Here’s a marvelous, hilarious, pump-your-fist gal-on-the-street British news clip starring actor Emma Thompson, best known for her work playing victorians on a number of Merchant Ivory films and adaptations of Jane Austen novels. First, a little background via Wikipedia:
…on 13 January 2009, after flying in from picking up a Golden Globe award in the US, it was announced that Thompson, in partnership with three other Greenpeace activists, had bought land near the village of Sipson, a village whose homes are under threat from the proposed third runway for Heathrow Airport . It is hoped that the area of ground, half the size of a football pitch, will prevent the government from carrying through its plan to expand Heathrow. The field, bought for an undisclosed sum from a local land owner, will be split into small squares and sold across the globe. When interviewed, Thompson said: "I don’t understand how any government remotely serious about committing to reversing climate change can even consider these ridiculous plans. It’s laughably hypocritical. That’s why we’ve bought a plot on the runway. We’ll stop this from happening even if we have to move in and plant vegetables."
The arch online magazine of politics and ideas has just posted an excerpt from Almost Green. The section in question is a bit of a romp — after obsessing over my neighbor’s exterior floodlamps for many nights, I launch a devious social-engineering campaign to convince him to turn the damn things off.
Salon will leave the piece up over the Thanksgiving weekend, which is awesome, because I figure we Americans will be turning to our computers in droves to escape our families! Take a look.
The global economic downshift could potentially be hitting home in an unexpected place: your blue box.
“Recycling companies are saying we can’t take metal or plastics anymore,” says Mairi Welman, Director of Communications for the Recycling Council of British Columbia. “They don’t have any space to put it, and they can’t sell it.”
The problem originates with the hundreds of mills in India and China that normally accept corrugated cardboard, glass, mixed papers and plastic, but that have closed their doors to new materials, Welman explains. She also has heard that there are issues among the container shipping industry with letters of credit.
“The whole market has crashed on everything across the board,” confirms Mike Sullivan, general manager of Metro Waste Paper Recovery, one of several materials-processing firms in the British Columbia. “We are still taking mixed paper, but nobody can move glass. For mixed plastic, everyone that has it is just stockpiling the stuff.”
…
“In China they are not producing finished goods, so they are not buying the corrugated boxes to pack them in, and then the box mills are not in turn buying the waste corrugated material from Britain or North America.”
“I don’t think we are going to see any improvement in the next month; I haven’t seen anything like it in 25 years. It is not just a few mills closing down in the Northwest. It is not just a few on the east coast shutting down for a few weeks. We are talking about every mill.”
…
Read the rest of my story over at The Hook. It’s ironic, really. In reducing our consumer appetites for packaged goods manufactured in Asia, we are — in a round-about way — starting to crunch our recycling programs. Perhaps we could start stacking our tin cans and plastic tubs in the stadiums. Is Wall-E available?
The president-elect records a short video for a meeting of climate wonks in California, pledging $15 Billion a year for clean energy research. Obama’s plan also calls for a cap-and-trade system that will help reduce U.S. emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and by a further 80 per cent by 2050. "Anyone who wants to develop clean energy has a friend in the White House."
And not a moment too soon. Watch the video. It fills me with hope.
Padre, my republican father-in-law, is a big Fox News fan. Many of you might know the network, which finds a receptive audience amongst American conservatives. At times its hosts can really go for the jugular. Which is why it was such a pleasant surprise to have a great conversation last week with Spencer Hughes of Fox News Radio. Right off the top of the hour, Hughes called ALMOST GREEN “very humorous, very telling, and very insightful.”
My host kicked off the 20-minute interview by questioning whether climate change is caused by human activity. My response:
“I start my approach from the baseline that this is science, and it’s correct, and that there is just no point in endlessly going around and around about this. We are wasting time, and we are missing an opportunity. And the opportunity is for America to completely reinvent how it does business, how it powers itself, and moving into a completely whole new era, and the opportunity there is tremendous.”
From there the conversation shifted to China and India’s carbon emissions.
You can say ‘We won’t do this if nobody else will,’ and go around and around. Look, this is a nation that was born to lead. And if America says, ‘Listen, we are going to do this,’ well you are going to see the entire rest of the world line up behind you. This is what is so exciting to me, you can create a happier and brighter future starting today, instead of just arguing about, ‘Is it clean coal or dirty coal?’
I was pumped to get out there in front of such a large nationwide audience, and with such a receptive host, who called the book “a good read, no matter where you fall on the global warming debate.” Here’s the MP3. Have a listen.
File this under ‘sad and funny at the same time.’ Here’s an embossed aluminum pen that my parents recently received in the mail at their house; a promotional-products company sent it to me, hoping to score a new account.
The info on the ballpoint dates from a few years ago when, for the space of a couple months between real-estate transactions, I temporarily moved my family in with my parents who live in a suburb just east of Vancouver. At the time, I was doing some contract gear-writing work for a since-shuttered Conde Nast men’s shopping magazine called CARGO.
I got a good chuckle out of the fact that some far-off privately held customer-leads database thinks that this once-glossy title is not only still in business, but headquartered in Burnaby.
Then it sunk in: How many thousands of these things went out on spec to similarly obsolete firms and addresses? And beyond that, how much logo-crested crap is presently churning its way through the warehouses and shipping channels, into the grateful hands of business people and consumers, who extract whatever utility and joy they can before ultimately handing these items off to the landfills?
Quite a lot, it turns out. According to the Promotional Products Association International, a trade group representing the fine people who make, import, distribute and sell mouse pads, stress balls, magnets, umbrellas, footballs, calendars, plastic coffee mugs, nylon tote bags, watches, ball caps, this is a $19.4 billion industry.
Sigh. If you believe the group’s research, consumer demand keeps the schwag engine running at top speed. Apparently, lots of us still love getting something for “free.” Utlimately all this marketing momentum needs to move into the digital realm, the atoms need to turn into bits. But when’s that going to happen?
How long can this madness continue? Anyone care to weigh in here?
Greystone Books, my Canadian publisher, has organized a fun contest to celebrate the launch of ALMOST GREEN. The prize? A night in the Eco-Shed, the swish little guest house at the center of the plot. For details, visit the contest Web page.
