Starting small, Beijing has reserved a 1 km swathe on the capital’s fringe for parkland and recreation. It may not seem like much, but remember that Beijing has phenomenal development pressure, soaring land prices and not much more land to work with.
Environmentalists Sue Harper, Bali Begins
I’ve never been shy about my dislike of Canada’s current Prime Minister and today won’t be any different. Regular readers of Things Are Good may have noticed that other countries get mentioned often here because their national government take positive action. Three nations, though, get mentioned not because of federal efforts but because of local ones. Those nations are Australia, Canada, and the USA. I’m confident that there is a connection between the lack of good news coming from those national governments and how popular their leaders are. Howard just lost his election and Bush is at an all time low. (EDIT: Australia ratifies Kyoto Protocol! Way to go Rudd!)
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.
How the USA Can Cut 28% of Greenhouse Gases
A new study has been released that looks at how the United States can cut 28% of their greenhouse gas emissions. They looked primarily at the wastefulness of energy use and notice problems that can be solved from the level of the consumer, to the landlord, and to every level of government. By knowing the problem, we can begin to solve and, indeed they have a couple suggestions.
“What the report calls out is the fact that the potential is so substantial for energy efficiency,†said Ken Ostrowski, a leader of the report team. “Not that we will do it, but the potential is just staggering here in the U.S. There is a lot of inertia, and a lot of barriers.â€
The country can do the job with “tested approaches and high-potential emerging technologies,†the study found, but doing the work “will require strong, coordinated, economywide action that begins in the near future.â€
Open Source Translation from Lingro
Boing Boing has a post on Lingro, which is a new tool that makes any word on a webpage clickable and translatable. It can also help you learn a langauge!
Find out more about Lingro.
“It works with English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Polish (with more on the way) and if you find a missing word, you can add a definition.
“Our goal is to make the coolest language learning tools, build community, and build open content dictionaries that anyone (even our competitors) can use in their projects (licensed under the FDL and Creative Commons licenses).”
A Newer, Gooder Website!
If you come here often, you’ll notice that the site looks different!
I just made the switch to this theme and I’m sure there are still some bugs around so if you find any, please leave a comment (after you comment you’ll see a bug…). I plan on adding some minor colour changes and add some features soon. I’ll list the features here once they’ve been implemented.
- Tag cloud! Taxonomy is fun, check out the right side of the site.
- Share this! Look slightly below and you’ll see a “Share this” option. Click on it to send the post to a friend or one of the more popular social websites.
- Take good news to go! If you’re on a mobile you’ll now be better able to view Things Are Good.
- The site should load faster.
- If you comment, you should get a thank-you email and the page won’t have to reload after you comment
- When reading a single post page you’ll notice relevant content from the Arkayne network under the content.
Thanks to Ricdes for the WordPress theme, it’s so good that I made only minor changes 🙂
Another thanks to the wonderful people at WordPress who continue to make my favourite blogging platform.