Nøtterøy starts Norway's first 'Going Carbon Neutral' project - with our support
Friday, October 30, 2009 at 8:04AM | Share Article Last Tuesday (27 October) Prof. Roy Alexander, Kate Harrison and Garry Charnock went from Ashton Hayes to Nøtterøy in Norway to launch the country's first community 'going carbon neutral' project. The launch was planned using the Ashton Hayes toolkit and involved all aspects of the island community which is home to 20,000 people. Janet Gullvåg has been the inspiration behind the project with cross party support from the Mayor Roar Jonstang, the Town Council and Climate Group and local businesses (Jonathan Hall coordinator) and several schools. The British Ambassador also expressed his support for the initiative as it supports Norway's ideals of becoming a carbon neutral country by 2050.
The three day visit involved a series of presentations from the Ashton Hayes delegates, newspaper, radio and TV interviews. All expenses for the visit were kindly covered by the Town Council.
Ashton Hayes will be helping Nøtterøy to make a film about its journey and the Parish Council has twinned with the Nøtterøy Council on a carbon neutral basis.
Thanks to everyone in Nøtterøy for their fantastic hospitality.
Reader Comments (4)
seriously, what are the counter arguments for the continued increase in CO2 levels, yet the fall in temperature? The GW crew points to the CO2 level as the end all and be all, yet there seems to be divergence occurring...why???...... www.controlmycarbon.com
Susan, thanks for your comment. There is certainly much confusion about global temperature changes and the relative importance of natural and human drivers. I'm not sure who you mean by the 'GW crew' but I think most serious climate scientists would recognise a range of influences other than just CO2. It is important to take a long term view and not to confuse short term episodes with longer term trends. The majority scientific view is certainly that we are experiencing a long term warming trend but not that every year will be globally hotter than the previous one because of the effects of natural factors and cycles (eg solar activity, Pacific Decadal Oscillation). Most predictions are for a resumption of a warming trend within the next 10 years. A couple of good places to read more on this are Paul Hudson's articles and blog on the BBC website: www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/ and a recent article in Der Spiegel: www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,662092,00.html
After reading a bit on this website I figured I would mention that more of these CO2-neutral projects are arriving, maybe not in such a large scale, but still worth mentioning. I have come across a few, but I figured I would just mention a single project, which is a project that focuses on websites, which might be a relevant thing to write about on a blog. The project itself focuses on CO2-neutrality for websites.
Basically, one pays a certain amount of money to get into the project, which are then used for buying CO2-quotas. Once one has paid for some CO2-quotas it is then possible to add a "CO2-neutral-website" badge to the website, which has been registered, to show the world that the website is CO2-neutralised.
More information about how this works can be found on the project website. Just follow the link. :)
Hope everything works out for you!
Thanks Robert,
We'll take a look