(This article is cross posted on Rails-to-Trails' site.) When Jenny Nordstrom signed up on Rails-to-Trails Conservancy's (RTC) Team RTC for the 2008 Brita Climate Ride, she didn't know exactly what to expect. "I'm an RTC member, and I received [their eNews] featuring the ride," she says. "I didn't know anyone else who was going, but I was so excited that I ended up registering 10 minutes later." Nordstrom signed up in late July, which didn't leave her much time for training. She had jumped at the chance to raise awareness of climate change and perhaps meet some interesting people along the way. But at 40 years old, with a toddler at home, she knew her work was cut out for her on a 300-mile ride.(more...)

Join the movement. Stand up against climate change and dirty energy. Get on your bike and ride for the climate! 1)  Sign Up Your Friends--Make a Team Already, 18 teams have registered for Climate Ride!  Teams are a great way to gather your friends or colleagues, fundraise together and then pedal from NYC to DC. Teams can be as small as two or as big as you want!  Jake Stewart, who sent us this picture of riders celebrating in front of the Capitol last year, has started a team called Austin Climate Riders. Look for this team of Texans on (more...)

1) Last day to register for only $60! Register before May 1st and get $40 off your registration fee. Get online, get your friends, and sign up! When you register before May 1st, it helps everyone. It helps you plan, get a jumpstart on your training and fundraising, and get the word out to more folks.  After May 1st, the registration fee returns to $100. Register for Climate Ride here! 2)  Clean Air-Cool Planet and Climate Ride Build Youth Leadership in Northeast: Thanks to the donations of our 2008 Climate Riders, Clean Air-Cool Planet (CA-CP) is charging ahead, providing (more...)

Thanks to the donations of our 2008 Climate Riders, Clean Air-Cool Planet (CA-CP) is charging ahead, providing remarkable educational opportunities for young climate leaders. Thanks to you, Clean Air-Cool Planet was able to provide competitive, real-world Fellowships for eight college and university students in the Northeast. These students worked on a variety of challenging and catalytic projects, including inventorying greenhouse gas emissions in southwestern New Hampshire, creating a New York State climate change toolkit for community governments, and customizing a version of CA-CP’s Climate Change Backpack® educational tool for young people in the Mid-Atlantic states. One inspired Fellow said that (more...)

Join the movement. Stand up against climate change and dirty energy. Get on your bike and ride for the climate! 1)  Focus the Nation Launches Nationwide Town Hall on a Just and Clean Energy Future. Your Climate Ride donations helped Focus hire five community organizers who have worked tirelessly since December to organize an unprecedented 103 Town Halls across the nation, covering more than 150 congressional districts! The Town Halls are being held this weekend to engage Congressional representatives, mayors and other elected officials in accelerating America's transition to a clean energy future. The majority of the Town Halls will (more...)

While on Brita Climate Ride '08, Kat and Josh learned of The College FilterForGood Eco-Challenge which aims to empower eco-conscious students to create projects that improve the environment on their campuses.  This year, five college students were chosen to each receive a $10,000 grant to bring their ideas to life.  Proposals were evaluated on creativity, environmental benefit, educational impact and best use of time and budget.  Check out the brilliant ideas implemented by Kat and Josh! Read these excerpts from www.filterforgood.com: Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Sun Conditioning Here's another reason to love the sun. MIT's group of students, led by (more...)

For those wishing to observe Yom Kippur but still participate in Climate Ride, please email us at info@climateride.org for details about an arrangement we are working on with UPenn’s Yom Kippur service. We are aware that Climate Ride coincides with Yom Kippur in 2009. In no way was our date selection intended to offend or disregard Jewish activists or cyclists. Climate Ride dates are constricted by Senate and Congressional schedules, clement fall weather, and availability at our camping areas. We hope that members of the Jewish faith understand our limited choice and will join us this year or next year (more...)

