The US Congress is voting on a climate change bill soon and recent moves by large US companies such as Wal-Mart and GE Electric are moving to cut greenhouse emissions.
This is great news because climate change has largely been ignored by US governments and businesses until recently.  Jonathan Lash from the World Resources Institute told a conference in Brisbane today that the issue is gaining ground in the US Government.

If a current bill is passed by the US Senate, the Climate Security Act (ACSA) would aim to reduce total US greenhouse emissions by 19% below the 2005 level in 2020 and by 63% below the 2005 level in 2050. The bill would do this by mandating caps on greenhouse emissions from the electric power, transportation, and manufacturing industries. The scheme would involve about 75% of the US economy.

Lash said action on climate change would also need to involve business, and moves by US companies such as retail giant Wal-Mart and utility and infrastructure company GE Electric to cut greenhouse emissions demonstrate a willingness on behalf of some businesses to tackle the issue.

This is fantastic news.  My observation however is that while large businesses are aware of the need to minimise their risks from climate change, and some are being very proactive, small business is still ignoring the problem.
Small business is overwhelmed in many cases and hoping that their “little bit” will go away.  Unfortunately there are a lot little bits and they add up.  I work with small to medium businesses helping them to green their business and increase their profits at the same time – yes it can be done and it is easy.

Technorati Tags: ISO 14001, US Senate, Business Ramp, Climate Change, climate change action, US Congress, US Government

Six University Campuses in Victoria (Australia) have installed energy efficient fluorescent lighting system that has saved $73,000 on energy bills and cut CO2 emissions by 470 tonnes. It follows an RMIT University decision earlier this month to recycle mercury from 35,000 fluorescent light tubes.
They now use 28W lamps with double the life and only a third of the mercury content of the ones they replaced, making them more energy efficient and environmentally friendly. All of the old T8 fluorescent tubes have been recycled to minimise waste from the upgrade.

Meanwhile, Melbourne’s RMIT University announced it would recycle mercury from existing fluorescent light tubes in stages. An estimated seven tonnes of light tubes will be removed annually from the university’s three campuses by Advanced Recycling, which will recycle the mercury for the university.

“Mercury poses a serious health hazard; it affects the brain, liver and kidneys and causes developmental disorders in children. Most mercury-containing products end up in landfills, where the mercury evaporates into the air or leaches into groundwater,” Dr Mohajerani from the Engineering Department said.

Technorati Tags: ISO 14001, University saves through energy efficiencies, energy efficiencies, University saves, University Campuses in Victoria, Victoria Australia, Australia, energy efficient, fluorescent lighting system

I have been watching, with mixed feeling, a pair of mud larks making a most elaborate mud nest on a pipe above my car parking space. The mixed feeling come from the fact that birds and baby birds do not wear nappies! I can now take my car to the carwash and it will look less like a Christmas pudding than it does at present.

After a few weeks of shrieking anxiety when anyone came near, three little heads appeared over the edge of the nest. That is the sign of spring that really is delightful. After a few days only two heads appeared and over the last few days I have been witnessing flying lessons with multiple crash landings. One baby was smaller and less competent and its parents left with the stronger baby.

The other baby was abandoned and this morning I went down to look for it only to find its flattened body on the roadway. I cleaned it up before my small grandson who has been watching the nest with great eagerness, arrives for family dinner tonight. What a short little life that baby had. I am probably daft, but I shed a tear.

Technorati Tags: ISO 14001

We are at a time in history when we need to be able to think creatively and completely outside the box. We have to redesign our lives to use less carbon. At the same time our toy makers and media are stultifying out children’s minds!

I bought some new Lego for my grandson to add to the much diminished remnants left over from my own children. Eventually I found a tub of Lego but even that had pages of designs for children to follow and not really many blocks for $50. Most Lego now comes in sets to build a specific thing.

When my kids were young their Lego was a large collection of blocks with assorted strange shapes and a few “people” blocks. No plans or ideas because the idea was to encourage them to think for themselves and dream up their own grand designs.

When I was a child, we had wooden blocks that did not lock together and we needed to think about how things balanced and locked in together if we wanted to build larger structures. We also improvised and incorporated toilet roll tubes, scraps of wood from Dad’s workshop and cardboard boxes. We still built our grand designs but we used our imagination and created our own.

My children were born in a remote part of North Queensland in tropical northern Australia. We did not get television until my kids were aged 5, 4 and 3. They were attending the local kindergarten when the TV tower was commissioned at Bartle Freere, near Cairns. That week the children’s games changed. They all played the games they saw on TV because it impacted at once on the entire town. What a pity their old imaginative games were gone. They never came back.

