In a UK review on climate change, British economist and government advisor Sir Nicholas Stern has said that "climate change represents the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen," but that there "is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we act now and act internationally." Which is exactly what we have been saying all along (while getting accused of "climate porn"). The scientific and moral cases for acting against climate change have been known for some time - but ironically, it's taken an economist to spur governments into action. Show me the money...

Read more on the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change »

Greenpeace UK: Climate change: We still have time! »

Posted by Dave at 4:42 PM | Permalink

Remember, remember, the 4th of November... Will you be wandering around London on that day? Worried about climate change wreaking catastrophic planetary destruction? Terrified you might not be able to get tickets to the next Glastonbury music festival? Not sure which you should be worrying about more?

Fret no more! We'll get you and a friend backstage at the next Glastonbury for free as our guest bloggers. All you have to do is persuade more people than anybody else* to come to Trafalgar Square on November 4th and stand up against climate chaos.

"PAPT" are in the lead, with 11 team members. Think you can do better? Enter the competition and start inviting your friends. »

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Posted by Dave at 4:14 PM | Permalink

It's so easy to shift the blame onto someone else but politicians do it better than most. Witness Margaret Beckett earlier today, speaking to foreign policy experts at the British Embassy in Berlin. Quite rightly, she stressed the dangers of climate change but her role as foreign secretary lead her to framing it as "a serious threat to international security". Which it is, but it's a lot more besides.

All well and good, but what rankles is the bit where she claimed that, as far as the EU is concerned, it's up to Germany to sort it all out. This isn't the result of some diplomatic tit-for-tat stretching back to the Battle of Britain but a forward glance to Germany's presidency of both the EU and G8 next year. "We will support you," she said, but hang on a minute. Wasn't the UK in exactly the same position last year, and wasn't climate change a priority at the Gleneagles summit, hosted by our very own prime minister?

Since then, precious little has altered in either the UK or the EU on the subject of climate change but now our government is out of the firing line, it's easy enough to shift the responsibility elsewhere. Even Beckett's intention to rope aviation into the emissions trading scheme smacks of being too little, too late. "Like putting a sticking plaster on a broken leg," according to one of our climate campaigners, Emily Armitage. But then if we're not to fall into a childish round of 'I will if you will', then someone needs to take the bull by the horns (or the plane by the tail) and do something.

Posted by Jamie at 4:34 PM | Permalink

Now this is fun. Top-notch design studio Freerange Graphics have produced another of their really quite cool online animations, and anyone who's seen cyberpunk animal welfare skit The Meatrix or organic sci-fi rip-off Grocery Store Wars will know they can put a groovy spin on ethically-minded issues. But for their latest viral masterpiece they've shifted away from foodstuffs and onto toxic chemicals in the form Sam Suds and the Case of the Poison Plastic, a pop at toxic PVC that has more than a touch of The Big Sleep about it.

What impresses me is that, even among the jokes and spoofs, they manage to squeeze in those key bits of info that will stick in people's minds. It's so easy to fall into the trap of being overly earnest and preachy, but then that's often what the news media expect and so that's what they're given. To inform while entertaining though, that's an art and arguably a more successful strategy although we'd need deep pockets to be able to afford this kind of razzamatazz for every campaign we launch. Go and watch the animation, then keep your fingers crossed for a positive outcome in the current REACH legislation being debated in the European Parliament.

Posted by Jamie at 1:44 PM | Permalink

Our colleagues in the Netherlands who alerted us to the dangers of toxic sex toys are now tackling the Red Light District in Amsterdam, and making energy efficiency sexier than ever. They've replaced the inefficient red light bulbs lighting up six windows in the famous district with energy efficient green light bulbs. The Greenpeace volunteers are also canvassing entrepreneurs in other parts of the neighbourhood asking them to use energy efficient light bulbs.

The guerilla bulb replacement is part of a project called "Heir" (Here in Dutch) to promote the use of 1 million extra energy efficient light bulbs in the Netherlands.

Next stop the Ajax football stadium?!

