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Governments everywhere face the challenge of how to engage their citizens in a program of carbon emissions reductions. There have been two main approaches so far – carbon taxes and personal carbon quotas. We propose Green Credits, an alternative which is based on rewarding citizens after they have taken actions to reduce their emissions. Green Credits are based on consumer loyalty reward schemes – a simple, proven and widely accepted model. Citizens are awarded Green Credits for every verifiable action that they take to reduce their carbon emissions.

Just back from Manifesta. The seventh edition of this touring art biennale is held in Trentino-South Tyrol, in N-E Italy. The food over there is definitely Italian but with a crispy teutonic twist, so are the people and atmosphere. To make things even quirkier for visitors, the exhibition is split over several locations, most of them in derelict ex-industrial buildings (how fashionable!) at the outskirts of the small towns that host the event.

Inside the ex-Alumix factory. Photo credit: Andrea Pozza

by Jamie Henn

Editor's Note: We encourage "Reader Reports" -- submissions from members of Worldchanging's global audience who volunteer to write up their notes from conferences, workshops and other worldchanging happenings they participate in. If you'd like to contribute your own report, please email editor@worldchanging.com.

Now that the "Green" Olympics in Beijing have ended, what is the future for sustainability in China?

Eric Lombardi, the waste-management guru behind Boulder, Colo.-based recycler Eco-Cycle, is fighting incinerators around the world with a vision. Although his Zero-Waste Park may never be built, he has been able to use the artistic plan as an effective tool for discussion that has allowed city planners to consider alternative solutions.

The Zero-Waste Park was originally conceived by Lombardi when he was working with a Hawaiian community group called Zero Waste Kauai (we originally mentioned the design in our post on Vancouver's RCBC conference). The island of Kauai was facing a landfill closure, and considering building an incinerator to handle waste disposal. The park is sized to handle solid waste from about 300,000 people (about the size of Boulder County, or the entire island of Kauai).

By Samantha Cleaver

Imagine a ladder with 10 rungs. Now, imagine that the lowest rung (0) is the worst possible life that you could have and the highest rung (10) is the best. Where would you fall on that ladder?

If you’re like almost half (49 percent) of Americans, you’re “thriving” on rung seven through 10, according to the most recent Gallup World poll. Another 47 percent of us are “struggling” on rungs five through six, and four percent are “suffering” below rung four.

Since World War II, Midwestern farmers have been encouraged to use machinery, chemicals and government policies to ramp up crop and livestock production to feed the growing population and economy. But since then, many farmers have felt the harmful effects of this quantity-over-quality production model, and have started to investigate how to make their methods more sustainable.

During the past few decades, small organizations promoting sustainable agriculture have been popping up and banding together across the Midwest to create a patchwork of information, support and tools for those interested in taking part in the sustainable agriculture movement.

by John Thackara

Every day 1.5 billion cups of coffee are drunk somewhere in the world – quite a few of them in this house - but few of us in the North know much about the 25 million families that grow and produce this valuable bean.

After reading a new book called Confronting The Coffee Crisis I feel better informed not just about the negative aspects of the story - but also motivated to explore practically the potential of emerging alternative trade networks to change the bigger picture in profound ways.

In a system that can involve as many as eight transactions to bring the coffee to market, coffee farmers receive less than two percent of the price of a cup of coffee sold in a coffee bar or roughly six per cent of the value of a standard pack of ground coffee sold in a grocery store.

By Glenn Fleishman

The unsightly plastic warts on our walls are sucking down terawatts of power globally each year. It’s time to put a stop to that needless energy drain by replacing dumb bricks with smart hubs -- putting a computerized stake through the hearts of our home electrical vampires.

Devices that are plugged in but not in use consume between 200 and 400 terawatt hours (TWh) per year, according to the International Energy Agency. Other research pegs the not-in-use drain from 5 to 25 percent of all residential energy used in the U.S., with numbers rising.

San Francisco may have the most technologically nifty new parking system in the U.S., but Chicago wins big points for the mercenary genius of their approach: the city expects to raise over a billion dollars by auctioning a 50-year concession on their entire parking system.

The Vattenfall/McKinsey Report "A Cost Curve for Greenhouse Gas Reduction" contains a graph (below) that everybody needs to see. The graph shows how much greenhouse gas abatement potential lies in some popular strategies/technologies, and simultaneously shows the monetary cost of each strategy.

By Lori Williams

We know our environment, and the rules we live by, affect our health. The city around us influences how much time we spend walking, how clean our air is, even how anxious we feel. So how can we plan effective local infrastructure that also helps to keep our community as healthy as possible? An analytical tool called a health impact assessment (HIA), which has a long history of use in Europe, is now gaining popularity in the U.S. as a practical means of putting the well-being of people back into the policy-making process. These studies evaluate all potential public health effects (both negative and beneficial) of a project, program or policy.

So, last week the good folks at Walk Score released their rankings of the walkability of U.S. cities. Though it may be difficult for some of our European readers to believe, walking is still a somewhat radical concept in many parts of the U.S., and for that reason alone, these guys are making a real contribution simply by giving us a way to talk about how easy it is to hoof it from one place to another.

