Greenpeace UK - Multimedia

'Banned' Kit Kat video struck down, becomes more powerful

jamie — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:31:07 +0000

Where to begin?

There's been so much going here over the last 18 hours that I've only now found the time to write an update. Since the last post here, the Kit Kat video which was pulled from Youtube (following a complaint from Nestlé about copyright infringement) was resurrected on Vimeo and has been racking up views like there's no tomorrow - 78,500 as of this moment. Not the shrewdest move Nestlé could have made, and I liked how Canada's Globe & Mail referred to it as "a global game of whack-a-mole".

Didn't Obi-Wan Kenobi say something about being struck down and coming back more powerful than before?

Our supporters - that's you - have done us proud and I've been constantly amazed at the level of response we've seen. Tweets have been flying about and Nestlé's Facebook page has been swamped with comments asking about their shoddy palm oil policies.

We also offered up a copy of the video for anyone to download and post hither and thither. Over 2,000 people have done just that and it's appearing all over the place, such as Eco-tube. Even more amazing are the customised versions or completely original creations. Here are my two favourites:

As we left the office last night, our baton was being passed on to other timezones, and my fellow Kit Kat ninjas in the US, China, New Zealand, Indonesia, and Australia set to work. Japan and Mexico are also joining in as well, along with many other Greenpeace offices, and most of the tweets appearing last night were in Portuguese as Brazil got into the game.

And even the Sun ran a piece on our campaign today with contender for headline of the year: KitKatastrophe.

Where to now? Nestlé executives have agreed to a meet with our campaigners in a couple of weeks' time which is a positive step, but until they cut the notorious Sinar Mas out of their supply chain, our video will remain and we'll keep pushing.

A run on salmon?

Willie — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:38:50 +0000

It's worth stopping to think about the true price of the salmon you eat. And there's quite a lot to think about.

Salmon is one of the biggest international seafood commodities, and in the UK it's easily one of the most consumed and most conspicuous species in our supermarkets and restaurants. But the vast majority of the salmon you'll find on shelves or plates these days has been farmed rather than fished. Partly that’s because there's hardly any wild Atlantic salmon left, but it's also because salmon's popularity has grown and it has gone from being a delicacy to become more of an everyday food in the past few decades.

Today sees the online launch of a short film exposing some of the more unpleasant side of the global salmon industry, called Farmed Salmon Exposed - watch the first instalment above.

Internationally, the UK (and Scotland in particular) is a big salmon farming country, producing proudly branded products that are sold worldwide. But the reach of this industry flows around the world the other way too – in particular with the demand for feed fish, small species like anchovies that often come from places like South America, where they are caught in vast numbers and rendered down to fishmeal. Alternative options could be palm oil or soya, which of course bring their own set of concerns.

Perhaps surprisingly for some people, salmon farming generally uses many times more fish - weight for weight - than it produces. From that perspective alone it's questionable whether farming salmon and other carnivorous species of seafood can ever be truly sustainable.

Lately there have been some quite hard-hitting criticisms of the impact that fishing for feed fish has on the oceans, with the mighty Dr Daniel Pauly equating this as "robbing Pedro to pay Paul". There are others trying to change the system from the other end, and at the SCA Seafood Summit in Paris I was happy to meet the dynamic Patricia Majluf who is working tirelessly in her native Peru to convince people to cut out the middle-fish, and eat anchovies rather than feed them to salmon!

As a result of Greenpeace USA's work, the retailer Target recently announced it was to stop selling farmed salmon, and would only stock wild-caught certified salmon from the Pacific instead. This is great news, but slightly marred by the huge concerns being raised by many groups in Canada about the alarming state of Pacific sockeye salmon, which, confusingly seems about to be recertified by the MSC.

The irony here is that even if you, as a conscientious consumer, want to avoid that particular species then it's likely to be very difficult to do because a number of different species are just called 'Pacific salmon'.

Some parts of the industry have already had to change because of catastrophes and bad news stories – up until last year, for example, Chilean farmed salmon was readily available on UK supermarket shelves. A string of disease outbreaks and bad PR means you won't find it there today. Elsewhere the bad news stories just keep coming, like the escape of thousands of non-native salmon just a few weeks ago.

Over here in the UK there are clearly better options for salmon if you do choose to buy it, including the salmon from Scotland which has organic certification and is overall, a much lower-impact option.

But please do stop to think of the overall price you may be paying.

Impossible Hamster crushes all before it

christian — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:41:21 +0000

Is economic growth at the root of the environmental challenges we're struggling to get to grips with? That's a central tenet of the diagnosis for the 100 Months campaign from our hipster friends at the New Economics Foundation.

But how to illustrate this argument? Enter: The Impossible Hamster, twitchy growth-based anti-hero. nef have also produced a report, Growth Isn't Possible, and so both boxes of the modern campaigning strategy are very much ticked: solid research backed up by meme-hugging hamster video.

So, what do you reckon? Is growth the key problem? And does the hamster take your fancy as the unlikely hero of the fightback?

Video: 2040 and all that

jamie — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 11:33:23 +0000

With Copenhagen and Christmas taking up most of our attention in the undignified scrabble at the end of the year, a few things have fallen through the gaps so I've only just seen the email from Jörg Iversen about the video he produced with Roman Rütten. They're both design students at Buckinghamshire New University and made this impressive short as part of their coursework. There's even a behind the scenes film!

Naomi Klein on activism's impact on the climate negotiations

jossc — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:28:49 +0000

This blog by Mike Gaworecki was originally posted on the Climate Rescue weblog earlier today.

All week long, the Fresh Air Center has been a really valuable place for me and Jamie to come work, especially now that we're not allowed into the conference center. Run by Tcktcktck.org, the FAC is a space for NGO and independent bloggers to work and coordinate messages.

I'm writing this as our executive director, Kumi Naidoo, addresses the crowd (he's also the chairman of Tcktcktck). He got a very warm welcome, and the speaker before him actually said he was glad not to have to follow Kumi on. But I dare say the crowd is really here to see the main event: a panel hosted by Kevin Grandia of Desmog Blog and featuring Naomi Klein, author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine; Andy Revkin of the New York Times; George Monbiot, author and columnist for The Guardian; and Katherine Goldstein, green editor for the Huffington Post. The panel discussion is about how coverage of the climate talks in the media will effect the final two days of negotiations.

Before the panel took the stage, I asked Naomi Klein (of whom, I freely admit, I am a rabid fan) to tell us what, in her estimation, the impact of activism outside of the conference center can have on the negotiations going on inside. In the video above she gives her response.

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Playing the biggest game of Risk

jamie — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 16:56:27 +0000

With all the headlines about what the world will be like if we don't get a grip on climate change - how hot it will be by 2050, how high the sea levels will rise, that sort of thing - there's always an element of uncertainty. The top line figures you see in the press are usually only one of a range of figures calculated by climate modelling, producing a range of potential outcomes based on possible changes to our behaviour and the environment.

What's often neglected is a risk assessment: comparing the probability of a particular outcome against the effect it will have. Our perception of risk is very skewed - we'll panic about things like swine flu (which the chances of us dying from a very low) but we'll quite happily drive around in cars where the probability of dying in a road accident are comparatively higher.

A piece by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times yesterday provides an eloquent comparison between the risks of climate change and nuclear terrorism, which demonstrates just how warped our risk perception really is. He explains how Dick Cheney reportedly declared: “If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping Al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.” Cheney contended that the U.S. had to confront a very new type of threat: a “low-probability, high-impact event.”

As Friedman points out, even though climate change has a far higher probability of being extremely bad, there isn't such enthusiasm amongst politicians for mobilising against it as they are with perceived terrorist threats.

Which is a perfect way to revisit this fantastic video which is well worth spending 10 minutes of your life watching. And now there's a book, too.

1 minute to save the world - and the winner is...

jossc — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:12:47 +0000

The winning entry: My Paper Boat by Arun Bose

Remember '1 minute to save the world' - the international competition to make your own one minute film about the effects of climate change? The idea behind the project was to provide a platform to allow people to share their visions of how climate change impacts their lives - and how it will impact the future of life on this planet.

