We are excited about the creation of a new Greenpeace ship - the Rainbow Warrior III. Having just signed a contract for the build of this state-of-the-art vessel - three crew members from the Rainbow Warrior I and II take us back in time briefly - as we look forward to seeing this legend continue.

Bunny McDiarmid, executive Director of Greenpeace in New Zealand, talks about her memories of life on board the original Rainbow Warrior as a deckhand...

I can still see in my mind's eye and often do, the grain of the wooden decks of the old Warrior, I can remember their feel underfoot, and the smell of the black tar when the sun hit them. I first joined her as a deckhand in 1984 in Jacksonville, Florida in a godforsaken boat yard in the backofbeyond. We were turning her from a motor boat into a sailing boat. And she turned beautifully. And it was the 'we', the 12 crew and 5 or 6 dedicated volunteers that did it all over the course of 4-5 months. The doing of this welded us to her and to each other. I remember Ulla the 24 year old danish fitter and turner who redid all the welding on the chain plates after the yard guys buggered it up.

I remember Henk skill sawing the aluminum bridge wings off so we could mount winches for the main sheet, I remember all of us walking the stays of the main mast as she swung over the yard into her sleeve on the main deck. I remember sitting braced on the main deck as we sailed through the night repairing the mainsail on an old sewing machine and I remember how fast we could unscrew all the bolts holding down the benches in the mess and push them into the companionway so that we had enough room for dancing. No campaign office, there was just the mess and the radio room off the bridge. No email just a clamour for the mail when we arrived in Hawaii after two weeks at sea.

The crew of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985 - Bunny is second from the right

I did not know much about Greenpeace when I joined the Warrior, I just liked what she was going to do - an anti nuclear campaign in the Pacific. The first stop was helping 350 Rongelap islanders move from their home island to another island 40 miles away because of the radiation contamination from US nuclear testing.

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Posted by Lisa at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

... or how we traveled back in time to dial-up connections and email without attachments.
Warning: This is an entry that might interest more the geeks among you than the general public.

The Arctic Sunrise is on top of the world right now, at 82 degrees North, and the difficulties encountered are not just weather related. Because so few people live that far North, satellite cover is almost nonexistent, and staying in touch with the ship is a complicated operation.
We had to install iridium phones on top of the crow's nest to create a very low bandwidth dial-up connection.

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Posted by Juliette at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Guest blog by Sara Holden, our International whales campaign coordinator

If you google “ Mount Difficulty” the first twenty-five pages do not link to information about the evocatively named central New Zealand mountain – they all go straight to adverts for wine and vineyards. It is apt that the analogy adopted (not by consensus) by the IWC Commissioners is that discussions on the future of the IWC are like scaling Mount Difficulty, as the very process of discussing the discussions could drive you to drink.

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Posted by Jo at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In 2007, HP promised to phase out using brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastics in their products (except for servers and printers) by the end of 2009.

But earlier this year they said they would keep using these toxic chemicals until 2011.

So these Greenpeace activists in Beijing donned Mark Hurd masks (that'd be the CEO of HP) and held laptops declaring "HP: Harmful Products," and demanded that somebody come out of the HP headquarters and collect their toxic laptops.

Greenpeace has been campaiging against hazardous e-waste by pressuring manufacturers to get the toxics out of their products.

HP has no excuse for inaction: Apple's new computers are almost PVC free and don't have any BFR's. Dell, Lenovo and Acer have more products with less or no PVC and BFR's.

The next edition of Greenpeace's Guide to Greener Electronics comes out next week. The guide ranks the 17 top manufacturers of personal computers, mobile phones, TV's and games consoles according to their policies on toxic chemicals, recycling and climate change. Expect to see HP paying a Hefty Price for Horrible Performance.

Posted by brianfit at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How this works:

The accumulating costs above are based on the EUR 1.7 billion overrun announced by Areva/TVO plus an extra EUR 1.2 billion which will be needed to purchase electricity that has not been produced by Olkiluoto-3 since its projected start.

These costs will eventually be paid for by Nordic electricity consumers and French taxpayers, either through higher bills for customers or through taxes.

Related posts: EPR: Enfant Terrible of the French Nuclear Industry

Posted by Eoin Dubsky at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Guest blog from Sara Holden, our International whales campaign coordinator

Just a few minutes before the opening of the 61st International Whaling Commission meeting, a large rat was seen scuttling through the hotel and out the door. As metaphors go, it was a good one. The IWC meeting venue is another. Hosted at a casino hotel in Madeira, Portugal, it is fast becoming apparent that anyone betting on a good outcome for the whales is unlikely to win.

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Posted by Jo at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

John Hocevar writes from the Rainbow Warrior:

Today things got ugly.

We are in Valletta Harbor in Malta. We learned that there were two vessels here owned by Fuentes, the tuna tycoon who controls over half the bluefin catch in the Mediterranean. We decided to board the vessel to inspect the cargo and documentation. Three women, Emma, Rita, and Liz, were the first to volunteer.