Register before May 1st and get $40 off your registration fee. Get online, get your friends, and sign up! When you register before May 1st, it helps everyone. It helps you plan, get a jumpstart on your training and fundraising, and get the word out to more folks. It helps us get a sense for how many Climate Riders we will have, so we know how many jerseys to order, leaders are needed to staff the event, and how many yummy Clif Bars to stock. After May 1st, the registration fee returns to $100. Register for Climate Ride here! (more...)

By ClimateBiz Staff View the article on Climate Biz here. The advocacy group Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy -- also known as BICEP -- flexed its muscle Thursday with a new crop of members to help push for aggressive climate change policies. Gap Inc., eBay and Symantec joined the four-month-old coalition whose founding members include corporate heavyweights Levi Strauss & Co., Nike, Sun Microsystems, Starbucks and The Timberland Co. The group, organized by nonprofit Ceres, subscribes to a set of climate change principles that are, in some ways, more progressive those of President Barack Obama. For instance, BICEP (more...)

Reposted with permisson from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark. The original article can be viewed at Denmark's COP15 website. By Marie Sauer-Johansen First priority is security – especially if Heads of States and Governments are going to participate. Unfortunately, there just aren't that many armoured limousines that are environmentally friendly. If, for example, Obama is here, it simply isn't safe enough to drive him around in a car like the Toyota Prius – although it's a great hybrid car. Secondly, practicalities must not stand in the way of achieving a good conference result. For example, some delegates prefer (more...)

By GreenerDesign Staff Wal-Mart and Kmart are adding full lines of organic jeans made by Washington-based Greensource to their private label clothing lines. Greensource provides T-shirts, jeans and other apparel made from a variety of greener sources, including organic cotton, bamboo and recycled polyester. The cotton Greensource uses is grown in accordance with organic standards, and how the company processes and manufactures the jeans meets the voluntary Global Organic Textile Standard. All five of the company's manufacturing facilities have been certified to the standard. Wal-Mart's Faded Glory label and Kmart's Route 66 brand will each offer men's, women's and children's (more...)

Climate Biz: By Tom Stoddard Offsetting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is like public education: Everyone is an expert on it, and opinions are posted all over the Internet like celebrity photos. In GHG compliance markets, governed by treaty and law, strict criteria are put in place to define what types of offset projects are acceptable and what conditions -- real, permanent, additional, etc. -- they must meet. Not everyone agrees with the rules. Discussions of additionality are tortuous. There are inevitable reports of imperfections in projects resulting from the protocols that are now in place. Nonetheless, projects designed to create (more...)

New York Times By STEFAN MILKOWSKI ~ TOKSOOK BAY, Alaska — Beyond the fishing boats, the snug homes and the tanks of diesel fuel marking this Eskimo village on the Bering Sea, three huge wind turbines tower over the tundra. Their blades spin slowly in a breeze cold enough to freeze skin. One of the nation’s harshest landscapes, it turns out, is becoming fertile ground for green power. As interest in cleaning up power generation grows around the country, Alaska is fast becoming a testing ground for new technologies and an unlikely experiment in oil-state support for renewable energy. Alaskans (more...)

Financial Times~ By Clive Cookson in Chicago The world is warming far more quickly than scientists forecast just two years ago when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its last reports, according to a series of assessments presented over the weekend. Chris Field of Stanford University, a senior member of the IPCC, told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that the unexpectedly rapid increase in the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal, since 2000 would have dire consequences because of "feedback loops" in the global -climate. "We are looking now at a future (more...)

Reuters~ SOMETIMES it is worth looking at the big picture. That is the idea behind monitoring greenhouse gases from space. In January the Japanese space agency, JAXA, launched Ibuki, the first satellite dedicated to monitoring carbon dioxide and methane. Later this month the American space agency, NASA, is due to launch the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), which is also designed to monitor carbon dioxide. The new satellites will work as carbon accountants by keeping a close eye on how the Earth breathes and returning regular audits. Ibuki, which means “breath” in Japanese, orbits the Earth approximately every 100 minutes at (more...)