How one family is living off the grid
Sonny and Linda Jobe live in Doddridge County, W.Va., in a house too far out to be connected to city utilities. They make it work with solar energy and generators.
116
MoboSens, a Square-like tool for eco warriors, lets you crowdsource water pollutants
The project, called MoboSens, relies on a large sensor plugged into the audio jack on a smartphone. It looks like an ugly (and huge) Square dongle, but instead of taking payments it senses water quality using a microeletromechanical (MEMs) sensor inside the dongle. The goal is to eventually use the MEMs packed into the device to measure nitrate, heavy metal, carcinogens, and bacteria in water.
Full Story: GigaOm
China Photo of the Day: The Egg Lady
Matt Schiavenza, theatlantic.comModern supermarkets dot the landscape throughout China, but people can still buy their food the old-fashioned way: on the street. The photographer Michael Steverson has spent years photographing rural China, where hundreds of milli…
This is about more than just advertorial — it’s about brands going direct
By Mathew Ingram, paidcontent.orgThere’s been plenty of focus on how publishers are catering to advertisers by producing “native” advertising, including sponsored content — but a much bigger trend is brands and advertisers that are becoming publishers themselves.
We’ve been…
A good description of the business model we are trying to follow.
Climate science 101
Do you know these iconic climate graphs?
These three graphs (among many, many more) show just some of the clear observational evidence that we’re changing the climate: global temperatures are rising and arctic sea ice is disappearing while CO2 emissions keep rising. Find out more about these graphs and what they mean here
According to a new report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) globally, nearly $2 trillion are spent each year in subsidies to oil, natural gas and coal companies. Are you paying to melt the Arctic? Find out more here.
We want you to meet 30 of of the amazing water-well mechanics you helped to sponsor last year on World Water Day. Here’s Well Mechanic #16!
If you’d like to help us bring water-well mechanics to Africa, check out our campaign page and get involved, here: http://www.stayclassy.org/events/help-bring-water-well-mechanics-to-africa-waterworks/e23733
Meet: Surnimal!
Where he works: Madhusudanpur
Number of wells he maintains: 60
Family status: Married with one boy and one girl
Job before becoming a Well Mechanic: He had worked with NGOs before and felt passionately about their work.
Why he decided to become a Well Mechanic: Being a Jalabandhu means you’re providing a crucial service to the community. Our local government has been very supportive of the Jalabandhu program, and is proud that I can reduce breakdown periods and make water available to people throughout the day.
We are humbled to have been chosen to be among those selected to take part in 350.org’s Global Power Shift in Turkey this June. We’ll be sharing our experiences at ClearWorld Media and will contribute to creating a powerful global movement on climate change. Click on the image above to see what questions we will be addressing and add you own.
#GreatSmog post mortem
On December 5th, 2012, to mark the 60th anniversary of the Great Smog of London, ClearWorld Media started ‘live’ tweeting the five day urban pollution event that would come to be known as one of the world’s deadliest human-created pollution events.
Our purpose in recreating this event was simply to raise awareness about urban air pollution. From our base in Beijing we know that many cities in this country and in Asia experience smog events similar to the Great Smog. In 1952, Londoners were slow to connect the terrible air pollution with a sudden spike in deaths.
Today in Asia, many are aware of the link but see air pollution as being a necessary cost of development. It had been hoped that initiatives like the Kyoto Protocol would help developing nations choose clean and green energy options over fossil fuels but this shift has been slow in happening and has lacked support. Of the recently completed COP 18 meeting in Doha Bob Ward told The Guardian:
There remains an enormous mismatch between the scale and pace of the action under discussion at these talks and that which is required to manage the huge risks of climate change. In particular, there has been no real progress in strengthening current pledges to reduce emissions by 2020. The prospects of avoiding global warming of more than 2C now look increasingly remote without a rapid and substantial injection (of) political will at both domestic and international levels. (via http://gu.com/p/3cc3x/tw)
We are trying to take a different approach to bringing about change by using social media. We recreated the five day Great Smog of London as a way to show just how shocking the event was and hoped that the network effect would bring the issue of urban air pollution to a wider audience.
