Support blog action day on the environment, Oct 15th !!

The text below is copied from http://blog.blogactionday.com/category/resources/ in order to help promote: Blog Action Day

You can also click to watch the first and second videos promoting the day.

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind. In 2007 the issue is the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

We’re looking for bloggers of all nationalities and backgrounds, writing about all topics to join in.

Here’s what you have to do:

Publish on October 15th

Publish a post on their blog which relates to an issue of their own choice pertaining to the environment.

For example: A blog about money might write about how to save around the home by using environmentally friendly ideas. Similarly a blog about politics might examine what weight environmental policy holds in the political arena.

Posts do not need to have any specific agenda, they simply need to relate to the larger issue in whatever way suits the blogger and readership. Our aim is not to promote one particular viewpoint, only to push the issue on the table for discussion. So write in whatever way suits your readers and your blog, just relate it back to the environment and make sure it goes up on October 15th.

Other things you can do

You can also participate in Blog Action Day by posting a banner on your site (http://blogactionday.org/promote ) or by donating your day’s blog earnings to an environmental charity of your choice.

Register your blog

We are keeping track of all the blogs that have committed to participating on BlogActionDay.org and it would be very helpful for you to register your blog at http://blogactionday.org/commit
At this time the form is only available in English, but the form fields are as follows:
1 - Blog Title
2 - Blog URL
3 - Approximate RSS Subscriber Number(This will not be published. It is used to generate an approximate ‘reach’ for Blog Action Day. Simply enter an average, recent feed count from Feedburner or similar service. If you don’t know the audience size, just enter ‘0′. )
4 - Your Email( You will ONLY receive two emails. The first will be two days prior to Blog Action Day 2007. And a second in August 2008 about next year’s day.)
5 - The final field is to test whether you are a human or spam robot. Simply type in the number written there

Thank you for participating in Blog Action Day 2007! In future years we hope to have the entire site translated in many languages

'So it goes' - is the environment dying to give us biodiesel for the Earthrace powerboat?

So, the '...revolutionary biodiesel powerboat Earthrace arrived in Bristol Docks.As part of the Sound of Many Waters - Clifton Cathedral's year-long campaign of caring for the environment' recently (see the local story about the 'cross between a spaceship and a spider' here and more details on the boat and what its going to do here). Amazing design, technically very interesting, thrilling to be on, and so on....but is it really powered by truly green biodiesel fuel?? (I'll leave aside, for the present, whether spending all this effort trying to achieve a world record for circumnavigating the globe is the greenest thing to do with your time!!)

If the biodiesel put into the boat comes from large scale crop moncultures, which involves massive land, including forest, clearance and energy/chemical intensive production then its certainly not a green fuel. Far from being carbon neutral, the sums show that fuel from these origins is making climate change much worse, as well as taking land from food production and inflating food prices.

If the biodiesel comes from the recycling of used vegetable oil and fat, which some of it may do for this boat(??) (including some fat extracted from project founder Pete Bethune's own backside apparently), this is much greener.

Truly green biodiesel could be produced from all the waste veg oil and fat we produce in large amounts (its a waste disposal problem for goodness sake!!), but we aren't organising our society to do this at the moment - instead we seem to be going for the environmentally damaging production of biodiesel and other biofuels from large scale monocultures, with people wrongly still calling it green!! There are some very rich people out there getting a lot richer, making a lot of already poor people poorer, and over-exploiting the environment - and investing in bio-fuels produced by very un-green methods! So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote (and the environment does seem to be dying to give us biofuel).