But like so many ratings systems, this one is very far from perfect. Walk Score's site admits as much when it says,

By Nancy Scola

Inside each of the more than one million 3G iPhones sold so far, you'll find a lithium-ion battery. No big surprise there. But what's different here from early model iPhones is that the batteries are not soldered in place. That's good news. It means that when your iPhone has a dead battery, you can simply get a new battery, rather than sending the whole thing back to corporate HQ, or dumping it in the trash. And speaking of trash, there's more good news on that front: an unsoldered battery makes a phone easier and more economical to dissemble and recycle.

News of hero reports caused a stir around the Worldchanging office yesterday. The creator, MIT doctoral candidate Alyssa Wright, hopes that her project can help build public confidence, raise property values in areas where goodwill is prevalent, and just plain improve the collective world view, by collecting and mapping citizens' reports of courageous acts performed by regular folks in New York City.

Wright says she was inspired by the See Something, Say Something campaign, New York Metro Transit's effort to inspire citizen vigilance in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001 (the campaign, officially titled the "Eyes of New York," first launched in 2003). As the Hero Reports site proclaims:

By Carey King

Moving toward a sustainable, or renewable energy-based economy, stresses the views of how people value their time and exertion. Our system of economics puts value on products and services that allow people to spend less time and/or exertion while performing a task. This value system is exactly why fossil fuels have been the driving factor for increases in accumulation of material goods and leisure time over the course of the industrial revolution.

By Kathryn Cooper

Whether at the local, national or global level, the plan for a switch to renewable energy involves two crucial pieces: policy and technology. As I discussed in my previous post, many of the discussions at last month's 7th Annual World Wind Energy Conference focused on the need – and best-practice strategies -- for firm political policy. Certainly, without effective policy, even the best technologies may not reach their potential. But policy relies on an infrastructure of effective tools to get the job done.

Pulse of the Nation is a new web based initiative to get New Zealand voters engaged in the build up to this year’s general election, through the development of an active online political community.

“We really want to lift the taboo on talking about politics in a way that doesn’t necessarily involve having to say who you choose to vote for” says the game’s producer and ‘virtual electoral officer’ Craig Neilson.

Pulse of the Nation is the brainchild of Jimungo, a New Zealand company specialising in game design for the web. The new website is based on a game platform where communities of players are asked to predict the outcomes of sporting events. Players compete against friends, family and other community members and can win prizes.

Pulse of the Nation will run a virtual election every two weeks up to New Zealand’s next general election later this year.

By Mary Catherine O’Connor

What will bike-friendly cities look like ten years from now? As citizens around the world raise the demand for human-powered transportation infrastructure, major cities are starting to re-imagine their car-centric transportation models.

or, Millennial Mistakes: Why the Apocalypse is a Bad Model for Understanding The Future

In thinking seriously about the negative trends in our future, we're severely hampered by the Hollywood idea of the Apocalypse. That idea, in turn, has deep roots in the millenarianism of monotheistic religions (in which there is an End of Days and it's coming soon) and of 19th Century social movements (there is a Dictatorship of the Proletariat and it's coming soon). Millenarianism has its own problems, not least of which is that people do horrible things to others in the name of clearing the way for their chosen perfect future. But for our discussion here, let's just confine our understanding of the credo to what it has done to our conception of the future.

The other night Cory Doctorow and I were talking over coffee, and we got going on an idea that's been rattling around in my head ever since.

We were talking about the slow-motion collapse here in America, the looming climate crisis,the futility of survivalism; and we began to play with the thought, what kinds of heroes would actually do some good for the communities that get hit hard?

Because if the ruins of the unsustainable are the new frontier, and if, as is already happening, the various economic and environmental transitions we face will leave many people unmoored from their familiar assumptions at the very least and, at the worst, cut loose from their jobs or driven from their homes, a huge number of people are going to need help forging new ways of life.

By Kathryn Cooper

The "winds of change" were blowing last month among 600 renewable energy leaders from 46 countries at the 7th World Wind Energy Conference in Ontario. A global tipping point toward renewable energy is emerging, propelled by success in countries like Germany, which in the past decade has established itself as a world renewable energy powerhouse. In the hopes of achieving independence from fossil fuels as early as 2050 (an in some cases, much sooner), conference attendees discussed best practices for using national policy to stimulate investment and growth in the renewables sector.

Ubiquity and sustainability could turbocharge each other. Ubiquity enables revealed backstories, observed flows and shared services, making it easier to live well at a minimum of expense and ecological impact. Sustainability, particularly in the form of compact urbanism with bright green innovation, concentrates human interactions with each other and networked systems, making it easier to suffuse daily life with the sort of intelligence that allows data to be gathered, shared and connected. The Net and the public square, as Castells wrote, are symbiants.

Summer has finally arrived here in Seattle. And the abundance of daylight means more time for things like barbecues, lawn sports, cool drinks and, of course, great summer reads. To create the perfect Worldchanging summer reading list, full of smart, beach-worthy must-reads, we asked for a little help from our friends. Here's what some of them are reading:

Reviews from Jay Walljasper
I worry that summertime as a distinct season when "the living is easy" is slipping away from us. The deluge of things to get done doesn't seem to slacken in the hot weather anymore. We could blame air conditioning or the i inexorable spread of workaholism, but whatever the cause, this is not a sign of progress. The lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer-- as another old song goes-- is something worth preserving.

Can we imagine a day when, having sorted out our recyclables and compost-ables, then responsibly earmarked our "still perfectly good" stuff for reuse, we'll have no trash left to drag to the curb? What are the solutions that will take the developed world from our current rates of over-consumption to zero waste?