Transy senior to join world environmental leaders in Poland

Next week, one of Kentucky's newest and most well-traveled young environmental activists will join world leaders and experts in Poznan, Poland, for the United Nations climate change conference.

Marcie Smith, a 21-year-old senior at Transylvania University, will lobby on behalf of the 20-something generation as part of a delegation from the grass-roots group SustainUS.
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"We want to see a treaty that is bold, that is courageous. It needs to be binding, and there needs to be accountability," Smith said. "And we want to see U.S. leadership, which has been lacking."
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She has founded a campus environmental group and has interned in Congress and for a think tank in The Hague, Netherlands. She has studied in Madagascar off the coast of Africa and hopes to spend next summer in France after graduating with a double major in international relations and French.

But to call her a citizen of the world shortchanges her strong and deep Kentucky roots.
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But the two seminal events that widened her perspective, Marcie said, were in high school when she read New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch's book about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and two summers ago when she attended a screening of former Vice President Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

Green tax is the end of low-cost flights -Times Online

A spokesman said: “The Government has always said that this is an environmental tax, but that has never been the case. The money is not spent on the environment. Travel is being used as a cash cow.”

He said that the UK travel industry employed thousands of people and that job losses were inevitable if people stopped flying because of the higher prices.

Ryanair's deputy chief executive, Michael Cawley, said: “The Government is insane if it thinks that price-sensitive passengers will continue to travel when faced with increased costs.”

Turn veggie to save planet, says Sir Paul - Science, News - The Independent

Sir Paul McCartney has teamed up with a Nobel Prize-winning scientist to urge people to become vegetarian to save the planet from the greenhouse gases created by rearing livestock.

In a letter to The Independent, the musician joins Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to blame worsening global warming on a rise in the number of people who eat meat.

The musician and Mr Pachauri, who are both vegetarians, also believe that global food shortages are exacerbated by the planting of cereal crops for animal fodder. A mass switch to a more vegetarian diet will, they say, help the poorest people in the world.

Becoming vegetarian, or at the very least eating less red meat, is "the single most effective act" anyone can take to lessen greenhouse gas emissions. As well as producing the greenhouse gas methane, the livestock business uses up increasingly scarce sources of fresh water and increases other forms of pollution through its need for agricultural chemicals, they argue.

"Unfortunately, with higher incomes, societies, even in developing countries, are turning to greater ... consumption of animal protein, which reduces the availability of food grains for direct consumption by impoverished human beings," they say. "Already 60 per cent of food crop production in North America and western Europe is being diverted for production of meat." Sir Paul and Mr Pachauri also suggest that people switch off lights, turn down their central heating, buy compact fluorescent lamps and use bicycles.