Green-Eyed: Our Favorite Environmental And Climate Change Crusaders

[Image Credit: Taking Root]

Here is a quick snapshot of just a few of the many people that have influenced the climate change movement:

• Jean Jouzel: He started his career studying hailstones, not knowing that one day he would become one of the leading specialists on climatic shifts. A climatologist and glaciologist renowned for his work in Antarctica and Greenland, Jean Jouzel is considered a pioneer in the reconstruction of climate history. He is the director of the CEA (Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique) and received the highest French scientific award, the CNRS Gold Medal with Claude Lorius for archiving glacial shifts. Constantly faced with the heated debate surrounding climate change, his research has been published in more than 350 articles within various international journals. In an interview published in The Global Journal, he discussed the challenges the globe faces in reducing greenhouse gas emissions without countries that are willing to make commitments to reach a specific goal. In his closing comments, he wanted to note that “April 2010 was the warmest month ever recorded on the planet.”

• Andy Revkin: Currently the senior fellow at Pace University’s Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies and the award-winning blogger of the New York Times‘ Dot Earth blog, Revkin is perhaps best known for exposing the impact of climate change on the North Pole. The Arctic Rush, a Discovery-Times channel documentary about climate change at the North Pole he shot and co-produced with Craig Duff, won the National Association of Science Writers’ “Science-in-Society” award; his “The Big Melt” series on NYTimes.com offers extensive multi-media coverage of Arctic melting. Along with stints as the senior editor of Discover and senior writer at Science Digest, Revkin is the author of three benchmark books on the Amazon rainforest, global warming, and the North Pole.

• Wangari Maathai: Known as the “tree woman,” Wangari Maathai founded The Green Belt Movement in Kenya in 1977 and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in  2004. The movement has since planted more than 10 million trees to prevent soil erosion and provide firewood for cooking fires. Poor women in the villages of Kenya mostly planted the trees, restoring their environment and providing paid work. Maathai gained worldwide attention in 1998 by helping to defeat plans by Kenya’s president to clear hundreds of acres of forest for luxury housing. Jailed several times by previous administrations, she was elected to parliament in 2002 and is now the country’s environment minister. Today, The Green Belt Movement aims to plant one billion trees around the world, as well as supporting other efforts to create a healthier environment.

• Al Gore: His documentary An Inconvenient Truth shook up the planet and created an awareness for global warming that was unprecedented. In October of 2007, Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the Nobel Prize.The film won an Oscar award as well as many other film awards related to inspiring a positive social movement. Al Gore has put global warming solidly on the American political agenda.

• James Hansen: According to Discover Magazine : Al Gore won a Nobel Prize for explaining global warming to the world, but James Hansen was the one who explained climate change to Al Gore. Hansen, a NASA climatologist, started voicing that climate change would accelerate more quickly than originally calculated in 1981. By the end of the decade, his computer models showed that humans were heating the planet and as a result, serious problems would occur. The impact of Hansen’s research and outspoken laments against wasteful consumerism helped fuel the green movement.

5 Websites To Get Your Green Fix

1) The Daily Green

Pitched as the consumer’s guide to the green revolution, this website has everything and anything you need to know about green news, cuisine, products, tips and tricks.  Senior editor Dan Shapley learned about the environment by growing up in the upstate New York with a family that reduced, reused and recycled as a way of life. Born and founded on Earth Day 2007, the quirky website includes interesting headings like “Weird Weather Watch” and a blog called, “The Green Cheapskate.” The stories are clear and concise without being bogged down in too much technical jargon.

2) Grist :  A Beacon in the Smog

Add Grist.org to your Google Reader for its unique green perspective on news and technology stories.  Reporting on green newssince 1999, Grist started focusing on climate change long before the green revolution. The website is another great resource for entertaining stories with punchy headlines. Grist has a fun discussion section called “Ask Umbra” where readers can get green advice on everything from “where to buy slime free hamburger meat?” to “hair dye that won’t kill you or the planet.”  Also, join Umbra’s book club for the latest published green works.

3) Ecorazzi: The Latest in Green Gossip

Are you missing your People magazine? You can turn to this site to catch up on the the green or not-so-green lives of the rich and famous. With celebrities like Meg Ryan, Leonardo Dicaprio and Cameron Diaz speaking out on environmental issues, people of all ages are inspired to join their causes. Who the latest celebrity to join PETA’s cause? Is the Dalai Lama the ultimate freegan? This is website to find out.

