building sandbag

From an underground bunker, last inhabited by Sir Winston Churchill and his war time cabinet, we launched sandbag last night. A few technical glitches aside it seemed to go down pretty well. We attempted to show our new film, but sadly the volume gave out half way through, but, via the power of Youtube, we are pleased to say the whole thing can now be viewed on line here.

It's our attempt at explaining emissions trading to the man on the street. Thanks to Greg, Marek and James for putting this together at short notice. Stirling work.

We also made our updated Google map live. Log in to see how emissions from power stations and factories last year compare with the number of permits they have been allocated for this year and the next four years. The data is still not very clean in places sadly as some sites have entered post-codes for administrative head-quarters nowhere near the site itself. We are investigating ways of correcting this but it may prove a task that needs crowd-sourcing. Anyone with any nifty suggestions for how to make this happen, please get in touch.

So with the launch event over, we can now concentrate on getting this campaign underway and also improving the functionality of the website. Thanks to everyone who has registered to date and signed up as members - we will be in touch soon to begin the process of turning ourselves into an irresistible force for change.

And things are falling in to place, fingers crossed. Today saw the arrival of a new animation on the home page. The result of lots of hard work by Michael Goldrei our star animator who worked round the clock to make it happen.

Lots of people have fed back that it wasn´t immediately obvious to the casual observer what we were all about so hopefully this new addition helps correct that, though more feedback always welcome!

 (continues)

A week to go until our official launch on Sept 16th and there´s nothing like a deadline to focus the mind.

I´ve left my full time job and so last Tues I went to see Jim Hansen (the climate science guy, not the muppets guy) give a talk to the Stop Climate Chaos coalition. It gave me a change to reconnect with many of my old NGO colleagues from my Friends of the Earth days. It felt good and odd to be back. Good because I was surrounded by people with the same conviction that we need to act and act quickly. Odd because the last few years in a big energy company and in Government have somehow given me a different perspective - less polarised – a greater appreciation for the shades of grey that generally in campaigning you try to play down since campaigns rely on conflict, black and white arguments, good guys and bad guys. I hope I haven´t gone soft!
(continues....)

I resigned from my job today - with mixed emotions. I´m excited
about the prospect of being able to devote my energies to making this
campaign a success and by the idea of being my own boss, but I´m also
going to miss my old job. I´ve worked for Scottish and Southern Energy
for the last three years - as a policy adviser and general agitator -
and it´s been excellent. They have embraced the challenge of climate
change and are now seriously investing in renewable energy and in
developing an energy services business model. It´s been great working
for a company that makes things happen on the ground and I´ll really
going to miss them.

Thinking about on-line social networking, Frank used a very good analogy the other day: it’s like hosting a party – you can create a space for people to get together, let people know about it but then you just have to hope they turn up and have a good time. But what constitutes a good time? Getting dressed up? Meeting new interesting people? Dancing til your feet hurt? In the real world things like alcohol, cool lighting effects, great music help create ‘atmosphere’ – but what is that really? For me the best parties feel like you’ve stepped into a different world, to take part in a random unscripted event which will hopefully leave everyone with something to smile about. Fun things to do seem to be a key ingredient – last night the area around the Royal Festival Hall seemed to turn itself in to an urban Burning Man Festival...

If you should stumble upon this site we apologise for the slightly confusing state it is in right now. You can't join yet, but you can register as a new user which allows you to comment on blog articles. If you want to find out about us please click on the picture of Sally to the right. Hopefully next week we'll have most of this sorted out!

Cheers.

The last couple of days have been hilarious. Every good website needs a promotional video so this weekend we made one. Alex, Edwin, Pete, Dr. Tom and I 'sweded' the Hollywood version of climate change - The Day After Tomorrow. 

What is sweding?

Today saw the arrival of our first map of emissions trading. At the moment it is only showing the top 100 polluters in the UK but we are exploring ways of being able to show the full 900 or so without rendering it too complex to be useful. Getting to this stage has involved quite a lot of data cleaning and re-organisation. Our conclusion - the UK is a lot better at handling data than the EU.

Yesterday was the third anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol coming into force and to mark the occasion an ex-colleague, Dr. Dan Barlow, contributed an article to the Scotsman newspaper.

http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/opinion/Let39s-mark-Kyoto-anniversary-by.3781449.jp