Unless you are a certain flame-haired supermodel who can afford a flat in London and a first-class commute to lectures, shared accommodation is a necessity during university. I have to say my experience of shared living was mixed: communal baking, charades and having friends around were excellent; dying rats under the floor boards and shelling out for monthly bills; not so excellent.

If you have ever had to suffer the stench of a decomposing rat, you have my sympathies. Equally, if you have tried to explain to a housemate why having four light bulbs on in one bedroom is a waste, I also feel your pain. There is an element of reason involved, of course. Walking around the house with three jumpers, two t-shirts, gloves, tights, trousers and several pairs of socks on at once is definitely no fun (believe me, I would know), but it is surely important to save money– and the planet too. If SJP of Sex and the City had practiced energy-saving initiatives, she could have bought more shoes instead of needing a bail out from Big. And who wouldn’t want more shoes, or anything else for that matter?

There are many ways to cut down on unnecessary energy use but measuring your electricity use is a good place to start. There are ways to get free measurement devices that plug in and calculate your costs . Oxford University have also created an imeasure which is more work but still provides results as you can find out which appliances eat up your money and use them less. One ‘out there’ suggestion is to use cling-film for secondary glazing – tape it around your windows and then hair dryer it taut. I did this to keep a ladybird infestation out, but it works just as well to keep heat in. Tin foil behind a radiator may help too; recycle foil take-out boxes to be optimally sustainable.

I also recommend outlining the ‘Landlords Energy Saving Allowance’ to your landlord. Up to £1,500 can be claimed against tax each year to improve a property’s eco-credentials. Who knows, there may be some green landlords out there, so spread the word. Encourage your landlord to install better insulation on the roof or around water pipes, and point them in the direction of claims information.

There is one caveat to implementing energy saving suggestions: the rest of your household. Lead by example, gentle persuasion, reminders, and advice as the first steps to switching off appliances and turning down the heating, which can then be backed by technological solutions. Forgetting to turn something off is not an excuse anymore. There is of course an App that can remotely turn off electronics – can you believe that? If nothing else works, try positive conditioning. Get housemates to turn off lights or computers then surreptitiously give them a sweet. Repetition is key. Soon energy saving behaviour will occur with just the vague memory of a delicious sweet for encouragement. In a nod to Thorndike, like rats pressing a lever, those lights go off.

The latter suggestion may not be such a good idea (though I’d love to try it just to see if it works!) but it is definitely hugely beneficial to try and implement energy saving initiatives around the house you’re letting. If nothing else, try it for a month as evidence for the months to come, and watch your bills go down. Before you feel the pinch of huge bills, try turning to this advice. It just might help!

Katie

If a successful campaign needs a story, then since 2009 the global climate movement has been in deep trouble.

We certainly started off with a great story. I love to tell it to people all the time. Gather round kids, I say to fresh-faced activists and strangers in pubs, listen up – here’s how we changed the world. In the early noughties the UK and Scottish Governments were somewhat interested in climate change, but they were pretty convinced that we didn’t need new legislation to tackle it. “Leave it to me”, said Tony Blair, “the climate is safe as long as we’re in charge”. We didn’t agree, and after a monumental protest, lobby, and direct action campaign the Climate Change Change Act and Climate Change (Scotland) Act were passed with cross-party support in both legislatures. Onwards and upwards. Gordon Brown then created a cabinet level position for Climate Change, a move which remains somewhat unique internationally. With our climate bills in hand, the then minister for Energy & Climate Change Ed Milliband, went to the UN Climate Change Summit at Copenhagen. We’d set the course for the UK, and now we were going to lead the world! (more…)

Campaigners

Visit stunning Nicaragua, live for a week in a Nicaraguan village, have fun and do your bit for the environment!

Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign

is organising a trip to Nicaragua as part of its work promoting solidarity between UK and Nicaraguan community and environmental activists. This tiny, beautiful Central American country is a great place to learn more about combating deforestation, pollution, food security and small-scale production.

Visit stunning Nicaragua, live for a week in a Nicaraguan village, have fun and do your bit for the environment!

Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign is organising a trip to Nicaragua as part of its work promoting solidarity between UK and Nicaraguan community and environmental activists.

Not only is it a very beautiful country with a history of revolution and victory of the people over dictatorship but it is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Yet - for it’s size (about the same as Wales) - it’s rich in biological diversity:

· A great variety of landscapes are packed within a small area: rugged mountains, lush forested lowlands, coral reefs, coastal mangroves and large lakes (including Lake Nicaragua, which contains over 300 islands).

· The region serves as a “land bridge of the Americas” where species from the north mingle with those from the south. Nicaragua lies at the biological heart of this bridge, and represents a melting pot of plant and animal species.

Nicaragua contains the greater part of the largest tropical rainforest remaining in Central America, and supports populations of animals that have largely disappeared or are endangered elsewhere including the harpy eagle, scarlet and green macaws, the resplendent quetzal, the giant anteater, Baird’s tapir and five species of wildcat.

However the country suffers hugely from deforestation, weak international environmental regulations, extreme weather conditions and violation of the rights of many indigenous groups who live in the more remote parts of Nicaragua.

But Nicaragua is also the home of thousands of well-organised and coordinated grass roots community groups working on social, environmental and political projects. For example our Nicaraguan partner organisations are the Nicaraguan Community Movement and the young environmentalist movement (see below).

If you are interested in experiencing all this, the visit will take place from 1^st – 14^th June 2012 and will consist of a week living in the rural community of Guadalupe Abajo working with women on a backyard gardening project, which aims to overcome food shortages, improve nutrition and food self-sufficiency and build self-esteem.

The second week will be spent visiting projects of the participants’ choice (as far as possible) for example on: recycling, indigenous seed production, community tourism, Fairtrade , endangered turtles and renewable energy.

The group will also take part in a ‘National Fair for the Earth’ organised by the Young Environmentalist Club, on International Environment Day (June 5^th).

Not including flights, costs will be around £680 for preparation in the UK, and in Nicaragua: accommodation, all meals, interpreting and accompaniment. (It would be helpful but not essential to speak Spanish but we encourage everyone to learn at least a little before they go).

Go to www.nicaraguasc.org.uk/tours%20&%20volunteering/index.htm and apply SOON!

This post was submitted by the UK youth delegation to the UN climate talks in Durban, coordinated by UKYCC

It’s that time of year again, when diplomats and negotiators, in iron-clad grey suits come face to face with young people who are ready to flashdance and cheerlead their way to the future.

Those two things might seem worlds apart, but in just a few days in Durban, South Africa, the UK youth delegation from the UK Youth Climate Coalition will join with other young people from across the world for the United Nations annual climate talks.

The countries of the world come together once a year to try to formulate a plan that will reduce emissions and prepare for inevitable changes to our climate. That meeting is called the Conference of the Parties, and its 17th annual meeting is about to start.

We believe that young people are the ones who truly have the overwhelming passion and energy to show that, despite the lack of success these talks have had during our lifetimes, we want the most ambitious solution possible to climate change.

And the reason we’re so strong as a group is because we all have our own individual experience. The climate negotiations are crucial to solving climate change, but they are not the be all and end all. We’re all involved in a huge variety of projects around climate change and empowering young people in our local communities, and that’s where our strength and energy come from.

Youth are not the bystanders in this process, we are the ones who will be dealing with the consequences of these decisions for decades to come. And what’s more, progress, or lack of it, has impacts for every young person back on the streets of the UK. Progress towards a low-carbon, clean future, would provide new opportunities for growth and jobs. Politicians and diplomats are bargaining and procrastinating over our future.

And don’t be beguiled by our facepaint, silly costumes, propensity to dance and sing and wear colourful clothes. We’ve also spent the year fundraising hard and in particular learning about climate change policy. Behind our sunglasses and flowery shirts, we’re armed with the tools to have conversations with negotiators on their level.

What’s more, we hope to communicate what’s going on in these talks back to young people in the UK and that they will get in touch with us. Every young person has a stake in this process and we want to make sure that they know what’s being decided in their name, about their futures.