4) Jetson Green

Jetson Green is a fascinating blog about green innovation and residential building. The blog was founded by Preston Koerner, a LEED AP, as a MBA student to chronicle latest building trends. The website is updated daily and on the pulse of the newest and greenest technology on the planet. The website is a preview of our future homes in five to ten years. Full resources, it is bursting with informative articles, cool pictures, videos and links.

5) Mother Nature Network

Mother Nature’s Network has one goal: to help you improve the world. MNN organizes its site with eight different channels, each providing in-depth news and information updated throughout the day: Earth Matters, Lifestyle, Green Tech, Eco-Biz, Transportation, Your Home, Food, and Family. MNN  also has a special section called “Translating Uncle Sam,” a guide to issues on governmental websites translated in simpler, more understandable terms.  Simplicity is what they advocate and in turn, their website is simply designed and very user-friendly. Whether you are green novice or expert, MNN is the perfect resource for a green living.

Belgrave Trust On Public Radio’s Marketplace Money

“Next week marks 40 years since the first Earth Day. I’m guessing they didn’t talk nearly as much about the environment then as we do now. It’s not easy being green. But it’s a lot easier when you’ve got piles of greenbacks.

Spendy solar panels? Check. Hybrid car? Check. Large check to the Sierra Club? Check. And why not? A recent Princeton University study reported that the world’s wealthiest people cause half of the world’s carbon emissions.

Ashley Milne-Tyte looks at some of the ways the well-off are trying to make up for that.”

Listen to audio of The Belgrave Trust featured on Marketplace Money here.

What Causes Global Warming?

When you spend hours, months, and years diving into something passionately, sometimes you can lose the forest for the trees (to make both a pun and a cliche at the same time), so we found this especially refreshing.

Leave it to National Geographic to take something very complex and reduce down into terms people can understand.

So what does cause climate change? Here’s as good of a clear, succinct answer as I’ve seen:

What Causes Global Warming?

Scientists have spent decades figuring out what is causing global warming. They’ve looked at the natural cycles and events that are known to influence climate. But the amount and pattern of warming that’s been measured can’t be explained by these factors alone. The only way to explain the pattern is to include the effect of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitted by humans….

One of the first things scientists learned is that there are several greenhouse gases responsible for warming, and humans emit them in a variety of ways. Most come from the combustion of fossil fuels in cars, factories and electricity production. The gas responsible for the most warming is carbon dioxide, also called CO2. Other contributors include methane released from landfills and agriculture (especially from the digestive systems of grazing animals), nitrous oxide from fertilizers, gases used for refrigeration and industrial processes, and the loss of forests that would otherwise store CO2…. [more]

Click here to read the rest of this National Geographic Story

A Corporate Social Responsibility Top Pick

Kudos to CSR for giving Belgrave Trust the nod for what they call ‘Our Picks,’ which they define as the most pertinent and revealing CSR-related developments from their ongoing survey of a wide range of global media outlets.

Each pick is hand-selected by members of the CSRwire staff. So here’s our memo back  to the CSR staff – thanks!

The Belgrave Trust was founded by a group of individuals convinced that there was a better way to put the power of the burgeoning carbon offset marketplace in your hands. Using practices borrowed from the fields of statistical analysis and modern portfolio management, they offer a more efficient and more responsible way to live carbon neutral — helping their members channel resources in real time to the places they’ll have the greatest impact.

And to read on, here’s a link to the rest of the Corporate Social Responsibility ‘Top Pick’ for Belgrave Trust.

“Aligning Policy and Market Forces… The Way Forward Now is Voluntary Markets”

Our good friend, mentor—and member of the advisory board as Belgrave Trust’s Carbon Markets Advisor—Peter Fusaro has a first person piece published today via Triplepundit.com. And as usual, we’re in awe not just of Peter’s mastery of the issues, but of his uncommon clarity and force in being a true advocate for the green trading community.

