This looks set to be an amazing event…

See also:

• Free ‘Peak Oil’ conference in London, 15 July 2006
• Transition Towns
• Transition Handbook
• Transition Handbook Now Open Source!
• Indymedia Film Festival 7th – 15th July

In the lead up to Reclaim Love on Feb 16th Venus and Rikki walk round Camden market asking people what Love means to them and get an extraordinary range of responses…

See also:

• Reclaim Love 2007
• Reclaim Love 5!
• International Love Collective
• You and I
• Belief is circumstantial…

These are my links for February 5th:

• elderwomanblog: Turning Green – Part 3 – our national and global economic systems are all based on a growth model rather than a sustainability model. And since every one of us is part of both a national and a global economic system, the systems need us to keep consuming so that the growth can co
• Practical Answers – Practical Action’s technical briefs ? introductory factsheets and basic practical information ? have been written in response to the demand for information on a broad range of appropriate technologies. They can be downloaded free of charge from this s
• Links: compost toilets – From LILI the Low Impact Living Initiative, links about compost toilets
• Devon Community Supported Farming — [RC 1] – South Devon Community Supported Farming group (CSF): * Organises community crop planting, weeding and harvesting days * Offers other low or no-cost family-friendly events such as fungal forays, bug hunts and rural skills training events * Helps re-connect
• Education for sustainable development, sustainable living, school curriculum – RAISE – RAISE – education for sustainable development RAISE Education RAISE (Rural Arts In Science Education) is an education for sustainable development project based at Beenleigh Meadows Farm near Totnes in South Devon providing a curriculum for learning the pr
• Opina: gestor de encuestas – Trac – An open source poll/ survey/ questionaire manager
• DoMyStuff.com – Outsource your life – DoMyStuff.com provides a marketplace where anyone looking to outsource chores, errands, or projects can locate (and do business with) responsible and experienced local help. At DoMyStuff.com, you can have all your chores completed by SOMEONE ELSE – all f
• Work Together: 60+ Collaborative Tools for Groups – With businesses and families spread out more and more, we?ve dug up 60+ sites that will help everyone be on the same page.
• Hivurt Revolution – This blog about new content management system Hivurt, based on Zope3, Python and other good open source technologies.
• Welcome to Hivurt ? Open Source Content Management System – Hivurt is a content management system powered by a component architecture. It gives you the strength of Zope 3 in an easy to use environment. It allows you to easily switch between ZODB and PostgreSQL data storage and features search and indexes, an easy
• CMS Toolbox: 80+ Open Source Content Management Systems – A content management system, or CMS, is the easiest way to get a content driven site up and running fast. Frequently, they?re also used for building social networks. We?ve rounded up more than 80 popular CMSs due to reader requests. For the sake of br
• [Zope-Annce] Hivurt new open source CMS 0.1.3pre-alfa released – Key Solutions (http://keysolutions.ru/) and Hivurt team (http:// hivurt.org/) proud to announce first public release of our Zope3- based content management system. Hivurt giving you strength of Zope 3 in easy to use environment. This is release aimed for
• my-guides.net – How to create a custom DVD using DeVeDe – This guide describes how to copy, split or customize your legally purchased DVD-9 disks in order to have a back-up of them using DVDFab Platinum ! DVDFab is able to remove almost any copy protection from the dvd disk such as CSS, RC, RCE, APS, UOPs, ARccO
• Alledia – The Joomla SEO Club and Joomla SEO Book – A good Joomla site with good articles comparing it to other CMSs and stuff
• Scratch | About – Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web. Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learni
• Michael Linton on Open Money ~ Chris Pirillo – “Markets are conversations, and if there is no money around the conversation goes away. Money is the medium. Conventional money carries one way, open money carries in others. Open money is to normal as a laser is to a flashlight. Money is the ultimate soc
• Gnomedex Day 2 | Blog World Expo Blog – “Michael Linton has caught my attention with his Open Money presentation. I will update after I figure out what he is exactly talking about, but whatever it is it?s interesting.”
• Price of food soars to all-time record – Record high grain prices and energy bills have forced up the cost of food production
• Eco-Economy Indicators: Ice Melt Accelerates Around the World – Recent years have seen ice melt accelerate and spread to new, previously unaffected regions. In many areas, the pace of melting has surprised even the scientists studying it most closely, providing a strong early indication that the consequences of climat
• The Low Carbon Show – Transition Towns Conference – This programme features interviews with people involved in transition towns projects recorded at the Transition Network inaugural conference. It provides a snapshot of the many and diverse projects now underway.
• CamStudio – Free Screen Recording Software – CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs)
• Magento – Home – Open Source eCommerce Evolved – “Magento is a new professional open-source eCommerce solution offering unprecedented flexibility and control. With Magento, never feel trapped in your eCommerce solution again.”
• Designing for Civil Society: Do communities need boundaries? – collaborations, these depended on the development of shared understanding and trust. This could best take place within a community, and communities need some boundaries. That community might be an organisation, or people with a set of shared interests….
• Goodreads | get book recommendations from people you know – Have you ever wanted a better way to: * see what your friends are reading? * keep track of what you’ve read and what you’d like to read? * get great book recommendations from people you know?
• A Commons for Creators or Consumers? « kNOw Future Inc. – Two divergent and clashing conceptions in the use of CC licenses become evident. The first employs them as instruments designed to guarantee access.The ?commons? that this model aspires towards is one based only on consumption. …nThe second focuses
• SWOP – Semantic Web-based Open engineering Platform – an open, semantic, standard-based, distributed engineering platform, including multi-dimensional constraint-based and decision-making ICT tools, for – fast and flexible production of customised, but “industrialised” complex solutions, – with intensive inp

See also:

• Links for February 1st to February 4th
• Links for February 10th
• Links for February 28th to March 6th
• Links for February 18th to February 22nd
• Links for February 12th

I’ve written before about the carbon offsetting con and in my update I mentioned the wonderful Cheat Neutral site.