And we’re also excited to link up with the hundreds of young people from all over the world who scrimp and save to come to South Africa, who study detailed policy, who plan creative actions to open politicians’ eyes. We want to help shape the efforts needed and decisions taken to tackle climate change for the lives of all young people.

Find our blogs at un.ukycc.org, follow us @ukyccdelegation and email us your thoughts and hopes for a clean, safe future - delegation.enquiries@ukycc.org

Youth Delegation to the UN Climate Talks, UK Youth Climate Coalition

Unless you are a certain flame-haired supermodel who can afford a flat in London and a first-class commute to lectures, shared accommodation is a necessity during university. I have to say my experience of shared living was mixed: communal baking, charades and having friends around were excellent; dying rats under the floor boards and shelling out for monthly bills; not so excellent.

If you have ever had to suffer the stench of a decomposing rat, you have my sympathies. Equally, if you have tried to explain to a housemate why having four light bulbs on in one bedroom is a waste; I also feel your pain. There is an element of reason involved, of course. Walking around the house with three jumpers, two t-shirts, gloves, tights, trousers and several pairs of socks on at once is definitely no fun (believe me, I would know), but it is surely important to save money– and the planet too. If SJP of Sex and the City had practiced energy-saving initiatives, she could have bought more shoes instead of needing a bail out from Big. And who wouldn’t want more shoes, or anything else for that matter?

There are many ways to cut down on unnecessary energy use but measuring your electricity use is a good place to start. There are ways to get free measurement devices that plug in and calculate your costs . Oxford University have also created an imeasure which is more work but still provides results as you can find out which appliances eat up your money and use them less. One ‘out there’ suggestion is to use cling-film for secondary glazing – tape it around your windows and then hair dryer it taut. I did this to keep a ladybird infestation out, but it works just as well to keep heat in. Tin foil behind a radiator may help too; recycle foil take-out boxes to be optimally sustainable. Alternatively, sign up to People & Planet’s Big Green Makeover project and you’ll get all the training and resources you need to help fellow students do this for free!

I also recommend outlining the ‘Landlords Energy Saving Allowance’ to your landlord. Up to £1,500 can be claimed against tax each year to improve a property’s eco-credentials. Who knows, there may be some green landlords out there, so spread the word. Encourage your landlord to install better insulation on the roof or around water pipes, and point them in the direction of claims information.

There is one caveat to implementing energy saving suggestions: the rest of your household. Lead by example, gentle persuasion, reminders, and advice as the first steps to switching off appliances and turning down the heating, which can then be backed by technological solutions. Forgetting to turn something off is not an excuse anymore. There is of course an App that can remotely turn off electronics – can you believe that? If nothing else works, try positive conditioning. Get housemates to turn off lights or computers then surreptitiously give them a sweet. Repetition is key. Soon energy saving behaviour will occur with just the vague memory of a delicious sweet for encouragement. In a nod to Thorndike, like rats pressing a lever, those lights go off.

The latter suggestion may not be such a good idea (though I’d love to try it just to see if it works!) but it is definitely hugely beneficial to try and implement energy saving initiatives around the house you’re letting. If nothing else, try it for a month as evidence for the months to come, and watch your bills go down. Before you feel the pinch of huge bills, try turning to this advice. It just might help!

Katie

(This is a bit late posting, having been written a week ago, but I promise the issues haven’t fallen off the table since!)

People & Planet activists picket LSE tar sands event

I’m wearing a suit. This is not something I do a lot, but as it turned it out, it was probably the main reason I had the chance to call Canada’s Natural Resources Minister, Joe Oliver to account, for he and his Government’s attempt to convince LSE students that Canadian tar sands are an ‘ethical’ and ‘responsible’ source of energy for the future.

The LSE – to their discredit – chose to host the Minister, after being approached by the Canadian Government as part of their declared lobbying push to undermine European climate legislation. The public university – who regularly host multiple speakers at their events – chose to let the Minister speak unopposed, on one of the most hotly-contested global environmental issues of our generation. People & Planet, as part of our Tar Sands-Free Universities campaign, see this as a major insult to the countless victims of the Alberta tar sands industry, given the Canadian Government’s track record of ignoring and discrediting the critical issues facing First Nations Canadians and the climate as a whole as a result of the industry.

