone who came tonight - biggest Silwood Green Club meeting ever, yes! I have a good feeling about what we can achieve this year =D

Points discussed in tonight's meeting:

-1st Green Cinema night is this Thursday at 8, probably showing the Great Global Warming Swindle. Send Elena all your ideas for future film showings!

In addition, Sarah is going to start Wildlife Movie Mondays in the bar, probably with a big David Attenborough focus.

-Everyone was happy with focusing on a Carbon-offset plan for Silwood, and pushing for an Imperial environmental policy, as two big goals for the year.

-So for the Carbon-offset plan:

• What was done last year: Using campus data, Natalie calculated a footprint for Silwood. We also did office audits and an online survey to get a feeling for staff & student behavior & opinions. The audits mostly highlighted problems like unreachable radiator knobs that need to be fixed by Estates, and might only useful in the future to check if these problems are resolved.
  
• Things to do this year: See if we can get any more campus data to improve footprint calculation. See if we can get the Carbon Trust involved to do a proper in depth audit - and if money is the main obstacle, raise money for this. Get online surveys established as a regular occurrence (maybe at start and end of each academic year to judge changes in peoples' perspective; also try to get at what would get people to change their actions to more sustainable options). Check if we can get Imperial involved in the Mayor's Green Procurement Code for London. Once we have a good footprint number, raise money to buy rainforest to offset this.

-Environmental policy stuff:

• Elena has the results of a survey of environmental policies and how they were established (I think) for universities around the world, that the Green group at her university in Ukraine did. She's going to translate these and send them around for everyone to see.
• I'm going to write up what I've been thinking of and will send it around for comment as well.
• We need to think about: how to convince Imperial that it's in their best interest to sign up; who we can sign up to support this initiative as well; what should be included in an environmental policy for Imperial

-Finally, some stuff for sustainability/problems on campus:

• There are lots of complaints for Accommodations & Estates that relate to Green Club interests as well. Charlie said she could collate these, so write a list of what you think needs fixing, and email it to her! Remember though that these should be related to sustainability/energy use/etc., and should be feasible things to tackle (not"all halls should have solar panels on their roofs")
• For the problem of transport around Silwood, one cool idea is to have the minibus shuttle between Sunningdale train station and Silwood once each morning and evening. We need to check whether the local council might have grants for this sort of thing, and whether Imperial could subsidize/support this. I'll talk to Ana Bento (union transport person) and Mick. If anyone else could help look into it I'd appreciate it (especially the council stuff).
• Possible good event for this term: a debate about air travel in the name of science. could possibly use it as a fundraiser if we serve refreshments . . .
  

Hope I didn't forget anything!

Silwood Green Club starts a new year! wahey!

And an exciting new year it is - we've only had one meeting and already we have a blog, amazing!
(Thanks very much to Lawrence for setting it up!)

For this first post, I'd like to introduce the club and then summarize the results of the first meeting, in which we had our first discussion of plans for the year to come.

What does the Green Club do?

The Green Club tries to improve sustainability at Silwood in a variety of ways -

We run a recycling & composting scheme for the Refectory
We organize a Green Week every spring with events & a Green Fair
We're the ones responsible for getting recycling and composting into the residence halls on campus
We talk to Estates & Accommodations about building improvements and that sort of thing
We run events like film showings or locally-sourced beer festivals to inform & excite people about green issues
and we help with on-campus initiatives, like the Silwood Centenary Fund that raised money to buy rainforest in honor of Imperial's 100th anniversary.


But I can't emphasize enough - the Green Club will do whatever YOU want it to do - so if you have an idea, tell the club and we can all work together to make it happen!


What are the plans so far for this year?

This year, in addition to the usual events & things, we're keen to choose a big initiative to work on. There are a few ideas:


-Last year we started on a project to quantify Silwood's carbon footprint and then come up with a plan to offset it. As a result of the investigations and audits we did, we have an estimate of Silwood's carbon footprint, and we also have support from the faculty & department. One idea is to offset this amount by buying more rainforest - as this would have many clear benefits outside of just carbon offsetting, and would tie in well with the type of work that many people at Silwood do. This seems popular among our new members, and we'll have a deeper discussion at the next meeting.

-Another point of interest is environmental policy - neither Silwood nor Imperial college as a whole have an environmental policy - the closest approximation is a couple of policies that the Estates division of Imperial has, relating to Lighting, Waste, and Building construction (or something like that). This is something I know the environmental society in SK is interested in working on too!


Plus there are already lots of ideas for other events & initiatives around campus:

-Olena is going to head the organization of a series of Green Cinema nights, screening environmental films like an Inconvenient Truth, Who Killed the Electric Car, etc. Email her if you'd like to help!

-Michael is going to investigate UK wide organizations connecting university green clubs

-We'd like to do some events together with the SK environmental society - possibly a trip to the Eden Project or Centre for Alternative Technology, or volunteering in London with an organization like the British Trust of Conservation Volunteers, or maybe events targeting the wider community here and in SK

-I'm going to talk to Accommodations & ICT about getting more rubbish bins around the halls, and about getting recycled paper in the printers

-Lots of people are interested in sustainable food, and there was talk of having a farmer's market on campus or something like that.

So that's where we stand at the moment!
The next Green Club meeting will be on Tuesday, Nov. 4, at 5pm. We'll start making concrete plans for the year to come, hopefully while drinking tea and eating cake.

Hoping to see lots of people there - the more ideas and opinions the better!

Yael