Worldchanging

Dang. I’ve used up the morn­ing blog time I have (between 6–6:30- when I rise to 7:50 when I need to get my son Packed off to school) post­ing over at World­Chang­ing.

I’ll cross post what I said over there in respon­se to an open ques­tion about what NGOs are doing wor­thy work on Cli­mate change.

(Chevy Appren­tice still going strong — see the links in the com­ments to my pre­vi­ous post for some cool stuff!)

OK, full dis­clo­sure: I work for Green­peace Inter­na­tion­al in Ams­ter­dam. But even if I didn’t, I’d put them up there in the ranks of the wor­thy.

For starters, they were talk­ing about this issue in the late 80s with a “Fos­sil Fuel Free Future” that was ahead of its time. They did some impor­tant work inter­na­tion­al­ly putting the issue out there. In the inter­ven­ing they:

Cre­at­ed a pres­sure cam­paign that got Coke, McDon­alds and Unilever to switch their refrig­er­a­tion meth­ods away from CFCs:

http://tinyurl.com/fguey

Part­nered with indus­try to cre­ate “Green­freeze” CFC-free refrig­er­a­tion:

http://tinyurl.com/nj5n6

Lob­byed the World Busi­ness Coun­cil into a pro-Kyoto posi­tion again­st the will of the US mem­bers:

http://tinyurl.com/nayqg

Green­peace may not be the new cool in envi­ron­men­tal advo­ca­cy (I note they don’t even get a link in the side­bar here at World­Chang­ing), but in a world in which the nuclear industry’s adver­tis­ing bud­get alone is (way) big­ger than their annu­al bud­get, they’re still box­ing above their weight.

Per­son­al­ly, I’d split my dona­tions between Green­peace (think glob­al) and small­er local groups doing the nuts and bolts work to ensure renew­ables are on a lev­el play­ing field with big oil, that con­sumers get incen­tives to buy green, and that your own pow­er isn’t com­ing from nuclear or coal.

Here ende­th the ser­mon. 😉

–b