Maldives Pledges at Stupid premiere to go Carbon Neutral in Ten Years

Stupid's climate change supervisor, Mark Lynas, met the Maldives' climate team at a conference in February 2009 and had a good old chat... Less than a month later, at the UK premiere of The Age of Stupid on March 15th 2009, the President of the Maldives, Mohammed Nasheed, announced by an exclusive video message that his country will be the first to go carbon neutral - within ten years.

The speech and ovation as it happened: 

The complete video message: 

The annoucement sent shockwaves through the international media (just try googling "Maldives carbon neutral") including a double page spread in The Observer, a think piece from Nasheed in the Huffington Post and a six page feature in the New York Times, and also marked the beginning of President Nasheed meteoric rise to becoming the world's first eco rockstar. Since then, he has continued his revolutionary ways by holding a cabinet meeting underwater and all sorts of other shenanigans summarised in this article.

Next, Team Stupid invited the President to attend the Stupid Global Premiere in New York on September 21st (he was in town anyway for the UN General Assembly's climate meeting) where Franny presented him with a Not Stupid certificate for general brilliance. And then they bumped into each other once more at the (disastrous) Copenhagen climate summit in December 2009, when poor Nasheed had been awake for three days straight trying to pull some sort of deal out of the bag: 

The carbon neutrality announcement from President Mohammed Nasheed places the Maldives at the forefront of climate change mitigation policy worldwide. Nasheed has set the bar high; if a small, relatively poor country like his can announce plans for total decarbonisation of its entire economy within a single decade, what does this mean for other countries making claims to global leadership with targets like 80% cuts across the next 40 years?

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