From the morning of December 5th until the late evening of December 9th (all times GMT) we sent out over 422 tweets. This included 24 tweets that we ‘retweeted’ because the content worked well within the frame of what we were doing. We involved over 40 organizations in our event from environmental (@ClearAirLondon) to transport (@TfLOfficial) to the media (@thetimes). We contacted many organizations beforehand to ask for their help and support. They helped to bring our tweets to a wider audience and some also acted as willing participants (@NationalGallery). Some unwilling participants asked us to remove mention of them (@CityPolice) and we made adjustments to our tweets to remove mentions of Twitter accounts where we felt we might cause confusion or misinformation (@Ldn_Ambulance). A few twitizens thought our tweets were real including the MP for Hornsey and Wood Green (@lfeatherstone). In most cases, we contacted those who thought that a Great Smog was actually causing havoc from our ClearWorld Media Twitter account (@mediacw) to tell them about the historical reenactment.
We’d like to note again that the historical record shows that the police, ambulance services and hospitals did an incredible job to keep order and to care for the sick during the Great Smog of London. Two organisations did fairly poor jobs of communicating the event with Londoners - @MayorofLondon and @Number10gov. Do note that there was no Mayor of London in 1952, however, the local equivalents in 1952 were silent on the matter. As in 1952, government officials sadly also kept silent during our reenactment despite our advance emails and tweets. Although a special mention should go to @GreenJennyJones and @Highburyonfoot who did mention us and shared our information. If only all politicians were as open and willing to discuss green issues with the public.
We made some mistakes in our tweets - including incorrectly labeling Tower Bridge as London Bridge and Piccadilly Circus as Piccadilly Square. But the beauty of social media is that there are always those who are quick to point out the mistakes and we retributed their eye for accuracy by retweeting their corrections.
We also confirmed what most analysts already know about social media usage - our peak times were when people arrived in their workplaces and logged in to check their accounts. Our lowest periods of activity seemed to be late afternoon - presumably the pub is still the bastion of in person social interaction. In tracking discussions on Twitter about the “great smog” or “london smog” we also became painfully aware of how many spambots are out there automatically retweeting stories from major media outlets. Sadly, the proliferation of fake accounts and tweets makes the discovery of real content by real people akin to looking for a needle in a haystack.
Our statistical analysis of our live tweeting of the Great Smog of London shows that we were successful in bringing the issues of smog and urban air pollution to a very wide audience, all around the world.
Our tweets were retweeted 460 times. This meant that tweets about the Great Smog appeared just under 9 million times for almost 1.5 million people. We were mentioned 303 times from 220 different locations as the map below demonstrates:
None of this would have been possible without the help from a few organisations and people and their great support both before and during our reenactment.
All roads on air pollution lead to Simon Birkett at Clean Air London. Simon responded immediately when we first contacted him about this project and provided valuable feedback during the five day period. His work reminds us that air pollution in London is an ongoing concern.
We are also grateful for the support of @jonathanwatts, @adamvaughn_uk, @BBCTomEdwards, @biancajagger, @HistoryNeedsYou, @DaveHill, @ClientEarth, @MuseumofLondon, @IHR_History, @HistoryToday, @londiniumonline and @Green_Europe and to @grist, @pbump, @rmholdsworth, @londonist and @tcktcktck for writing about the project.
This project also would not have been possible without the support of @joshuamarch and his team at @conversocial. We managed the publication of all of our tweets using their fantastic social media management tool and despite the large volume of tweets and responses, we experienced not one problem over the five day period.
If you commented or retweeted any of our content during this five day period we thank you. If you have any questions about the information above or about this Twitter reenactment of the Great Smog please feel free to tweet us. You can also contact Steven Chiu (steven@clearworldmedia.com) or Thomas Ketchell (thomas@clearworldmedia.com) via email. If your work is related to the environment and you are trying to expand your reach on social media, we’d also be happy to discuss with you how we might be able to help.
Why tweet 1952’s Great Smog of London?
From December 5, 2012, ClearWorld Media is going to recreate the Great Smog of London via Twitter using over 400 prepared tweets. We’ll start tweeting at 7am GMT and will finish sometime during the evening of December 9th. We’re not the first to recreate historical events on the platform but we’re likely the first to do the London Great Smog.
Why the London Great Smog?
A few reasons. This was one of the first really deadly human-created urban pollution events in the world. A combination of a temperature inversion, unseasonably cold weather, crowded living conditions and the poor quality of coal all helped to contribute to this five day ‘perfect storm’ of deadly air.
Most amazing is that Londoners did not comprehend how deadly the air was during these five days until after the event. It was estimated after the event that 3-4000 people had died. Later estimates have put the total number of deceased closer to 12,000 people with over 100,000 people suffering other smog-related ailments.
