Electric Car song...

Some of you might have seen this already, but it’s too cute not to share. It’s the animated music video to the new song “Electric Car” by indie band They Might Be Giants. It’s from their new album “Here Comes Science”, which is aimed at kids. But I’m seriously thinking of buying it anyway

Vegetarian week...

Grilled chili mushrooms with squash, beans and potatoes It’s Vegetarian Week again! If you’ve been meaning to help the environment out a bit more, why not Pledge to Try Veg? Every person who signs the pledge means that a dollar will be donated to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation to help protect it from climate change. I’m giving it a go this week, with the “eat vegetarian for the week” option....

Fresh green links...

Lots going on at the climate summit and G20 financial crisis summit in New York this week. If you’ve seen a good round-up of all the events there, please let me know in the comments. The shortest yet most accurate summary I’ve seen so far came from David Waskow, spokesperson for Oxfam International: “Everyone played nice at the climate summit tea party, but only Japan and China showed up with cake.”...

Flowerdale: building it back green...

Builditback.org As Australians gear up for another hot, dry summer, some communities are still trying to rebuild what they lost in the bushfires earlier this year. It must be awful to have lost all you own, and have to start again. But it also gives the chance for renewal. One place that’s been leading the way in rebuilding is Flowerdale, a small town in Victoria hard-hit by the firestorm, and then left alone for...

Gorgon gas field...

Photo credit: abc.net.au The Gorgon gas project is going ahead: it’s a billion-dollar gas mine, drilled into the North-West sea floor, with the product pumped to Barrow Island (a Class-A nature reserve) so it can be compressed to a liquid and exported. Barrow Island is like Australia’s version of the Galapagos islands. It’s home to 15 mammals, 7 marine mammals, 110 bird species, 54 species of reptile...

Fresh green links...

350: The magic number - an article by Bill McKibben on why we need to get a global agreement on carbon reductions at the Copenhagen meeting later this year. From the post: The planet is done negotiating, and we know its bottom line: 350 parts per million. It’s hard to get 180 nations to agree on a useful pact. It’s hard to get 60 senators to sign on to a powerful bill. But it’s even harder to amend the laws of nature. Japanese...

Solar hemi-cycle house...

Last Sunday Dave and I visited one of the open houses that were set up for Sustainable House Day. I’d been to the Painted Fish and Josh Byrne’s garden a few years ago as part of the event, and wanted to see something new. This one was a solar hemi-cycle house, built in a curve facing north. The whole building is only one room wide. It has a bedroom and bathroom on either end of the curve, with a laundry/pantry,...

I don’t own an umbrella anymore...

When I was a kid I used to get rained on all the time. I caught the train home from school, and had a 15 minute walk back from the station to my house. During winter this meant getting rained on at least once a week or sometimes more often. As an adult I rarely get rained on - I don’t even own an umbrella or raincoat, although I do have a couple of water-resistant jackets that take a long time to soak through if...

Fresh green links...

This week, instead of the usual newsy links, I’ve chosen a few opinion pieces I particularly like, and hope you do too. Your green lifestyle helps convince people of global warming - at No Impact Man. We need change in our global systems, but how do we convince people it’s necessary? Colin Beavan looks at the types of things that change people’s minds and lives. Emissions trading arguments evoke slavery...

Fonterra contributing to rainforest destruction...

Photo credit: Greenpeace New Zealand Long-term readers will remember when a bunch of us wrote to Fonterra about their rather stupid “Win a Hummer” choc-milk promotion for Brownes, one of their subsidiary companies. At the time, they responded with details of their efforts to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in production since 1998, to prove that they care about the environment. But this looks pretty...