So Oliver’s presence was inappropriate for a university to host as an ‘educational’ event to begin with. But from the point that we arrived (about 10 of us, from LSE People & Planet and the UK Tar Sands Network), we were greeted by a police presence at the front doors of the venue and a heavy security presence inside, which included body searches and refusal to allow any personal bags in the venue. Having been to a half-dozen LSE public lectures before, this was the first time I’d seen anything like this. Even when I saw the President of Ecuador speak at LSE last year, there had been no parallel precautions taken.

The Chair, Dr Richard Perkins, said that he was keen to have a debate after the lecture, given the contentious nature of the issue, but then prefaced questions with ‘this isn’t a chance to make a statement’…

The event started late, due to the extensive security checks, and was closed early, as too much of the crowd had become vocally critical of the misinformation coming from the Minister. Again, debate was not what the LSE appeared interested in hosting… If I hadn’t broken protocols and jumped up early on to present Oliver with an award for ‘Greenwash Propagandist of the Year’, relatively little criticism would have made it to the forefront.

And unsurprisingly, the Minister’s speech was nothing short of propaganda. Nearly every statement was untrue or misleading, and omitted even mentioning issues as significant as elevated cancer rates amongst First Nations communities, or First Nations legal challenges that tar sands expansion is hinging upon. Some highlights include:

• Oliver’s claim: ‘Canada is being unfairly discriminated against via the EU’s Fuel Quality Directive’
• The truth: Tar sands are one of several ‘unconventional fuels’ (including shale gas and liquid coal) that the European Commission has classified as high emissions fuels. The move is clearly an attempt to regulate fuel that is more harmful to the environment than crude oil. There is no basis to claim that Alberta tar sands have been ‘singled-out’.
• Oliver’s claim: ‘Tar sands aren’t as bad as other fuels the EU allows import of’
• The truth: Oliver compared Alberta tar sands to Russian, Mexican, Nigerian and Venezuelan high emissions fuels, saying that tar sands were much better than many of these. In truth, the best tar sands, are on par with or worse than, all but the very worst Venezuelan heavy crude and Nigerian flaring. The other countries fuels produce far lower emissions. Tar sands really are *that bad*!
• Oliver’s claim: ‘In situ tar sands extraction is much less destructive than mining’
• The truth: While in situ mining doesn’t use as much water, or scar the surface of the Earth in the way open caste mining does, the emissions associated with the process are on average 3x higher than that of mining tar sands, and 5x higher than drilling traditional crude. The Minister and the industry’s claim that the in situ process is more environmentally sound is at best a distortion of the facts, and at worst, an outright lie.

(Details of the above claims can be found here and here).

After the talk, a scheduled media phone-in with the Minister, was cancelled without explanation. We might be able to take a little bit of credit for that one. We also managed to get covered in newspapers and blogs across Canada, as well as in the Times of India (the largest English language newspaper in the world), hopefully throwing a bit of a wrench into the Canadian Government’s attempt to go abroad and paint the tar sands in a positive light.

While LSE may still be a few steps from calling itself a ‘Tar Sands-Free University’ (though our activists there will be pushing to make it one!), we an important question for the university, in light of its choice to host the Minister:

Given the factual inaccuracy of a range of the Minister’s comments and the highly-political agenda he was promoting, how can the LSE justify using student and public money to help a foreign government promote a single perspective, unopposed?

Speakers like Oliver are relatively rare, in terms of the ways that universities support the most destructive project on Earth. They may be banking with tar sands financiers like RBS/NatWest; they might be doing research into tar sands technologies for BP or Shell; their staff’ pensions might be invested in any of these companies… So don’t hesitate to get in touch if you want to get involved in making your university or college ‘Tar Sands-Free’!

As well as a new remote volunteer of the People & Planet team, I am also a PhD student about to venture out into the wilderness of Antarctica.

