Author: Adam Clare

Social Media Helps Global Development

Social media can actually be useful for more than sharing pictures of your lunch! There is a whole collection of apps and web services that can be used to help development efforts around the world. They provide the ability to track how projects are coming along and their current status to being able to connect farmers to more information and their own local social networks.

My favourite service is one that allows people to report corruption:

I Paid a Bribe is an anticorruption movement that harnesses the power of collective voices. Protected by anonymity, users are encouraged to report on corrupt acts, through a website, email or SMS. The reports are mapped on the site and used to inform campaigns for better governance. The movement is active in India, Greece, Kenya, Pakistan and Zimbabwe, after its founder, Tawanda Kembo, was pressured to pay a bribe by a corrupt police officer, and will be coming soon to the Philippines and Mongolia.

See more examples at The Guardian.

In Ireland, Carbon Tax Means Less Waste and More Revenue

Modern economies indirectly subsidize environmentally damaging corporate practices by ignoring the environmental costs ( younger generations have to deal with the environmental damage), this can be seen in everything from the tar sands in Alberta to ewaste in electronics. In Ireland they have started a carbon tax to deal with this environmental problem while raising a lot more revenue for the country.

The results in Ireland prove promising and may encourage other countries in Europe to take the European Commission’s suggestions that a carbon tax can help other debt-ridden economies.

Household trash is weighed at the curb, and residents are billed for anything that is not being recycled.The Irish now pay purchase taxes on new cars and yearly registration fees that rise steeply in proportion to the vehicle’s emissions. Environmentally and economically, the new taxes have delivered results. Long one of Europe’s highest per-capita producers of greenhouse gases, with levels nearing those of the United States, Ireland has seen its emissions drop more than 15 per cent since 2008.
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The three-year-old carbon tax has raised nearly 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) overall, including 400 million euros in 2012. That provided the Irish government with 25 per cent of the 1.6 billion euros in new tax revenue it needed to narrow its budget gap this year and avert a rise in income tax rates.

Read more here.

Thanks to Mike!

Ontario Demands Less Energy Despite Economic Growth

The only region in North America that expects a decrease in power consumption is Ontario and it’s all thanks to energy conservation initiatives. This is really great because it proves that energy efficiency policies can make a difference in how much energy is required to power a growing economy.

What’s even better is that decrease in overall energy consumption will mean that the money that went to paying for electricity can be spent elsewhere, which should in theory propel the economy even further.

“This isn’t because economies aren’t growing and our population is not growing, and it isn’t because people aren’t buying things,” says Chuck Farmer, director of planning policy and approvals with the Ontario Power Authority (OPA).

“It’s really because the growth is being offset by energy efficiency in one form or another and I think that’s quite a success story.”
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In Ontario, meanwhile, electricity demand growth has declined since reaching a peak in 2005. And now, winter demand has slipped in negative (-0.34 per cent) territory, with summer demand predicted to barely move at 0.07 per cent.

Read more at the Ottawa Citizen.

Futuristic Things That Became Reality Last Year

It seems that most ideas in the realm of Science Fiction stay as fiction but it’s not too rare that “out there” ideas from Sci-Fi can become real. At the Sci-Fi blog IO9 they have complied a list of some seemingly crazy things that turned out to become real last year. The list range from the really cool to the more banal that can occur everyday.

9. An Electric Car is the Year’s Best

If anyone ever doubted that electric cars were the future, those concerns were officially laid to rest in 2012. Tesla’s luxury Sedan, the Model S, captured one of the auto industry’s most prestigious awards by taking home Motor Trend’s Car of the Year honors. It marked the first time that an electric car has taken the top prize — a vehicle that doesn’t run on gas or have an internal combustion engine.

Read more at IO9.

Gross National Happiness is a Good Thing

Bhutan is a small country with a big idea that can change the world. For many years now gross national happiness is how the country monitors its progress, which is the opposite to how other countries measure success (which is from the quantity of money exchanged).

With a world population more knowledgable about environmental destruction there is an increasing concern that wealth accumulation outranks the needs of people. Gross national happiness can change how we measure progress.

Since 1971, the country has rejected GDP as the only way to measure progress. In its place, it has championed a new approach to development, which measures prosperity through formal principles of gross national happiness (GNH) and the spiritual, physical, social and environmental health of its citizens and natural environment.

For the past three decades, this belief that wellbeing should take preference over material growth has remained a global oddity. Now, in a world beset by collapsing financial systems, gross inequity and wide-scale environmental destruction, this tiny Buddhist state’s approach is attracting a lot of interest.

Read more at The Guardian.