The hopes of any meaningful action on climate change emanating from the US Government could be quashed if, as expected, Republican candidates fare well in the upcoming elections. According to the Wonk Room, a blog run by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, virtually all Republican candidates for the Senate, save one (Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware ), have pubicly expressed varying degrees of doubt about the science of climate change, calling it “a conspiracy” and claiming that policies to [...]

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After posting about the efforts of climate scientists to build a global climate databank for predicting extreme weather events, I got a note from Dave Jarvis who recently built a cool open source tool for exploring weather trends across Canada since 1900. Just choose a location in Canada and within seconds you can pull up historical trends ranging from minimum, mean and maximum temperatures to average daily rain and snowfalls. Apart from the fact that it’s [...]

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Scientists meeting in the UK this week are crafting a revolutionary new project aimed at transforming their ability to predict meteorological disasters. The goal, as reported by the Guardian, “is to create an international databank that would generate forecasts of unprecedented precision.” To make that happen, the scientists behind the project are contemplating something even more radical: enlisting thousands of ordinary citizens around the world to gather, classify and even help analyze the meteorological data required to build [...]

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Denmark is renown for wind power and its impressive accomplishments in reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions at a time when those of most other countries are growing vociferously. Today, 20 per cent of the power generated in Denmark comes from wind. Green energy technology and services account for 12% of national exports. And while North American carbon emissions have risen by around 30 per cent since 1990, Denmark’s emissions are actually lower than they were [...]

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The review committee set up to help revive the beleaguered IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) filed its report yesterday with proposals for wide-ranging changes to the way climate science is done. Set up 22 years ago to provide science advice to governments as they try to deal with global warming, the IPCC has found itself in a storm of controversy recently. First there was notoriously unsupported claim that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. Then there [...]

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For years I’ve been a fan of the Yes Men and the outrageous impersonation stunts they have deployed to (in their words) publicly humiliate leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else. In October last year, for example, they staged a hoax press conference, claiming to represent the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and pretending to announce that the business lobby group was dropping its aggressive opposition to the climate change legislation working [...]

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For the past couple of months I have been working with the wonderful folks at the Lisbon Council in Brussels to prepare a report that examines the economic challenges facing Europe — and the innovative solutions that many entrepreneurs, businesses, governments and citizens are devising to succeed in networked world. The report was launched last week in Brussels at an event that also featured Europe’s new innovation commissioner, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn. You can see video highlights [...]

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Change.org has a little write up of my conversation with Dave Witzel and Jerry Michalski earlier today. The post on Change.org does a decent job of capturing the main thesis, but the conversation itself covered more ground, including some reflections on the changing roles of business, government and individual citizens in addressing environmental problems and a discussion about how social innovations that reach across borders and cultures will challenge traditional conceptions of democracy. The recording [...]

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Are our institutions for global problem-solving broken? The recent failure to secure a meaningful climate change deal in Copenhagen and the global financial crisis suggest that existing global institutions require extensive rewiring. Decades of economic development, integration of product and service markets, cross-border travel and new technologies enabling virtual interaction have created a world that is much more complex and bottom-up than top-down. Yet, too many efforts to solve global issues such as climate change [...]

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I love this example of participatory regulation. Marc Bohlen, an “artist-engineer” at the University of Zurich, has designed a floating public robot that makes assessing recreational water quality a transparent and participatory experience. The Glass Bottom Float, as he calls it, cruises along a beach shore, and offers itself as a resting spot in places it deems clean enough for swimming. Over time, writes Bohlen, the GBF maps paths of least contamination and highest relative pleasure for fish [...]

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