We thought - “Would it have been different if Londoners were live tweeting the pollution?”. Would people have made the connections between florists running out of flowers and the dreadful air? London surely would have taken steps to protect those who were most vulnerable to the pollution - the sick, the elderly, children - had they realized what was happening. Could the number of deaths have been limited with the social sharing of information?
From our base in Beijing, China, we have also experienced our fair share of poor air quality and have often times thought how this is affecting the general population. There are already government objections to how pollution is reported in the capital. This is not just something which is happening in Beijing. It’s happening in many cities in China and the rest of the region. As economies develop, many people believe that poor air pollution is the price to pay for this development. This was widely thought to be true in London in 1952. But in 1952 the world did not have a plethora of renewable energy options. Today these options do exist yet because of the cheap cost of coal and oil, many developing nations are relying on these sources to fuel their development. By raising awareness of what happened in London in 1952, we hope to make more people aware of the dangers of air pollution.
How are you gathering information for the tweets?
We have not commissioned any great or new study into this event. We’ve read a lot of readily available information that we found via desk research. We’ve listed sources at the bottom of this post in an effort to provide credit to the organizations that originally produced this information. The sources for most of the pictures that are being used can be found on a Pinterest page we created (pinterest.com/historyretweet/greatsmog).
We are reaching out to people and to organizations that may have an interest in the event and asking them to share what they may have about those events in December, 1952. We are also hoping that our tweets get shared and commented on so that we can reach a larger audience. We truly hope that our tweets reach people who may have parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and friends who actually lived through these events. If they add their comments and recollections using the hashtag #greatsmog, we’ll readily share this information with our audience.
Many of the institutions that played a prominent role in 1952 still exist today - Transport of London, ambulance and police services, hospitals and the media. Surprisingly absent from the historical records are comments from local and national governments. We’ll involve them in our live account and hopefully they can make amends for their silence in 1952. We will also use today’s Twitter handles for the other institutions involved. If the period of December 5-9, 2012 happens to be foggy, we apologize in advance if our live tweeting causes any present day confusion (we don’t expect a War of the Worlds repeat).
Whose voice are you tweeting in?
We are tweeting using the voice of just a person in London. We’ve found some first hand accounts of what went on from different sources and have tried to put them together under one identity. We’ve also taken some information that we know to be true now and tried to include it in those tweets from yesteryear.
We will tweet from the Climate Action Twitter account @climateactio2n because we have a very dedicated following of low carbon enthusiasts who we think will enjoy this historical recreation. We’ll change the organization’s name to Great Smog during this five day period and will be using the hashtag #greatsmog on most of our tweets.
How are you doing the dates?
We will start on December 5th which is the day the smog started. That was a Friday in 1952 but in 2012 it is a Wednesday. One of the noticeable issues in 1952 was that most of the weekend’s sporting activities were cancelled which further impacted the lives of the people of London. Sadly, we’ll lose some of the impact of the weekend hit. 2012 marks the 60th anniversary of this event.
Is your tweeting historically accurate?
We have tried to be as accurate as possible but we have also taken liberties with the voice of our twerp so that some of that person’s thoughts are also shared with the audience. We have also taken some first person anecdotes and assigned them to our twerp either as original tweets or reflected as retweets where possible. We’ve made up tweets where we think we should make them up but just about everything else is based on historical records.
Are you using a tool to manage these tweets?
We use many social media tools in our daily activities, but for this event we can say that there is no better tool than Conversocial. They offer a fantastic tool to schedule tweets in advance and they have made their tool available to ClearWorld Media and Climate Action for more than one year. For this we are very thankful.
What happens after your last day of tweeting the Great Smog?
We’ll return to our regular Climate Action tweets and start the process of analyzing how effective our #greatsmog tweets have been. We will share results on this page.
Who is ClearWorld Media?
We are a small team, based in Beijing, China. We are part of the ClearWorld Energy group and have been involved in clean and green tech for some time. Over the past two years we have focused on creating a low carbon community on social media via two main channels - Climate Action and Upcycling. Climate Action sells carbon offsets to companies in this part of the world and ClearWorld Media works with sustainable organizations to help them with their social media efforts. We have also developed an iOS application called “PicPic”.
We gathered much information from the following sources and are adding new ones as December 5th approaches. Please tweet us at @mediacw if there are other sources which you think should be considered.
Sources:
