Month: December 2009

Don’t Let Fear Stop You

- Adam Clare

Do you have trouble starting or finishing projects because you fear that it could fail? Well there’s no need to fear!

Here’s a helpful article on how to overcome your fear of failure:

Ways to Combat Fear
You can work towards overcoming fear of failure in a number of ways. For starters, you can look at the situation as a chance to learn something. Always be on the lookout for the silver lining. If you do come face to face with failure, have the courage to pick yourself up and spend a good amount of time going over why you failed in that circumstance. That particular failure may have been required in your life in order for you to be lead to the path to success. If you allow the fear of failure to get the best of you, you wouldn’t have found the courage to even proceed.
Taking action is also a way to combat fear. If you have the right attitude, and plan for success, you just need to push yourself to go for it. Don’t overanalyze or think too much, just take some small actions.
When you’re in a particularly tough spot, you can always look for help from affirmations. These are short positive statements that are in the present tense. Tell yourself that fear is not getting the best of you. Tell yourself that you’re in the process of achieving great success. It may help you to relax and get out of the fear of failure mindset.

No One Is Perfect
When all is said and done, you should realize that no one is perfect. Of course you already know this, but many times that doesn’t stop people from being too hard on themselves. A fear of failure is also a fear of making a mistake. You can’t lead your life with a fear of making a mistake, because you’re bound to make them throughout your life. Just keep working on your attitude and your reactions and you’ll soon find success.

Solar Power for the Masses

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

A chain of department stores in the USA has begun selling solar panels off the shelf. This is a great sign that the market for solar panels is growing and this increased production will only make the panels cheaper in the long run.

Lowe’s has begun stocking solar panels at its California stores and plans to roll them out across the country next year.
This shows how far the highest of the high-tech alternative energy technologies has come. Solar power is now accessible to anyone with a ladder, a power drill, and the gumption to climb up on a roof and install the panels themselves.
For Lowe’s, it’s an opening into a new and potentially lucrative DIY business.
“There’s definitely a growing market for this with the number of people moving toward energy efficient homes,” spokesman Steven Salazar said.

Keep reading the article.

What You Can do to Stop Climate Change

- Adam Clare

Here’s an example of what a German family are doing to lower their environmental impact and make the world a little better for their children:

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

56 Newspapers in 45 Countries and 20 Languages

- Fono

Just one last post about Copenhagen (probably.) Yesterday, 56 newspapers in 45 countries and 20 languages published a shared editorial, urging the citizens and policymakers of the world to take Copenhagen as a serious call-to-action. If they can work together, maybe the rest of us can?

Given that newspapers are inherently rivalrous, proud and disputatious, viewing the world through very different national and political prisms, the prospect of getting a sizeable cross-section of them to sign up to a single text on such a momentous and divisive issue seemed like a long shot. But an early, enthusiastic, conversation with the editor of one of India’s biggest dailies offered encouragement. Then in Beijing in September, I met a senior editor from an influential business weekly, the Economic Observer.

Notwithstanding the shifting boundaries of press freedom in China, he was sure his paper would participate (and another major Chinese daily would subsequently, too). If we could reach a common position with papers from the two developing world giants most commonly identified as obstacles to a global deal, then surely we could crack the rest.

Read the editorial here (The Guardian)

Read the behind-the-scenes story here (The Guardian)

Ban Ki-moon Optimistic About Copenhagen Agreement

- Adam Clare

The Voice of America is reporting that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is optimistic about the world’s nations coming to an agreement about how to tackle climate change.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon told reporters he would go to the Danish capital next week to open the high-level segment that he expects will draw more than 100 heads of state and government.

“I am encouraged and I am optimistic. I expect a robust agreement at Copenhagen summit meeting that will be effective immediately and include specific recommendations on mitigation, adaptation, finance and technology. This agreement will have an immediate operational effect,” he said.

His remarks come as scientists released new data showing the first decade of this century will likely turn out to be the warmest ever. The findings from the World Meteorological Association also predict 2009 will be the 5th warmest year since global record-keeping began in 1850.

Keep reading at Voice of America

Meanwhile in Canada, Greenpeace unfurled banners on Parliament Hill pointing out that Ignatieff and Harper are total failures. Good for Greenpeace for a little direct action.

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