So we write more than occasionally on this site about global warming and how it’s not good and how maybe we should do something about it.  Well, here’s your chance to make some money off your idea on how to combat climate change.  The Eco Business Creation Association, which is in Japan, is holding a “Cool the Earth” idea contest.  The idea is simple, according to the official website.

With the aim of curbing global warming as much as possible and keeping the earth “cool”, we are calling for ideas from around the world for reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Applicants will have the opportunity to exchange views or to network over the Internet in order to enhance the feasibility of ideas. Based on the innovative ideas we receive, prototype projects will be conducted in Japan to establish models for reducing emissions. The results of these projects will be reported to the global community in the hope that this will promote further innovation towards reducing CO2 emissions.

There are four different categories to submit your ideas in: domestic and overseas business, and domestic and overseas governmental system/policy.  It should be noted that, in this case, “domestic” does indeed refer to Japan.

And there are prizes!  Cash money prizes!

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The world’s richest nations and emerging economies joined together at a summit on the island of Hokkaidou, Japan to commit to long range cute in global greenhouse emissions. They concluded their meetings today, calling climate change “one of the great global challenges of our time.” Good news, right? Well, not just yet.

Yesterday, leaders of the G8 (United States, Japan, Germany, France, Canada, Italy, Britain and Russia) pledged to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases in half by 2050. But the Group of 5 emerging economies (China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa) refused to sign onto that goal. They are holding out until rich nations like the United States take more aggressive steps to cut pollution over the next decade.

“It is good that the developing countries have embraced the principal of a global target that they will participate in,” Philip Clapp of the Pew Environmental Group said. “It would have been better if the United States and the other G-8 countries would have been willing to step up to the plate and make a strong commitment about what they would do over the next 10 years.”

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TOKYO (Reuters) - A strong earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 7 struck eastern Honshu in northern Japan on Saturday, NHK television reported.

There were no immediate reports of casualties and no tsunami warning was issued but NHK said Japan’s high-speed bullet trains in the area had stopped running.

Related:  6.9 Earthquake Rattles Japan

Sir Paul McCartney is said to be “horrified” that his spanking new hybrid car was flown 7,000 miles from Japan to the United Kingdom. The aging British rocker received the car, the $170,000 Lexus LS600H hybrid, as a gift for promotional work he had done for Lexus, but was mystified when the automobile was loaded onto a Korean Air flight and flown to Britain rather than arriving via ship as originally planned.

Transporting the car via jet created a carbon footprint nearly 100 times bigger than if the car had been sent by sea. Carbon offsetting firm CO2Balance.com estimated thatsending the enormous car on the plane created a carbon footprint of 38,050 kg as opposed to a 397 kg footprint for the three week boat journey.

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Professional race car driver Danica Patrick, 29, became the first female IndyCar winner in history on Sunday.

Danica Patrick was always sure a woman could win a race. And now the questions about her will surely stop.

Patrick made it to the place she wanted to be for so long “” Victory Lane. She became the first female winner in IndyCar history Sunday, capturing the Indy Japan 300 in her 50th career start.

“I’m glad it finally happened,” the 26-year-old driver said. “But I would be lying if I told you I didn’t think it would be me.” [Associated Press]

Help more females make sports history and by getting involved with http://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/. The Women’s Sports Foundation aims to advance the lives of girls and women through sport and physical activity.

The Rolling Exhibition is not your typical photography exhibit. Then again, Kevin Connolly is not your typical photographer. Connolly was born in Montana 1985, a healthy baby, but without legs. As a teenager he got into scateboarding and taking pictures. Last year while traveling abroad, tired of the way people stared at him because he has no legs, Connolly started staring back, through his camera: “I wanted to stare back at that guy, to let him know that, ‘Yeah, I catch you looking,’” he says. “And the way I did that was with my camera.” Combining his love of photography and his scateboard, which he prefers over his wheelchair which he rarely uses, Kevin embarked on an adventure, travelling to 15 countries in three months, from New Zealand to Japan, through Europe, Iceland, and then through America back to Montana. Always shooting from the hip, he would start his days heading away from the sun, shooting people as he rolled through cities and villages. By going to so many different countries, Connolly discovered how, on some level, we are really the same:

The thing I just loved was you had an executive-looking type guy in say New York City, someone who’s clearly wealthy enough to afford a very nice suit and a good cell phone, staring at you in the exact same way that a beggar in Ukraine would.

32,000 photos, 15 Countries, 31 Cities, and 32,000 photos later, Connolly discovered “One stare” captured on his online exhibit TheRollingExhibition.com. Connolly explains in his artist statement

1 year ago I was asked by a little boy in Christchurch, New Zealand if I had been eaten by a shark.

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The great Japanese director, Kon Ichikawa, died today of pneumonia. He was the man behind such films as The Burmese Harp, Fires on the Plain, and Tokyo Olympiad.

The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain both dealt with the Japanese perspective on World War II and provided different senses of the nature of war, often combining beauty with death and destruction.

If you’ve never seen an Ichikawa film, now might be the time : and learn more about the Japanese master by watching his films.

Also, there is a great essay on the making of The Burmese Harp on Criterion’s web site, I recommend giving it a read, for a taste of the article, go below the fold:

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Mercury contamination is accomplishing something that animal rights activists have been trying to do for years: persuade Japanese hunters to stop slaughtering dolphins. As MSNBC reports:

A series of scientific studies in recent years in Japan have documented high levels of the toxic heavy metal in dolphin meat”¦

“¦A leading regional supermarket chain has pulled dolphin from its shelves over the health concerns, and hunt critics in the town say villagers are shunning it. Meat from pilot whales “” a type of dolphin “” was taken off local school lunch menus in October.

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Fortune cookies are an end-of-meal staple at Chinese restaurants across the globe except for in one puzzling place: China. Yasuko Nakamachi, a folklore and history graduate student at Kanagawa University, says that the reason for this is that the cookies actually originate from Japan. Over the course of six years of research, Nakamachi has perused thousands of drawings and documents in order to substantiate her claims, finding references made to the cookies in 19th century Japanese etchings and literature. She also discovered small, family owned bakeries outside of Kyoto where similarly-shaped cookies have been made by hand for centuries.

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Smoke spewing from China’s factories is wafting across the Sea of Japan and coating Japan’s trees with a layer of contaminants similar to the acid rain that’s ruined forests in Europe. “Hana-boro”–the little crystals of ice that cling to Japan’s tree branches in winter””used to be sparkling white. Now, a noxious blend of vehicle exhaust and pollution from China’s coal-burning power plants has turned the hana-boro brown, according to Japanese news service Asahi Shimbun.

And that’s just one kind of “transboundary pollutant” that’s arriving uninvited from China and fouling Japan’s environment. Untreated sewage effluent from China’s cities is wreaking havoc with marine life in the Sea of Japan, promoting the growth of microorganisms that have led to an explosion of huge Echizen jellyfish. These “tentacled giants” first began appearing off the coast of Japan in 2002, and are a terrible problem for fishermen, causing “extensive damage to nets and to hauls themselves,” Asahi Shimbun reports

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