My research will focus on areas of the Antarctic ice sheets, looking at specific glaciers/ice streams in the Transantarctic Mountains (which divide the West and East ice sheets). The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) has been in the media a lot in the past (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/18/west-antarctic-ice-sheet-melt; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8387137.stm). This is because most of the underlying land is below sea level which makes it very susceptible to warming and rapid melting, and therefore it has a possible threshold point leading to ice sheet collapse. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) is bigger and considered more stable as it rests on a larger proportion of land. The Transantarctic Mountains provide an interesting partial barrier to the EAIS, through which ice streams flow into the Ross Ice Shelf.

“What are you trying to find out, and why?”

The project aims to find out how big the glaciers were in this region of Antarctica at the peak of the last ice age, and to see how they thinned and retreated to their current form. By understanding this past behaviour of glaciers it provides an insight into their relationship with past climate systems and can therefore help towards predicting the future response of ice sheets to climate changes. The data collected will be used to help test and validate ice sheet computer models which look to predict future change.

“How are you going to study this?”

By surveying the material and land features found in the area, one can see the where ice used to flow and what processes occurred. Some rocks can show obvious signs that they have been moved there by a glacier because they are a different rock type to that found locally in the landscape. These rocks are called erratics and are typically collected from the peaks of mountains which poke through the ice (known as nunataks). A technique called cosmogenic nuclide dating allows us to measure how long ago glacially-deposited boulders were left behind by the ice sheet, and from this we can establish the height and length of the ice sheet at different points in time. The results can then be compared to other data from the region such as further ice sheet information, ice cores, sea ice records, etc. But first things first, I need to go out to Antarctica to make some notes and collect some rocks!

This post first appeared on Selwyn’s own blog (http://theterratranscriber.wordpress.com/), where you will be able to find updates of his Antarctic experiences.

Philippa de Boissiere was one of 8 students who took part in People & Planet’s tar sands solidarity exchange this summer:

“Our trip to Alberta, Canada marked the start for us of an ongoing commitment to take on the most destructive oil project on Earth. Our visit was in response to an invitation from the former Beaver Lake Cree Nation (BLCN) Chief, Al Lameman, whose community is being directly threatened by the expansion of tar sands.
There was a lot to take in from our experience of this dirty oil extraction industry. We were treated to a full PR assault from Suncor representatives, harassed by industry workers whilst surveying the destruction of the boreal forest and left choking by the fumes emitted from toxic waste ponds.
More importantly however, we developed links of solidarity with indigenous people from Beaver Lake. Over campfires, meals and some dancing at their annual Pow-Wow we learnt of a wise and loving culture. We were able to send a powerful message on behalf of the People & Planet network that the Beaver Lake Cree Nation do not stand alone in taking on the most powerful oil companies on the planet.

This blog was written by Marco Cadena, a member of the Young Friends of the Earth network

Millions are already facing the devastating impacts of climate change, and the European Environment Council meeting this coming Monday wasn’t even going to discuss emission reduction targets at their meeting.

However, civil society groups all across Europe are campaigning loudly for climate action, one of these campaigns is Push Europe - a youth-led climate campaign building a strong movement demanding real European action on climate change.

It is really simple: we need real emission cuts, there is no time to sweep the emissions under the carpet through the dangerous obsession of carbon trading.

Young Friends of the Earth, People and Planet, 350.org and many other organisations are now calling on European leaders to recognise that there isn’t time to fiddle around: we’re getting closer to the tipping point. We’re heading towards a five degree world, with catastrophic consequences all around the world.

It’s time to tell Chris Huhne, who will represent the United Kingdom this coming Monday (10th October), that climate change isn’t something that Environment Ministers shouldn’t discuss. In fact, there is a need for increased political ambition to bring the stagnate international climate negotiations forward.

Europe has massive historical responsibility for causing climate change, but it’s focussing solely on carbon markets with very low real emission reduction commitments.

It is time for real action for Europe and for the rest of the world.

Email Chris Huhne before Monday to call for strong action now!

http://www.foe.co.uk/campaigns/climate/press_for_change/eu_climate_32796.html