After the vessels refused our polite request to allow us access, Emma stepped on board to press the point. She was immediately attacked – they punched her, pulled her hair, picked her up and threw her overboard. One person hurled a large wooden pallet which whistled by our heads, and another tossed a full bucket of paint into one of our boats. If either of those had hit their intended targets, someone could have been seriously injured, but fortunately no damage was done.

Greenpeace is not known for taking no for an answer. For us, the violent response to a simple request to inspect the vessel reinforced our belief that they had something to hide. And even if they did not, greater transparency is essential to ensure that vessels are not able to obscure the kinds of illegal activity which have contributed to the bluefin’s decline.

We climbed onto the pier, where Emma again tried to board one of the Fuentes vessels. She was viciously assaulted by a burly sailor twice her side, holding her down and punching her repeatedly in the face. (We brought her to a clinic here for treatment, and she has a black eye and her neck is swollen but she’s ok.)

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Posted by brianfit at 9:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A cheeky reposting of Christian's blog on our UK website:

Around midnight three of my colleagues eased themselves off one of the Greenpeace inflatable speedboats and into the cold water of the river Medway in Kent.

It's difficult to imagine what must be going through your mind in that situation - in the dark, in the cold water, with the looming lights of a large ship getting closer. But however difficult to imagine it is, it must have been even more difficult to do, because Cathy, Emma and Hannah knew that they were swimming out into the channel to block a coal freighter carrying twenty thousand tonnes of coal from docking at the Kingsnorth jetty.

As they made their swim - on one of the shortest nights of the year - more Greenpeace volunteers flagged the ship down with flares and banners, pulled alongside and clambering up the steep metal sides, across the deck, and on up the mast and funnel. They secured themselves in place and waited for the calls from the morning news shows.

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Posted by Jamie at 1:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A friend in Aomori, Japan, writes:

Photo:Greenpeace/Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert

May I present the legendary Greenpeace T-Shirt collector, a writer with Greenpeace International - Steve Erwood.

When Greenpeace’s Aomori Communications Centre in Japan put out a call for campaign T-Shirts for an exhibition, everyone told us to speak to Steve. A prolific collector, Steve and his partner, Greenpeace activist Eric Heijselaar sent us a care package of historical Greenpeace shirts so large, it could constitute an entire exhibition by itself.

“It probably wasn't a conscious decision to start a t-shirt collection,” said Steve. But once you’ve volunteered for Greenpeace and joined a few actions, it’s easy to end up with a few in the closet. T-shirts help get the message across and help to get people on board with Greenpeace's campaigns”

There are so many personal and special moments behind each T-shirt. The favourite for Eric came from the famous Brent Spar action in 1995, when activists occupied the giant Brent Spar oil storage facility in the North Sea. At the time, Shell Oil and the UK Government had wanted to simply dump the obsolete platform into the sea, along with all of the toxic chemicals, oil and rubbish it contained.

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Posted by brianfit at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Hocevar writes from the Rainbow Warrior:

The Rainbow Warrior is patrolling the waters of the eastern Mediterranean. We spent most of yesterday listening to fishermen. We also carried out a lot of inspections, ensuring that boats were legally licensed to fish, but mostly… we listened. Since few fishermen would be willing to speak openly over the radio, we visited their boats with our inflatable Zodiacs. The first challenge was finding a suitable language. Here in the eastern Mediterranean, we have already had conversations in Spanish, Italian, French, Arabic, English, and Maltese. Then there is the fact that many of the fishermen are pretty angry – about the disappearing fish, and about the regulations that have been put in place to try to stop the declines.

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Posted by brianfit at 12:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday in New York, actress Sigourney Weaver presented some hard facts about the practice of bottom trawling during the UN Consultative Process on the Law of the Sea (ICP). Namely - it is killing deep sea ecological systems and they may never recover. She did this through the latest Greenpeace documentary 'The Bottom Line' which she narrates and which outlines just what is at stake if action against bottom trawling is further delayed.

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Posted by Laura K at 1:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Posted by Eoin Dubsky at 3:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The final installment of a trilogy is out today. The last of the three Reasons to Believe films narrated by the charming and talented Ms Susan Sarandon has been released - 'Reasons to Believe: Servers'. These films give us three out of an endless list of reasons to believe that an Energy [R]evolution is possible and necessary to change our energy habits and reduce emissions contributing to climate change.

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Posted by Laura K at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week, Shell paid $15.5m to the Ogoni people in Nigeria, an out of court settlement after a 13 year struggle. I read that Shell's lawyers apparently once said that Shell would only settle when "hell freezes over" and they were "skating on it" - (perhaps that explains why Shell is now the most carbon intensive oil company on the planet - a desperate bid to keep hell nice and cosy).

Unfortunately I have now found that this quote was in fact from Chevron's lawyer in relation to a similiar case - but I would guess there was a not entirely dissimilar sentiment involved here. (Strangely, Shell's former Group Auditor Bill Campbell also told Shell's senior execs in 2007 that "hell would freeze over" before they would appear in court to clear their names. These guys must clean up at the annual Oil Industry Buzzword Bingo convention).

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Posted by Adele at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

An update on UN Climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany brought to you by our very own Cindy Baxter who has been at the negotiations since the start.