During my time in NQ I taught biology and science in the local high school and was astonished at difference between those pre-TV kids and the ones I had taught previously in the city. They were not as good at writing BUT they were streets ahead in maths and most importantly, compared with city kids, they were really creative thinkers. They were the children of people who improvised, built their own lives, their own houses, their own workplaces and made their own fun. They were a joy to teach. I returned to the city and taught very well mannered sponges who did not think much. You can’t waste time thinking when you need to cram for exam results. I left teaching. Now I hear that you can do a “science” degree with no physics, chemistry or maths! How can you understand a fish with no concept of pressure? The world has gone mad!

We now need people who can think creatively and not be blocked by being told that it can’t be done. We need Government and other regulators to be tough on polluters but to be flexible for people who are innovating and trying new ways. We need to encourage our kids to be creative, even when it does make a mess.

We won’t solve the problems of reducing our carbon emissions and thinking about our use and waste of embodied energy unless we allow and encourage creative thinking.

Technorati Tags: ISO 14001

We are at a time in history when we need to be able to think creatively and completely outside the box. We have to redesign our lives to use less carbon. At the same time our toymakers and media are stultifying out children’s minds!

I bought some new Lego for my grandson to add to the much diminished remnants left over from my own children. Eventually I found a tub of Lego but even that had pages of designs for children to follow and not really many blocks for $50. Most Lego now comes in sets to build a specific thing.

When my kids were young their Lego was a large collection of blocks with assorted strange shapes and a few “people” blocks. No plans or ideas because the idea was to encourage them to think for themselves and dream up their own grand designs. (more…)

Do you sometimes get confused about all the terminology?
ESD is ecologically sustainable development – which is something we all want.
EMS is an:
• Environmental
• Management
• System
It is a tool we use to achieve ESD and also to achieve more efficiency and more profits in our individual businesses. If we are managing our environmental risks in a way that also increases our profits, that will make our business sustainable in more ways than one.

My concern about whole of industry environmental approaches is that they only work if every member is involved. If you give people an industry “EMS”, Code of Practice, or ESD Policy document, it will be put on a shelf and have little impact on the way the business operates. An industry checklist certainly won’t change behaviour.

Once a group within an industry has built their own EMS based on the risks they have identified in their own business, they can share this with others to help them get started but each business will have different risks and every business needs to put in the time and effort with their own workforce to if it is to be owned and used.

A document that sits on a shelf does not change behaviour. Unfortunately this is something that is not understood by many of the bureaucrats and scientists pushing for ESD.

The EMS must come first and must be individual for every business.

Enviro Action provides online proven and award winning training that helps small to medium businesses build their own effective management systems. They definitely include the management and the system that sustains the environmental management.

Enviro Action’s next EMS Group Course starts on November 6th
Sign up before Oct 19th and save A$100 or UD$85
Click here or HERE for USA and type “OCTSPECIAL”
in the coupon field to claim your discount

Technorati Tags: EMS, ESD, Codes of Practice, EMS Group Course, ecologically sustainable development, environmental management system, ISO 14001

Last weekend I took my Grandson Luka to the Monarto Zoo. This is a 1000 hectare pen-range sanctuary undertaking a major role nationally and internationally in breeding programs for rare and endangered species.

It was wonderful. We started out with a 90 minute drive in a safari bus though the entire park. The trip included lions, bison, cheetah, Mongolian horses, zebras, lots of African grazing animals, both black and white rhinoceroses (all brown really), hyenas, African painted dogs, a large giraffe herd and the entire place is part of the largest revegetation project of it’s kind in South Australia’s history! We saw a two week old white rhino and a three week old baby giraffe – and much more. Apparently giraffe give birth standing up on their very long legs and the babies emerge head first to land in a heap on the ground.

We had lunch and surrounded by all these wonderful animals, when Luka (aged 3+) had his face painted he wanted to be Spiderman! I thought after being 3 feet from a cheetah he would choose that or a lion but no – it had to be Spiderman.

We also went for a camel ride which was fun. I was fascinated by how soft the came’s coat was on my bare leg. At one stage Luka kicked his foot and the camel turned around and looked at him. He had not thought about kicking her and was very surprised to be looked at. A useful lesson in consideration.

The role large zoos like Monarto have in preserving biodiversity with its important role in the worldwide endangered species breeding programs in enormous and they have a wonderful record or breeding, exchanging with other zoos and returning animals to the wild.

