climatechange

World Café in WorldChanging

The World Café was listed as a resource in the excellent resource manual for a new earth, WorldChanging!

Innovation Saves Lives

Nancy Margulies sent the link for this video, saying "With a simple invention and a great deal of creativity, this village's water problem was solved."

Reasoned Argument

This video makes hay with the question of whether or not global warming is the threat that environmentalists are warning us all about:

Climate Change Cafés in Reno

This report came in from Wendy Mason of Reno, NV, about a regional initiative to address climate change:

"On November 11, the Nevada Coalition for Climate Protection (NC4CP) hosted an introductory meeting regarding The Climate Change Cafés. Over 30 attended with another 10 responding that they supported us in our endeavors. Our goal was to see if there was enough interest in Reno, Nevada to make the effort of putting on the Cafes worth it. We were also looking for a few more volunteers to join our team.

The meeting was a big success. We had many short presentations (synopses of the following books: World Café, Blessed Unrest and Low-Carbon Diet) and short informative videos like Paul Hawken speaking at last years Bioneers meeting, and a few videos from Dr. Emmett Miller. We also showed a very cute one-minute video called Wombat and presented a short overview of what the city of Reno was already doing to address the carbon emission issue.

We met in a very nice art gallery right by the river in the downtown area, with music in the background and fresh flowers, along with a nice assortment of finger foods, coffee and tea. We had the space and enough time that we were able to invite people to stay around and visit with us after the meeting as well as fill out a survey we had designed, which almost everybody did.

At the close of the meeting we asked who was interested in bringing these Cafés to Reno and everyone put up their hands. So, we have decided to move along towards the goal of presenting the first Café in early spring 2008.

We appreciated all the support found on this blog and the World Café site."

Climate Change in Japan

Sitting next to Japanese colleagues for dinner at the 2007 Pegasus Systems Thinking conference last week, I learned that Riichiro Oda, from Change Agent Inc. had hosted seven World Cafés in Japan this year, the most recent being one on Climate Change! I asked him to send us more of the story, and am looking forward to sharing it with you when I hear back from him.

Your opinion sought

Rank your choices for energy efficiency at a site provided by Senator Barbara Boxer.

"Last Tuesday, my first major act as the new Chair of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee was to hold a hearing on global warming.  More than one-third of my colleagues participated -- an unprecedented number -- each Senator offering his or her own ideas and perspectives about how we should deal with the global warming crisis.
Then, after the hearing, I was further energized by the feedback I received when blogging about the hearing on DailyKos, spawning a rousing discussion that drew more than 800 comments to my initial blog post.
Clearly, online and offline, from the halls of Congress to the keyboards of Americans all across our country, a growing bipartisan consensus is emerging to confront this environmental crisis head-on...so please, take just 60 seconds to rank your preferred approaches for fighting global warming now!"  -Barbara Boxer

Dianne Feinstein's Climate Change Bills

Global Warming: A Time to Act

From the web site of Senator Dianne Feinstein

Senator Feinstein discusses her five-part package of global warming legislation at a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on January 30, 2007 .

An international consensus has been forged: Global warming is real. It is already happening. And greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels, tropical deforestation, and agriculture – are the leading cause of that warming....

That is why I am working on a comprehensive package of legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – the leading cause of global warming – from all sectors of the economy. Every business, home, and industry will have to do its part.

There are five bills in total:

Nevada City Global Cooling Café

Connie Parsons of Nevada City sent this report on their successful Café

Report from Nevada City, CA

Graphic Recorder Sherrin Bennett recorded the event
Our Global Cooling Café was overflowing with people, animated conversation, and numerous innovative ideas. It was very clear that many of us are concerned about the climate crisis and feel an urgency to act now. As a result, nineteen action groups have been formed and are currently beginning to focus on specific tasks that support carbon reduction in our community!