In the same way that humans are responsible for so much environmental catastrophe yet we shouldn’t hate everything pertaining to them, so we can love our donkeys whilst agreeing that they are overfunded.

Anyone who tells me that they don’t get soppy over a good donkey is either weirdly phobic or lying.

Regarding the NGOs, I think John McCormick’s right; they have to follow the funders to stay alive.

For example, it’s plain that whales get people to open their wallets to Greenpeace more than anything else. So when - as happened - the Icelandic government decided to obliterate the largest pristine wilderness in Europe in order to build a climate-assaulting dam to power a climate-assaulting aluminium smelter, Greenpeace stayed schtum. It would’ve clashed with their efforts to tempt Iceland into stopping whaling.

To them the whales are a sort of uber-donkey. No whale campaign, no money for whales or anything else.

I suspect they underestimate the ability of funders to grasp new relevant issues, especially if explained from the trusted voice of the NGO itself. But I’m making that up, maybe I just hope people of conscience are more open and less sentimental than they really are.

The bit that saddens me most is the factionalising among those who *are* campaigning on climate. They too play that NGO game; my biofuel issue is more important than your coal issue.

I suspect that there may be some truth in your idea that it’s to do with the political mindset of that generation of activists and their formative issues, but seeing climate activists treat sub-issues so gladiatorially I also believe there’s a big part of it that’s due to the narrow and inflexible structuring of NGOs.

I haven’t yet read George Marshall’s book ‘Carbon Detox’ but it has received rave reviews and I’m sure that for those who do not think it’s too late, it contains plenty of useful insights.

Why isn’t anyone addressing this question? Even as mere speculation? If there is nothing that can be done to stop what it coming, drip by drip, then shouldn’t we be preparing for future generations now? Or does nobody care about future generations, like 30 generations down the road. We have the chance now to plan for their future. Why is nobody asking those questions?

Except for Professor Lovelock? See my polar cities website for some images and info, too.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22climate+change%22+site%3Aamnesty.org

[George writes: As I said in the article, I did the orginal search 2 years ago and since then the phrase 'climate change" has started to slip bertween the cracks and make it onto the Amnesty website. The search you suggest gets 47 hits. But then try hamburger (63 hits), chocolate- (104 hits), chips (274). And when you search for any other serious global problem the scale of Amnesty's indifference to this issue is really apparent. Try "cancer (1,630); "HIV" (4,600); "terrorism" (13,800); racism (24,300). I say what I said before- Amnesty is deliberately avoiding the connections between climate change and human rights]

Not sure how to email you, so forgive the comment here.

You might be interested in this video featuring British eco-designer Oliver Heath on using recycled materials in the home: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eii_7WTxoHw

Keep up the great work! Cheers; Kevin Reed

Maybe this just highlights the systemic nature of the problem and the limits of individual action?

By the way, the carbon calculator method you use doesn’t recognise savings in the bank. Surely these need to be accounted for as they are almost certainly being invested and generating carbon.

[George replies. Dear Stuart- I think it is great that your emissions are so low. I don't think you should feel disempowerd- I think you should be out there amplifying like mad. You are showing that low carbon living is posisble and you are already practising it. You are right about savings in the bank, but it is hard to quantify savings (which are a lump) as annual emissions. So, rather like the Inland Revenue, I have assumed that they are covered under gross income or investment income. This is crude, but the emissions from consumption are very hard to evaluate accurately and most calculators duck this huge area. Carbon Detox is, I think, has the first calculator to even try to calculate, and I have had to simplify it to keep readers engaged. As I stress in the book, the calculator is an imprecise tool to give you an idea of where your issues are (with government in your case). Glad you enjoyed the book.]

It made me wonder whether “why are we doing so little about climate change” is the most productive question to ask. After all, there is much about my own behaviour that I am totally at a loss to explain. Perhaps a more productive question is: “How can we persuade people to do more?” (Of course the words “we” and “people” will mean different things to different people).

One of the questions the above discussion raised is whether democratic governments will be able to take the hard decisions needed to respond adequately to the problem. An optimistic view would be that if governments realise that people take the issue seriously, then they will have the courage to act.

Was I supposed to be talking about donkeys and icecream? Well, at least I’ve mentioned them.

I am afraid I think that this study is fundamentaly flawed.

Typing the phrase “climate change” site:www.amnesty.org is a specific database search string and is very unlikely to get many hits because people need to have written that precise string for it to be recognised by the search engine.

Obviously, you can’t just use “climate” instead because that can be attributed to any number of circumstances and would take a very long time to search through the 44,300 results you get back to see if they are related. I would propose a more suitable word search which is likely to guarantee some sort of climate link and the best I have come up with is the rather unimaginative “environmental” (not to be confused with environment which could be related to anything), and get 17,700 responses.

On the basis of that evidence you would say that http://www.amnesty.org are more proactive than the study initially suggests.

Now I realise that “environmental” is probably going to be tenuous in relation to a number of the hits returned but I would suggest that many of the hits are in some way related to the whole climate change issue.

[George replies- thank you Sam for giving this so much thought. But I don't quite see what you mean. "Climate change" is not a complex string: it is the key phrase for describing this problem. So it is reasonable to assess the issue by the frequency with which people write 'that precise string'. I looked through a few pages of the 'environmental' references and almost all refered to the repression of environmental activists. I also looked through many pages of the 'climate' search and, not surprisingly, found that every reference came from the use of the colloquial phrase 'climate of' terror/fear/etc. I should add, to be fair to Amnesty, that there are also some references to 'global warming'- a staggering 44 of them, behind 'bacon', or 'egg' or 'chips', or 'tea'.]

“ice cream” site:thedonkeysanctuary.org.uk gets 5 matches.