MYCJN

By Sonia

Green Agent Summit (GAS) is an environmental camp under STEP project by AIESEC in UTM. It is a 5 days/4 nights camp designed for energetic teenagers aged 13 to 27 years old. You will have an opportunity to learn more about the environment and how to save it through firsthand experience on field trips and outdoor activities. Besides, you will also have a chance to interact with passionate people from various organisations, corporates and countries.

Date : 7-11th June 2010 (5 Days 4 Nights)

Venue : Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Skudai

Organiser : AIESEC UTM Fee : RM 120 (Food, Accomodation in UTM Hostel, 1 T-Shirt,Tupperware goodies, Certificate)

Acitivites :

1)Team building Games

2)Sharing and interacting with international friends from Finland, Germany, Uganda, Poland, Indonesia, Eygpt and etc!

3)Trip to organic farm, recycling factory, Tanjung Piai

4) Interactive seminars

5) and more!

Click here for more info

Click here for their Facebook page.

Register now!

To the cynics out there, whether or not you believe in global warming,

even if climate change is a scam,

that doesn’t mean we can continue to cause destruction.

=)

Jin Yun

from http://carlsafina.org/2010/04/30/apocalypse-again/

Apocalypse again

by Carl Safina

Don’t believe the globe is warming?

Fine. Whatever.

Here’s one thing everyone agrees on: the fact that oil spills. Even without global warming—even if global warming is a hoax—we must, finally, eventually, kick the carbon-energy addiction. The fact that oil spills is among those reasons.

As if New Orleans doesn’t have enough problems. As if shrimpers and fishermen, already staggered, need an oil spill that will finish them.

And now look: 5,000 barrels a day. Not 1,000 as they’d been saying. 5,000 barrels a day. That’s two hundred barrels an hour, 24/7.

When will it end? No one can say. Months, I’m hearing. “It could eclipse Exxon Valdez.”

Gerald Herbert/AP

A man asked tonight for my thoughts on what will happen if the oil reaches shore. I’d rather not think about it, I told the audience.

Explosions. Dozens of dead workers this month, lost between the coal mine and the brine. Point being: fossil fuels—coal and oil—are dirty. They make people sick. They make people die. They hurt innocents, human and non. Their time has passed.

The things that must be done to kick this filth are the same things that must be done to address climate change, regardless: harness the tides we are despoiling. Harness the wind that’s pushing all that oil ashore. Harness the sun that’s making that rainbowed sheen.

After the blast at the rig, not enough booms could be found to contain the mushrooming billows of oil. Dispersants? They dissolve the oil, sinking it from the surface. What was polluting the surface now pollutes the whole sea. Right in the only spawning area of the remaining west Atlantic bluefin tuna, which are spawning now. No solution there. Plus, look, there’s not enough to stop the spreading slick. Burn it? Only 3 percent of the slick is thick enough to catch and hold the flame on the surface of the sea.

This latest catastrophe has begun licking the shore.

Herons will soon know it. Turtles will know it. Shrimp nurseries will be painted in crude. Dolphins will come for air in oil. And all those migrant birds coming across the Gulf. This is the peak of their spring migration. They’re landing exhausted in those vast marshes for a rest they believe will be only temporary. Those emerald expanses will blacken. And the terns and skimmers and plovers headed toward their nesting grounds on my Long Island shores; how much will that living tide will be thinned as the black tide arrives?

The price at the pump: $3 a gallon. The cost of the light sweet crude is different from the price. The cheaper the gallon, the higher the cost. Because the cheaper we pump the more we drink and the more we drink the thirstier we are. The U. S. burns over 20 million barrels of oil a day, about the same as the industrial behemoths Japan, Germany, Russia, China, and India—combined.

But we can’t burn this slick now coming ashore for us.

Three dollars a gallon?

Patrick Semansky/AP

You pay for the ships. You pay for the crews. The fishermen’s unemployment insurance. The lives lost. The jobs lost. Children whose fathers have been deleted with a click. Your taxes at work. The Coast Guard. Obama pledges, “every single available resource.”

Three dollars a gallon? Hardly.  We pay, pay, pay.

Lobbyists say we must drill. Republicans say we must drill. Obama says we must drill.

No.

“We need that offshore production,” the oily head says on TV. “But this will fire up the environmentalists.”

Yes. Indeed it will.

Shrimpers have sued to regain a fraction of the cost. They have no idea what’s coming to get them. They’re looking at years and years.

“This is gonna be used like a bludgeon against our industry for a long time to come.”

