Georg Fürtges’s pride and joy is a green monstrosity standing in the basement of his house in the western German city of Essen, hissing quietly and consuming dark little pellets that look like worms. The pellets, stored in bins reaching up to the ceiling in another room, are made of compressed sawdust. And the monstrosity is a furnace that is at least three times as big as a modern condensing gas boiler. Fürtges, 55, and his wife Karla, 49, have 6.4 tons of the pellets stored in their basement, enough to meet their heating needs for a year and a half. The couple has decided to live in an environmentally friendly way.
They have been doing so for more than 20 years, partly because they have three children and are thinking ahead, beyond their own life spans. They have made mistakes, but they have also learned a lot. They remain convinced that their approach is the right one, but they also know that a life devoted to living green can only be had at a high price. Georg Fürtges spent an entire year researching heating systems before he recently replaced his old gas furnace with a pellet furnace combined with a solar thermal heating system. Some of the pipes in the house had to be replaced. All told, it cost Fürtges €27,000 ($40,200) to retrofit his home. He would have paid about €10,000 for a modern gas furnace.

“We believe that it will pay off in the long term,” says Karla Fürtges. The couple bought their small 1930s house in Stadtwald, an Essen neighborhood, 16 years ago. The heating system was old, the windows weren’t insulated and the house lacked effective heat insulation.

The couple began by insulating the outside walls. Then they purchased the costly new gas furnace and had vinyl thermopane windows installed. The insulation alone brought down their annual natural gas consumption from 22,000 to 12,000 kilowatt hours. An average household currently consumes almost twice as much gas.

Keep reading at Der Spiegel

The timing was great as both Nike and Apple have left the Chamber of Commerce in protest over the lack of action on climate change.

The Washington Post has an article on the Yes Men press conference.

Environmental activists held a hoax press conference Monday morning, pretending to be the business group — and pretending to announce that the chamber was dropping its opposition to climate-change legislation now in Congress.

The event, complete with fake handouts on chamber letterhead, at least a couple of fake reporters, and a podium adorned with the chamber logo, broke up when a spokesman from the real chamber burst in.

What followed was a spectacle not usually seen in the John Peter Zenger Room at the National Press Club: two men in business suits shouting at one another, each calling the other an impostor and demanding to see business cards.

Here’s some climate change news that goes underreported: you can slow climate change by having and promoting safe sex.

In Pakistan, for instance, family planning and reproductive health services “still remain out of reach for millions of Pakistanis,” she said in a 2008 research commentary she co-authored, ‘Population, Fertility and Family Planning in Pakistan: A Program in Stagnation’.

Yet, Hardee asks, how come scientists and climate change experts fail to make the crucial connection between sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and climate change? She says the global architecture around climate change addresses mitigation and adaptation policies on technological solutions while social sectors, including health, are not sufficiently included on its radar.

The senior researcher at the Washington-based Population Action International (PAI), which promotes universal access to family planning and reproductive health care services, says it is critical that voices supporting SRHR and family planning are heard in the forthcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference, to be held on Dec. 7 to 18 in Copenhagen.

She calls for “more people-centered global and national adaptation approaches that meet the full range of people’s needs”.

Read more about population and climate change.

Peru’s Ministry of Agriculture has decided to single handedly attempt to mitigate the effects of climate change using a nation-wide tree planting project.

The campaign began on 13th December, and aims to have 40 million trees planted by 20th February.

Forty million trees in three months. That’s the same as 512,820 trees per day. Which is a lot of tree planting.

A workforce of 130,000 people, in fact, with each person planting an average 4.5 trees per day.

Nasa and the JPL have created a climate time machine to quickly explain to policy makers the effects of climate change.

Because everybody is affected by the weather, it seems like everybody likes to improvise themselves a climate scientist. Amateur theories about global warming are a dime a dozen and, unfortunately, that can make it hard for the general public and policy makers to figure out what’s based on sound science and what has just been made up in 5 minutes by someone who doesn’t know anything about climate science.

That’s the problem that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is trying to help fix with Climate Time Machine. Read on for more details.

The conservatives in Canada are now being sued by an environmental group. I’m sure that the timing of the lawsuit is to draw attention to the potential that Canada has for being a leader in fighting global warming at the UN’s climate change conference in Bali, which started today.

Major policies will be shaped by the countries listed above (among others) over the course of the next two weeks. Stay tuned for the good news that will come from the UN conference.

While in Canada, the environmentalist will continue to fight up north:

The group, Friends of the Earth, alleges that Environment Minister John Baird has broken the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, by ignoring a recent requirement of the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act.

The act was passed by Parliament in June 2007.

The lawsuit contends that Ottawa was legally required to publish draft regulations by Oct. 20, 2007, which would have enabled Canada to follow its Kyoto commitments, but failed to do so.

“This new application, while relevant to climate change, is all about holding the government of Canada accountable under Canadian law,” said lawyer Chris Paliare, who filed the legal challenge on behalf of the group.

In the context that is Harper’s Canada, activists have to be more creative than usual. The conservatives are stifling debate by not inviting the official opposition to attend the United Nations’ major climate change meeting next month in Bali, Indonesia. As a result, Canadian activists are trying to continue what the current Canadian government dislikes: discussions on climate change. So it is good that the Canadian people actively care about the environment.

A coalition of Canada’s top environmental groups is offering a hand to jilted opposition MPs who want to attend key climate-change talks in Bali, Indonesia.

Environment critics from the three opposition parties were told earlier this week that they would no longer be welcome in the official Canadian delegation attending the United Nations meeting next month.

The government has traditionally allowed opposition MPs, and even non-governmental groups and industry representatives, to tag along to such high-profile summits. The critics were invited to the last major UN climate meeting in Kenya a year ago.

Governments of 190 countries, in addition to the European Commission, agreed to freeze production of HCFCs at average 2009-10 levels in 2013. That deadline replaces an earlier target of 2016.
Developed countries also have agreed to end HCFC production in 2020, instead of 2030. The pact also says that by 2010 they will reduce production and consumption of HCFCs by 75 per cent and then by 90 per cent by 2015, five years before their final phase-out.