There is also a very important role in educating our kids to value the diversity of life. It was a wonderful day and we were both exhausted. When we got home he drew me a picture of a hippopotamus which were not there but animals were on his mind. He told me today that there are lots of different sorts of “reindeer” all over the world which I guess is a fairly informed preschooler view of the wonderful diversity of horned grazing animals.

Technorati Tags: Nuturing biodiversity, biodiversity, Monarto, Monarto Zoo, Zoo, endangered species, ISO 14001

I was delighted to see that Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Commission for Climate Change have shared the Nobel Prize.

Hopefully people will listen to this and accept the urgent need for us to change our behaviour and our emissions.

However in the very same week an English judge ruled that Al Gore’s film, The Inconvenient Truth contained untruths and exaggerations. Wow, a law degree would certainly equip him well to decide that – NOT!

In South Australia, where I live there was an absolute classic from a Judge in the Environment and Resources Court. The Conservation Council were taking the tuna farmers to court to try to prevent that industry from continuing. The history being that poor environmental practices, wrong location and a severe storm in the early days of the industry combined to cause a huge fish kill. The farmers learned from the experience and cleaned up their act, the government learned and allowed them to move to a more suitable location but there was still a serious lack of trust from conservation groups. The classic comment from the Judge was to rule inadmissible, government scientific video footage of the seabed under the cages because it was “meaningless” – it only showed the sandy seabed. That was the whole meaning in fact. The seabed was just sandy seabed and it was not covered with the piles of debris and waste that the Judge “knew” must there. This is the true meaning of prejudice

A law degree does not bestow infallibility on the recipient and judges, like all of us, need to move out of our comfort zones and accept that change happens.

It is time for all of us to move out of our comfort zones now and accept that the gases in our atmosphere are changing and we much change our behaviour urgently before it gets completely out of control and leaves appalling problems for our children and grandchildren.

Most of the tuna farms in Australia have ISO 14001 environmental certification and this is a well run industry.

Technorati Tags: Al Gore, Al Gore evokes different responses, different responses, Intergovernmental Commission for Climate Change, Nobel Prize, The Inconvenient Truth, Environment and Resources Court, ISO 14001, environmental certification, ISO 14001

I don’t have to tell a lot of you about the current drought in Australia and water shortages but, apart for a reducing number of good years, we had better get used to it. Rain is decreasing in many part of the world and our population continues to increase so we will have less water per head. Desalination will help but it needs to be wind or solar powered and there needs to be somewhere safe to discharge the bitterns left over from the process. This is discussed further in the articles in the blog links at the bottom of the page.

So what will climate change and the water and energy restrictions mean to you and your business? It is time to start planning and to reduce you environmental footprint now.

Findings released at the Greenhouse 2007 conference in Sydney this morning, include projections of up to 20 per cent more drought months over most of Australia by 2030. By 2070 this could rise to 40 per cent more drought months in eastern Australia and 80 per cent more in south western Australia.
A warming of 0.9 degrees since 1950 and an increase in hot nights have been mostly due to greenhouse gas emissions, the report concluded. These higher temperatures have “exacerbated” the effects of drought and led to a decline in snow cover, including a 40 per cent reduction in snow depth in Spring in the Snowy Mountains in the past 45 years.

Weather patterns and ocean currents have changed, reducing rainfall to south-west Australia and leading to a warming of waters off the east coast of Tasmania that is occurring at triple the global rate of ocean warming.

Technorati Tags: drought, Australia, water shortages, Desalination, south-west Australia, global rate of ocean warming, ocean warming, global warming, ISO 14001

Yes it is real and caused by humans. The gas and heat distribution in the atmosphere you be very different if it was a natural cycle. We are wrapping the earth in an insulating blanket of greenhouse gasses and we are steadily warming. The scary thing is that all the predictions we have reached so far have been reached sooner than expected so because the predictions are all on the conservative side.

Get used to it! We will have more droughts, more fires and more extreme weather events. We can slow it down but we can’t prevent it now.
This information came from many sources but the latest is report, Climate Change in Australia, which contains the most detailed and up-to-date climate projections produced by the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology.

My real worry is for the kids – our children and grandchildren and I look at my 3 year old grandson and think about the problems he will face in his twenties and thirties and he is too young to have any say in preventing it. His favourite DVD movie and also book are the Lorax by Dr Seuss. This is a brilliant little lesson in ecology and the results of lack of environmental control. If you haven’t seen this one go and find it. Adults can enjoy it too.

Technorati Tags: global warming, climate change, climate change news, climate, atmosphere, insulating blanket, greenhouse gasses, warming, steadily warming, CSIRO, Bureau of Meteorology, ISO 14001