Climatechange Videos

Helen iles from media charity, undercurrents was voted Digital Hero of Wales at a ceremony in the House of Lords. "I am so happy to have been voted Wales' Digital Hero. The 5000 grant will allow me to tour the UK with our solar powered cinema, using films to educate young people about the environment & motivating them to tackle climate change". http://www.undercurrents.org http://www.onthepush.org

Students at Shared Planet 2009 get their hands dirty planting some bulbs in the park as part of a Grow Your Own workshop.

Alec Loorz was inspired by Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth , to become an educator on the issue of climate change. Founding his own organization, Kids vs. Global Warming, Alec continues to fight fossil fuels and other contributors to global warming, and encourages his peers to do the same. The Earth Island Institute created the annual Brower Youth Awards to honor six young people for their outstanding activism and achievements in the fields of environmental and social justice advocacy. Each winner is awarded $3000 and brought to San Francisco for the award week and a backcountry camping trip. This video from Rikshaw Films tells Alec's story and shows what can be done with a little confidence.

The rainforests of the Brazilian Amazon, the most biologically diverse place on Earth, are shrinking by tens of thousands of square kilometers a year. About 60 to 70 percent of that deforestation occurs as rancher cut, burn and bulldoze trees, often illegally, to create pastures for the country's burgeoning cattle industry. In recent years, Brazil has become the largest exporter of beef and, not coincidentally, one of the largest polluters in the world. Fires from the burning forests and the ovens that heat the wood into charcoal fill the skies. The cattle, too, are responsible for methane gases. "Every year in the dry season, the rainforest is burning. If it's not the rainforest, it's the pastures," says Lohuizen. Even nature preserves, such as Terra do Meio, are not safe from the illegal deforestation.

It was more fractious, more divided, more bitter and more serious for Malcolm Turnbull than anyone had predicted. In the end the coalition party room discussion on the ETS went for more than 8 hours, ending with a dispute over the numbers. But as the leader, Malcolm Turnbull says he made the call, within minutes the Liberal leader appeared before a press conference declaring victory, it was a bravura performance full of bravado, he looked and acted like a winner when quite obviously the the reverse was true, already he knew a formal call for a spill of the leadership for thursday was in the works.

They say there's a soundtrack that can encapsulate every major event or life story. I'm sure there are songs that vividly remind you of your youth. A new soundtrack is out now, marking the historic struggle for an Emissions Trading Scheme. Yes, the earth may be hotting up, but the hot hits keep coming. But you have to be quick, it's for this week only!

On the eve of next month's Copenhagen climate conference, a new global synthesis of the last three years of climate science has been released internationally overnight. The Copenhagen Diagnosis finds that all the indicators for temperature, sea ice and ice-sheet loss and sea level rise are accelerating. Perhaps most disturbingly, the report says that the world is already locked into a minimum rise in sea levels of half a metre by the end of this century because of warming and melt already underway.

The tumultuous events in the Libeal party have overshadowed a real victory for Ian MacFarlane and his negotiating skills. He extracted $7 billion from the Rudd government, money that goes to compensation for heavy emitters. He also managed to have agriculture excluded.

The electricity sector may not be satisfied but one business group, the Australian Industry Group, says that on balance, the government's revamped climate deal is a 'definite improvement'. To get the Liberal party onside, the federal government doubled the amount of compensation on offer to the coal sector, giving an extra $4 billion to electricity generators. It also excluded agriculture from its emissions trading scheme.

Privately-owned Victorian power generators have been vociferous in their opposition to the federal government's scheme. In a last ditch lobbying effort, TRUenergy, the Chinese-owned company which operates the brown coal fired Yallourn power station in Victoria's Latrobe Valley, took out a full page ad in the Australian Financial Review this week, warning of blackouts, job losses and investment cuts if the ETS went ahead as is. Yesterday the federal government heeded those warnings, upping the assistance to electricity generators by 75%, or $4 billion. Yet TRUenergy says the deal is still inadequate and will hinder its ability to invest in cleaner technologies.

The climate deal offered by the government does seem to have clarified one problem which has loomed large in the emissions trading debates. Under the previous versions of the bill, voluntary efforts of householders to reduce their personal emissions would have done nothing to cut the country's overall emissions. But in the most recent offer, that appears to have changed.

A 'cave-in to the big polluters'. That's how Greens leader Bob Brown describes the revamped ETS deal. He's critical of the amended Emissions Trading legislation, saying it's too generous to polluters. The Coalition secured an extra $7 billion in industry assistance over 10 years and much of the extra cash will go to the coal sector and electricity generators. Bob Brown says the government and the opposition have delivered a Polluters PayDay.