Congratulations to the MySociety team for their work and multiple-recognition in the Guardian’s Top 100 Most Useful websites. It’s incredible what such a small, dedicated team can do.

Theyworkforyou

Publicwhip

HearfromyourMP

and, of course, Pledgebank

Their xmas bash was lovely too.

I’m sure many in government must also be thinking “those pesky kids”…

Not to be confused with 1980s UK TV show “The Tube“, or the London Underground, we just launched http://www.global-cool.com/cooltube

With lots more content to come.

Quite heavy reading, but very, very good; “The Global Carbon Cycle” (Amazon link) has a great selection of research papers covering most areas from anthropogenic CO2 cycles in the Oceans to regional Carbon-flow based on global trade (e.g. did you know 174 billion tons of paper were Exported globally in Y2000? - that’s a lot of Carbon being moved about, never mind the fuel). Measuring Carbon flow in terms of physical trade is quite fascinating and a very different visualisation than ‘pollution’. I’m thinking of ways to capture that into some tangible measure of personal CO2e.

One of the many wake-up stats is that the measurements are made in PgC. That’s Petagrams of Carbon. A Petagramme is 1,000,000,000,000 kilograms. And then they talk about PgC per year…

The total world energy consumption is about 400EJ (that’s Exajoules per annum, Exa is a 1 with 18 zeroes after it).

It all really helps drive home the idea that relocalisation of all forms of production is absolutely mandatory. Not just a sustainable power-station on every street corner, or good insulation of your property, but all other forms of human consumption have to be legislated into local re-existence.

So, how to re-seed what we used to do… and fast?

Getting there?

http://www.relocalize.net/guide

http://climate.oneworldblogs.net/

So, we just launched the next iteration of Global Cool - a combination of a more funky redesign, the launch of donation system, and most importantly, the launch of the Global Cool Tonne (”A Tonne of Cool”)…

Thanks to Andy, Naresh, Dave, Ralph, Matt, Ryan, Jenny, Anna, Adrian, Chris, Joel, Dig, Marcus and Paul.

Donations will be used to support United Nations-approved projects such as renewable energy projects like building and running wind farms, and energy efficient initiatives such as buying power-saving light bulbs for third world hospitals.

Nothing is perfect, but I believe the UN endorsed schemes amongst the best and are geared to benefit those most affected by climate change…

As far as I know, we’ve managed to create one of the best frameworks out there. Each UN project has a barcode, and gets audited so, one of the things we can do is bring greater visibility to those projects (not all of them work, and need public scrutiny). Rather than being buried on the UN site, we can help bring broad public eyes to projects that may help apply the right kind of social/media pressure to monitor the evolution of this very important sector.

We’re watching. We’ll help other people with the watching.

We’re also retiring. I don’t mean shy, or due to fabulous wealth. One objective is to retire carbon from the markets. This potentially has a more impact than investing in “future projects”. Taking carbon off the existing markets reduces, and may even stop, companies from just buying their way out of the problem - the markets are currently capped. The sooner there is less for them to buy their way out with Carbon credits, the sooner they have to pollute less.

Now all we need is millions of people to join in with all the initiatives out there and we might just make a difference.

And now? Onto v0.3…