Now I figured I should embed their splendid video here too for your delight and enjoyment:

Their about page is also great, and so I reproduce that here too…

About Cheatneutral

Cheatneutral is about offsetting infidelity. We’re the only people doing it, and Cheatneutral is a joke.

Carbon offsetting is about paying for the right to carry on emitting carbon.
The Carbon offset industry sold £60 million of offsets last year, and is
rapidly growing. Carbon offsetting is also a joke.

Find out more:

• The New Internationalist’s offset special: www.newint.org/issues/2006/07/01
• George Monbiot on offsetting: www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/10/19/selling-indulgences
• and: www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/01/17/buying-complacency
• An excellent, detailed analysis of offsetting: www.carbontradewatch.org/pubs/carbon_neutral_myths.pdf

Five ways that Cheatneutral is like carbon offsetting:

1. Cheatneutral tries to make it seem acceptable to cheat on your partner.
   In the same way, carbon offsetting tries to make it acceptable to carry
   on emitting excess carbon.
2. Cheatneutral doesn’t really do much to reduce the amount of cheating in
   the world. Carbon offsetting does very little to reduce global carbon
   emissions.
3. It seems impossible to measure how much harm cheating on someone does.
   With carbon offsetting, there is currently no practically feasible way
   of measuring how much carbon offset projects actually save.
4. Having Cheatneutral’s services available could actually encourages you
   to cheat more. If the carbon offsetters persuade you that it’s possible
   to offset your emissions, you’ll carry on emitting excess carbon through
   your lifestyle rather than think about reducing your emissions.
5. Cheatneutral is fundamentally the wrong way to go about solving problems
   with your relationships. Carbon offsetting is fundamentally the wrong
   way to go about tackling climate change.

Two ways which Cheatneutral is not like carbon offsetting:

1. We don’t make any money out of Cheatneutral. Offset companies in the
   voluntary carbon market take a cut of every transaction and make a
   profit.
2. Cheatneutral is a joke we thought up in the pub. Carbon offsetting
   presents itself as a credible solution to climate change, described by
   the government’s chief scientist Sir David King as
   “the most severe problem that we are facing today, more serious even
   than the threat of terrorism…”

What can I do instead?

• Measure your carbon footprint. There are good resources to do this online —
  visit www.resurgence.org/carboncalculator for a good, detailed analysis of your footprint. For a slightly quicker calculator try www.carbongym.co.uk, or www.chooseclimate.org to look in more depth at the CO2 emissions associated with flying.
• Think about reducing your carbon footprint. There are lots of easy ways to reduce the emissions from various areas of your life. You might want to think about your home,
  transport and what you eat and consume. There are lots of resources on the internet to help you reduce your emissions.
• Learn about Contraction and Convergence. C&C is a framework for agreeing a global cap on carbon emissions. We believe that to make our individual sacrifices count, we need a global framework that caps the amount of carbon emitted, creates a timeframe for reducing emissions to a safe level, and distributes carbon credits equitably. C&C satisfies all of these, and would make carbon trading fair and effective. Good resources are www.climatejustice.org.uk and www.gci.org.uk
• Use your influence as a citizen. You could lobby your MP for the adoption of C&C and telling them you are concerned about climate change. You can also talk to and lobby your elected representatives from local and regional and European government. You can find out who your MP is at www.theyworkforyou.com. Think about joining a pressure group, lobby group or charity that you feel shares and promotes your concerns.
• Get together with your friends or family and discuss what you think. How we face up to the new challenges of climate change should be something everyone has an opinion on. Although individual action is needed, we also need ways to make government and businesses take a lead in responsibly dealing with emission reduction.

See also:

• Carbon Con update
• The Carbon “Offset” Con
• Amsterdam prepares for global warming…
• Runaway Climate Change
• The Merton Rule

These are my links for February 1st to February 4th:

• Comprehensive Cooperative Township – P2P Foundation – Suehiko Ono is attempting to create a legal model for a massive member-driven leaderless organization, in which ownership does not equal control: one person, one vote. The draft of his operating agreement is being developed in partnership with Winston & S
• DorfWiki: FranzNahrada/SpeechChioggia – Can the City Return to the Village? Some Hypotheses About the Metamorphosis of the Suburban and the Construction of Global Villages
• The Money Fix – Have you ever thought your community could be more prosperous if it only had more money?
• Can Britain Feed Itself? » Transition Culture – Clearly, in the context of energy descent, this is a question we should all be asking, yet amazingly no one has really asked it in any depth since Kenneth Mellanby?s book ?Can Britain Feed Itself? published in 1975. In the most recent issue of the e
• Cornell Chronicle: Diets and NY’s ag footprint – A low-fat vegetarian diet is very efficient in terms of how much land is needed to support it. But adding some dairy products and a limited amount of meat may actually increase this efficiency, Cornell researchers suggest. See also http://transitioncultur
• Network 2012::Welcome – Yet another (pretty crap looking) Social Networking site: “Network2012 is a new social enterprise and our website is still under construction. We intend however to be a paid membership site with our profits going towards providing bursaries for other star

See also:

• Links for February 12th
• Links for February 22nd to February 23rd
• Links for February 5th
• Links for February 18th to February 22nd
• Links for February 15th to February 17th