The competition was open to people all over the world and there were over 200 entries. They came from all ages, from both professionals and amateurs, and from 30 countries. People from 173 countries voted for their favourite films.

Well, the results are now in and the video above, My Paper Boat by Arun Bose from India, was judged the overall winner. Another very strong entry, Cats against climate change, has gone viral, receiving over 300,000 hits on Youtube in the past two weeks.

For a full list of winning films across all categories, visit the 1minutetosavetheworld website. Go and check them out - and feel free to use them on your own site or pass them on to your friends. We need your help to get these videos seen and to get the message out - we need action on climate change now!

Tuvalu stops play in Copenhagen by demanding legally-binding agreement

jamie — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:32:12 +0000

A couple of hours ago, we heard that the plenary session had been suspended. Tuvalu, the Pacific island nation so vulnerable to climate change, demanded a legally-binding agreement - not in six or 12 months, but at the end of the conference next week. It's a demand that should not, and can not, be ignored.

This goes to the heart of one of the most important questions hanging over Copenhagen and yet a group of industrialised countries - the US, Japan, Canada and the EU - stayed completely silent. Nothing. Not a whisper.

Tuvalu called for a suspension of the plenary which was granted and while the delegates went into recess, the activist network within the conference centre went into overdrive to rally support for Tuvalu's demand. The word went out and by the time the plenary session resumed at 3pm, a large crowd (I guess at least 200-300 people) had gathered at the doors of the plenary room. Banners had been rapidly crafted and off-the-cuff slogans boomed out across the confined space.

Now I'm normally a cynical bugger, but to see such a response generated in such a small space of time thrilled even my jaded senses. The energy was electric and shows just a taste of what's possible with some many people here dedicated to a FAB agreement - that's fair, ambitious and (legally) binding. Expect more of this sort of thing as the summit progresses.

Place your bets for the Copenhagen Fossil Of The Day

jamie — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 20:21:29 +0000

This video shows the first presentation of the Fossil of the Day award on Monday.

Sometimes, there is such a beautiful synchronisation of multiple ideas in a single word, I'm tempted to believe that it couldn't possibly have happened by chance. For instance, what pops into your head when you hear the word 'fossil'?

A. The preserved remains of long-dead organisms
B. A polluting fuel hewn from the ground
C. Someone who refuses to adapt and evolve even though everyone else has
D. All of the above

If you answered D, you're clearly on the same wavelength as the team handing out Fossil Of The Day awards here in Copenhagen. Handed out each evening, they go to the country which has done most to stall, frustrate or otherwise get in the way of a fair, ambitious and legally-binding agreement during the last 24 hours.

They're clearly having a lot of fun and when I went along this evening, there was a large crowd around the stand. Bringing in Merhilda the mermaid to retrieve the winners' names from the bottom of the sea (it's a Copenhagen joke, you have to be here) adds to the silliness, but obviously there's a very serious side to this.

On Monday, all industrialised countries romped away with the top gong for complete lack of ambition, closely followed by Austria, Finland and Sweden in second place (fiddling their forests), and Saudi Arabia and Canada in third. Full details on why those countries were chosen are in the press release.

Last night, there were some surprises. Ukraine won third place for refusing to tell anyone how it is using the money from selling emission credits, which it's required to do so. Second place went to the group of non-EU industrialised countries (aka the Umbrella group) for trying to get carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects eligible for clean development mechanism projects.

And in first place was... Ukraine! So awful are this country's emission reduction targets (which would actually see its emissions increase) that the judges felt obliged to honour it with two awards in one day. Boos from the large crowd gathered round the stand were long and loud. (Check the press release for full details.)

The awards are being given out daily throughout the conference and there are nearly 200 candidates to choose from. Place your bets and check the Fossil Of The Day blog for the latest results.

Video: that Parliamentary projection in full...

jossc — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:44:04 +0000

Peace campaigner Louise gives us all a quick behind the scenes look at how to successfully project a slogan onto the Houses of Parliament...