Real action on climate change
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The gift of a less polluted planet - now available from Sandbag!
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Carbon trading explained through biscuits.
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About Sandbag
Thinking about climate change can be a depressing occupation. It's a massive issue and personal actions like switching off lights and unplugging televisions can feel like small contributions. But what if there was an easy way to make a big difference and really speed up the pace of change? What if you could take action now sitting in front of your computer armed with nothing more than your credit card and an e-mail account?
Well there is and sandbag has been set up to let you do just that. Thanks to policy makers in the UN and Europe levels of pollution are now controlled. Permits must be bought by polluters to let them keep polluting. But there is a finite number of them in circulation and the good news is anyone can buy them. So by taking a permit out of the system we can reduce the amount of pollution taking place and force industry to invest in cleaner technologies. One less permit means one less tonne of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
Join us and we will take permits out of the system on your behalf. Once you feel the sense of satisfaction you get from taking such an easy and positive action, we hope you will also join us in putting pressure on the people who receive them for free and the people who decide how many permits to hand out each year. At the moment far too many are out there but with enough people watching and asking for change we can change that. To see who has been given what so far check out our map.
So that's what sandbag and this site are all about - for more background information continue reading here or check out the FAQs.
From the Blog
Carbon budgets in the UK
Yesterday the Committee on Climate Change published its recommendations for how the government should implement the requirements of the Climate Change Bill to introduce legally binding carbon budgets for the next 15 years.
I have to declare an interest in this subject – when I worked at Friends of the Earth we wrote the first report calling for carbon budgets to be introduced, as long ago as March 2005. Then while working in Government I was lucky enough to be involved in writing the concept into the Draft Climate Change Bill which has just been finalised and become an Act.
The UK needs its own legislation because there is insufficient clarity at an international level about what it is each country is required to do to combat climate change – the Kyoto Protocol currently runs out in 2012 and the EU’s policy package has still to be agreed and is anyway contingent on a new global deal being reached. So in this policy vacuum the UK has been merrily drifting along – doing some bits and pieces to try to incentivise and disincentivise various things - but failing overall to deliver a sustained reduction in emissions across the economy as a whole. The Climate Change Act was designed to create both the impetus and the tools for the UK to act, decisively and unilaterally, in pursuit of a low carbon economy.
Continues....