Here are a few highlights, and check out Peter Fusaro’s full essay for much more;

The point is that with clearly written environmental goals, industry has no choice but to innovate, invest and change behavior to meet those goals. That does not mean that the government dictates the kinds of technologies industry must adopt, it allows industry to solve its problems by choosing its own means. The polluters will determine how we get to a cleaner environment because they will be required to make their own decisions about how they invest in cleaner technologies, renewable energy and energy efficiency. This is the behavioral change that is needed to reduce emissions…

Aligning Policy and Market Forces:

So, where do we go from here? It seems unlikely that this session of Congress can pass meaningful and binding legislation to start to reduce the US carbon footprint, and regroup for next year’s session. The way forward now is voluntary markets…

For Peter’s full bio click here, learn more about Belgrave Trust’s team here, and visit Belgrave Trust’s homepage to give it a try yourself.

Fast enough for you?

Even for those who consider climate change a serious issue, it’s easy to be lulled into a sense of complacency. It’s understandable, if you can’t feel it or see it every day in your daily life, it is a challenge to see it in your mind’s eye. But the problem is, that when a system reaches a critical state, change isn’t always gradual.

It’s what pop culture types call “The Tipping Point” and what complex adaptive systems researchers call a “phase change” or inflection. And Hollywood if I recall correctly memorably once called it a “critical desalinization point” in a movie starring a very fetching young actor and featuring a cargo ship inexplicably full of wolves parked in front of the New York Public Library.

But I digress, this is serious stuff, there’s new science out just now, and it’s scary. One of the most thorough research projects yet has made some interesting discoveries:

JUST months – that’s how long it took for Europe to be engulfed by an ice age. The scenario, which comes straight out of Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, was revealed by the most precise record of the climate from palaeohistory ever generated.

“This is significantly shorter than what has been suggested before, but it is plausible,” says Derek Vance of the University of Bristol, UK. Hans Renssen, a climate researcher at Vrije University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, says recent findings from Greenland ice cores indicate the Younger Dryas event may have happened in one to three years. Patterson’s results confirm this was a very sudden change, he says.

And don’t let the fact that Europe happened to end up cooler fool you, warming occured elsewhere, and the real take away here is the fact that climate change can be so rapid and severe:

Patterson says that sudden climate switches like the Big Freeze are far from unusual in the geological record. The Younger Dryas was brought about when a glacial lake covering most of north-west Canada burst its banks and poured into the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. The huge flood diluted the salinity-driven North Atlantic Ocean mega-currents, including the Gulf Stream, and stalled it.

Some climate scientists have suggested that the Greenland ice sheet could have the same effect if it suddenly melts through climate change,

Indeed they have, and it’s not pretty.

So if you don’t have your own Dennis Quaid super-dad on call for you, perhaps doing your part to make a difference is the next order of business.

“It’s consumption that drives dangerous climate change…”

There’s been a lot of focus on population growth as a key cause of climate change, and it’s been in the news recently, with headlines like “US Population Growth Will Make 2050 Emission Cuts Hard.” It’s an understandable concern, as the debate has been centered around the policy decisions of developed countries — especially the United States — where population growth is a major counterweight to the idea of actual emissions reductions (as opposed to just slower rates of growth).

But as I read the article linked above, I couldn’t help but wonder why they didn’t include one of the many voices that have correctly noted that at root it’s consumption, not population, that’s the defining independent variable for emissions. Especially as David Satterthwaite had so recently written a tightly researched study [PDF] with the primary conclusion that “it is not the growth in (urban or rural) populations that drives the growth in greenhouse gas emissions but rather, the growth in consumers and in their levels of consumption.”

Sure enough, if you read through to the end, thankfully his point of view is included:

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“Environmental Quickie”

How can you top a one-liner like that? Belgrave Trust member (and MediaBistro founder) Laurel Touby sure has a way with words.

“My whole life, I’ve felt guilty about not doing enough,” she says. But as she tells Halogen Life in an article today — with the help of the Belgrave Trust, that’s a problem that’s been fully satisfied.

Nicholas M. Baily at the Wall Street Green Trading Summit

A welcome surprise, finding this video in my inbox this morning.  On April 1st I had the honor of presenting The Belgrave Trust to the Wall Street Green Trading Summit, the longest running and most comprehensive environmental market event in the industry.  Thanks go to Peter Fusaro for giving us this fantastic opportunity to present at one of the most prestigious gatherings of green thought leaders.

Full text of the speech below the jump.

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