Coming to the end of a hard two weeks here at the climate talks in Bonn, we were greeted yesterday by a very (VERY) loud siren on the back of a truck parked by our colleagues just down from the conference centre. Sounding the alarm for the climate. The siren went on for two hours before our 15 activists were arrested. The noise carried into the building and maybe it
jolted some sense into at least some of the negotiators here.

Why were we sounding the alarm? Well, anyone who's been watching these talks would be quite amazed at the complete lack of urgency in these corridors, given the science on climate change. The usual suspects, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and New Zealand, are holding everything up, and seem more obsessed with the short term, special interests of their fossil
fuel industries at home. I could get very depressed at this stage. Time is marching on.

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Posted by Jessica Miller at 2:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here in the UK, bluefin tuna has suddenly become the posterboy for overfishing, largely thanks to the new film The End of the Line. I was at the premiere screening of the film (a documentary based on the book by journalist Charles Clover) here in London, and boy, it took me back. It was like Defending Our Oceans: The Movie. After seeing it, Pret-A-Manger, a sandwich chain, announced they were removing bluefin tuna from their menus and reassessing their fish policy, and Marks & Spencer has announced their fish will now only come from pole-and-line fishing. And then naked pictures of celebrities holding fish started appearing in even the tabloid newspapers. Celebs are also protesting against posh sushi restaurant Nobu refusing to remove bluefin from its menu even in the face of Sienna Miller's boycott. (The nerve, eh?)

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Posted by Adele at 9:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Lucy, one of our video producers at Greenpeace International, made the new video for our campaign against GM rice. Here's the story she's written about how it all came together with photos by Raffa and Tulio, from our video department.

“We need a film..”
“Great, about what?”
“genetically modified rice….”
Why do I never get the orang-utans or the whales?
“..something informative yet engaging…funny, memorable. different..”
“er OK sure …”

Only, I wasn't sure I could pull it off at first - but the sustainable agriculture team here at Greenpeace International knew what they wanted and their passion was infectious. They explained that the EU is considering to allow Bayer’s strain of genetically modified rice, LL62, to be sold in Europe, and ultimately ending up on our dinner plates. If that wasn’t enough, it’s resistant to Glufosinate - a herbicide considered so dangerous to humans that the EU has banned it. But apparently it’s fine to spray this stuff on rice in other countries and then import the genetically engineered rice for EU citizens to eat? I don’t think so! The challenge was set ….now I just needed to figure out what film I was going to make.

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Posted by Lisa at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Honestly, people. You can't make this stuff up.

An ExxonMobil oil tanker arrived in the port of Valdez (yes, the site of the Exxon-valdez oil spill) with a dead humpback whale stuck on its bow that (really, I'm not making this up) nobody noticed until the tanker got into port.

Now, let's put our conventional journalism hats on -- for just a moment -- and look at how Exxon tried to duck this rather sensitive news item.

I went to our top Conventional Old Media guy with this news item to get his take. If you picture J. Jonah Jameson, Spiderman's editor, you'd be fairly close to our Chief Editor, at least in disposition. Grumpy. Impatient. Blunt. (Occupational hazard among chief editors, actually) But give him curly hair, lose the cigar, throw in a Scottish burr, and you get the picture.

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Posted by brianfit at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

You can't have your whale watching and eat them too. That's what Iceland is finding out. Whale watching boats have been having a hard time finding whales lately - so they've ventured further out, putting them close to the whaling area.

Here's a (roughly translated) snippet from Icelandic Whale Watching Association...

The truth is that [whale hunting boat] Jóhanna was very close to the whale watching area. On a whale watching trip that started at 5pm from Reykjavík harbor and that lasted till 9pm, the Jóhanna was seen while whaling at a distance of about 16 miles from Reykjavík. This cannot be called “on the far edge of the bay”, and is in very close proximity to the normal whale watching area.

In the past week, whale watching vessels from Reykjavík have had difficulties in finding minke whales in the usual whale watching area and needed to look for whales on the outer edges of the bay, where Jóhanna has been whaling. The Icelandic Whale Watching Association reaffirms that whaling and whale watching cannot coexist. To allow whaling so close to whale watching areas as has happened here is complete madness, except if the aim would be to crack down the whale watching business in Iceland. It’s the same animals swimming in the sea between whale watching areas and whaling areas.

Looks like Iceland is going to have to choose between hunting and watching. Guess which makes vastly more money. (Hint, the only shooting involves cameras.)

I've went whale watching in Iceland years ago. It was super cool, and the whole country is amazing. That said, I'm not going back until they stop whaling. Help the whale watching industry in Iceland. Join me by signing the Iceland pledge.

Posted by Andrew at 9:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Blogger Jay Yarrow, from the Business Insider Green Sheet, described the launch of the Cool IT Challenge with the following sentence: "Greenpeace pees all over the IT sector today, saying companies aren't doing their part to save the world." Believe it or not, this was not a direct quote from our press release. We're not peeing on them Jay, we're endorsing them. Very different.

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Posted by Laura K at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)