He makes that sound like a bad thing.

But I hope he’s right. It’s only fair; the oil’s effects will bludgeon people, places, and animals for a long time to come.

The oyster grower says, “There’s fear we could be dealing with a catastrophe.”

“It’s premature to say this is catastrophic,” says the admiral.

Who’s she kidding?

Lobbyists say we must drill. Republicans say we must drill. Obama says we must drill more in offshore areas that have for a generation been closed.

No.

“This is gonna be used like a bludgeon against our industry for a long time to come.”

I hope he’s right.

I will certainly do what I can to make sure he’s right.

# # #

Dr. Carl Safina is founding president of Blue Ocean Institute and adjunct professor at Stony Brook University. His books include Song for the Blue Ocean, Eye of the Albatross, and his writing has been featured in National Geographic. He’s been profiled by the New York Times, Nightline, and Bill Moyers. His awards include a Pew Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Lannan Literary Award, John Burroughs Medal, and the MacArthur Prize, among others.

Take a look a this article from the business perspective.

Cheers,

Jin Yun

by Adi Ignatius

When an economy slips into recession, the pattern is familiar: Growth slows, unemployment rises, and governments fiddle with interest rates and stimulus spending to jump-start a recovery. But every recession brings a few surprises, as well. For instance, in this downturn companies and governments didn’t walk away from green initiatives. Quite the reverse, in the case of a couple of 800-pound gorillas. In July, Wal-Mart announced plans to create a universal rating system that scores products on how environmentally and socially sustainable they are. That system should have a huge effect on consumer products worldwide—and on competing retailers such as Target and Tesco. China, meanwhile, allocated 210 billion yuan, or 5%, of its stimulus spending to sustainable development.

To what extent will this enhanced commitment to sustainability cascade through the global economy? The lead article in this issue’s Spotlight on Sustainability and Innovation makes the audacious claim that companies won’t innovate successfully—and as a result won’t grow—unless they throw themselves whole hog into green initiatives. “Smart companies now treat sustainability as innovation’s new frontier,” write Ram Nidumolu, C.K. Prahalad, and M.R. Rangaswami. The Spotlight also offers six leading-edge approaches to clean energy and a passionate essay by former U.S. president Bill Clinton about programs in Africa that both support a cleaner environment and create entrepreneurial opportunities.

The rise of sustainability illustrates how culture shapes strategy. W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne do almost the opposite in “How Strategy Shapes Structure,” which extends their work on blue ocean strategy. They use the city-state of Dubai to demonstrate the concept of low-cost, differentiated, “reconstructionist” strategy. Dubai gives foreign investors unbeatable incentives and makes it easy and inexpensive to do business there. The government invests in infrastructural improvements—in shipping and port services, aviation, tourism, and real estate—and makes money from them rather than from corporate and personal taxes. Foreigners can live in Dubai very cheaply—albeit with no social benefits or citizenship rights.

Of course, any strategy you design will fall flat if you’re clueless about who your customers are. “The Female Economy” points out that although women make far more purchase decisions than men do, they feel badly served by the companies they buy from. Businesses that sell food, fitness services, beauty products, health care, and clothing have some of the greatest opportunities, but they leave a lot of money on the table, say Michael J. Silverstein and Kate Sayre. The financial services industry is the least attuned to women.

“The Coming Battle over Executive Pay” warns that the public uproar over financial firms’ outsized bonuses is just the beginning—next year, companies in the broader economy are going to be more closely watched than ever before. That scrutiny could lead to smarter compensation practices, according to HBR deputy editor Karen Dillon, but it could also lead to “reforms” that tie executives’ hands unnecessarily. General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt told us that, in light of the current economic climate, he refused a bonus his board had approved earlier this year but that he absolutely needs the freedom to “determine how the other 300,000 people at GE are paid.”

”Death by Information Overload” is an entertaining, scary exploration of how badly we’re affected by all the data that assault us every day at work. “Are You Having Trouble Keeping Your Operations Focused?” gives advice on how to keep up operational excellence even as you launch new businesses. And “How to Manage Your Negotiating Team” argues that you’re much likelier to succeed at the negotiating table if you first get your own folks working well together.

Youth @ COP15
United Nations Climate Negotiations – UNFCCC
Copenhagen December 2009

Activities of youth at UNFCCC COP15, 2009, and the growth of the youth climate movement around the world, and directions for 2010.

Youth@COP15 – The Youth Climate Movement’s Coming of Age