How Asians Can Encourage Facebook to Unfriend Coal by Earth Day

Greenpeace is campaigning to get Facebook to unfriend coal by Earth Day, April 22, and Asians can help to encourage Facebook too.

Greenpeace’s Unfriend Coal campaign wants Facebook to:

• Increase the use of clean energy to make Facebook coal free
• Develop a plan to make Facebook coal free by 2021
• Educate users about how Facebook powers its services and its carbon footprint
• Advocate for clean energy at a local, national and international level

Facebook announced last year that it is building a new energy efficient data centre to serve the hundreds of millions of its users, but the company plans to run it on electricity from burning coal, which is the most carbon intensive fossil fuel and also very pollutive. Greenpeace believes that Facebook can move away from coal and switch to clean energy, and influence the rest of the IT sector to do likewise. Read more

China’s Environmental Ministry Lacks Bite

This article first appeared in Greenpeace China.

Beijing, China – China’s environmental ministry turned one year old on the weekend. Greenpeace China takes a look at how this youngster has fared at dealing with China’s biggest crisis – its environmental nightmare.

It sounds unbelievable considering the giant environmental problems facing China but until March last year there was no ministry dedicated to environmental governance.

According to its website the MEP’s mission is to “prevent and control environmental pollution, protect nature and ecology, supervise nuclear safety, safeguard public health and environmental safety, and promote the harmony between man and nature.”

So one year on, what do we think? Read more

China’s Dead Lakes

This article first appeared in Greenpeace China.

Beijing, China – In the summer of 2007 a thick toxic blanket of blue-green algae covered Tai Lake (Taihu) in Jiangsu province. The government earmarked billions of renminbi to clean it up but next year the same thing happened again. What is going wrong?

The problem is the intense amounts of chemical fertilisers in use.

These leak into the lake and are one of the main causes of poisonous algal blooms.

Unless farmers start using less chemical fertilisers and start practicing eco-agriculture China’s lakes and rivers will continue to be poisoned.

Year after year. Read more

The Story of E-waste in Pakistan

Robert Knoth of Greenpeace tells the story of e-waste in the Karachi district of Lyari through his photographs.

Millions of vulnerable people in Asia bearing the brunt of climate crisis, says new report

Bangkok-Manila-Jakarta-Dhaka – Global warming is set to reverse decades of social and economic progress across Asia, home to more than four billion people or 60 per cent of the world’s population, according to a new multi-agency report published today called ‘Up in Smoke: Asia and the Pacific.’

The report–the fourth in a series, compiled by more than 35 development and environmental groups including Oxfam and Greenpeace–says there is growing consensus about the huge challenges facing Asia. However it notes “reason to hope” that there is now enough knowledge about the causes of climate change, how the world must tackle it, and how people in Asia must continue to adapt to it. Immediate action is vital, it says. Read more