Posted by tracy at 1:00 PM | Permalink

From BBC News earlier today:

A £10m drive to add wind turbines to public sites and to promote renewable energy is being funded by cuts to other green projects, it has been claimed. The Partnership for Renewables scheme will work with private firms to put the turbines on sites such as hospitals. But the Lib Dems and the Energy Saving Trust say money from insulation and double-glazing schemes will pay for it. The Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said the sum was never allocated to a specific project.

So despite making the right noises in a bland New Labour kind of way, David Miliband is simply juggling his budgets to make climate change less of a burden to the Treasury.

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Posted by Jamie at 5:31 PM | Permalink

Praise be for the tabloid press. On the cover of today's Current Bun, they've illustrated their report on the North Korean nuke test not with the seismograph that adorns most other papers, nor even a considered portrait of enigmatic premier, Kim Jong Il. Instead they've plumped for his marionette double as seen in puppet political satire, Team America: World Police. Not that I'm trying to show the Sun up as a reactionary rag pumped full of stereotypes and dangerous generalisations. If I was, I'd be tarred with the same brush because as I watched the reports on last night's news, exactly the same images were going through my head.

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Posted by Jamie at 11:03 AM | Permalink

Climate change is clearly the bandwagon to be on at the moment. The new green-blue Tories (what colour of the political spectrum does that make them - aquamarine?) have muscled their way on board, the media is transmitting the message on all channels, and even celebrities like Thandie Newton are climbing aboard. To my knowledge, we haven't got Jimmy Carr yet but he pops up on everything else so it's only a matter of time. However, one man I perhaps never expected to hear from on the subject was Mr Bagpuss himself, Oliver Postgate.

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Posted by Jamie at 3:30 PM | Permalink

The Hadley Centre, part of the Met Office, has just released some research, today, in the Climate Clinic, at the Tory conference. The main headline finding is that drought is set to double this century due to climate change. A spoil-sport serious newspaper would also mention that this figure refers to 'moderate' drought. Moderate drought can still be pretty dangerous if you don't have much in the way of resources to fall back on. Generally the agriculture in a particular area is suited to that area's climate. If you have an agricultural system which requires a lot of rainfall, such as paddy fields, then even a drought which doesn't look like a drought to the average observer could ruin your harvest and lead to a famine.

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Posted by graham at 5:30 PM | Permalink

So, having lambasted the leader of the opposition for being all talk, perhaps in fairness I should talk a bit more about what he talked about. It's mostly good stuff. Blair may have said that climate change is our biggest threat and challenge, but he clearly hasn't put it at the top of his to-do list (although as Bush seems to have editorial control that's not really surprising). Cameron stands in marked contrast for having given the issue as much time as Tony's apocalyptic pronouncements imply that it deserves, so firstly that should be acknowleged - every time Cameron has spoken about the climate, he was sacrificing the opportunity to talk about law and order or some other issue which might have given him a political benefit. Talk may be cheap, but it isn't free.

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Posted by graham at 4:08 PM | Permalink

Last night I was privileged to experience the combined force of the two politicians who've done most to get climate change in the UK media, Cameron and Gore. First was An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's block-busting documentary about climate change. If you haven't already seen it then do try to catch it. He refined it over a period of decades, and it's a great primer on climate science and far more entertaining than you'd expect.

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Posted by graham at 12:33 PM | Permalink

BAA spin doctors (seated) look shifty when probed about how more runways mean less aviation emissions

I was so excited by my discovery of environmentally aware conservatism that I may have missed out some of the detail. The bloke from BAA wants inreased capacity (bigger airports) whilst dealing with emissions via efficiency gains and the European Emissions Trading Scheme - ie air travel will continue more or less unchecked, but the aviation industry would have to buy carbon credits from industries which had managed to cut back. I'm not aware of anyone outside the industry who thinks that this might work unassisted - certainly Gummer was quite clear that it wouldn't, and my understanding is that were we to follow this track every scrap of industry or society outside of aviation would have to get down to zero emissions by 2030.

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Posted by graham at 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

That's what Cameron didn't enter politics to become. Allegedly. But as with all questions on the Cameroonian revolution, the real trick is filtering out change of direction from change in presentation. A recently leaked internal email from the Tories expressed concern emanating from the constituency parties concerning Dave's wholesale adoption of 'the Greenpeace agenda'. So I'm here in Bournemouth at the Tory Party conference to try to find out which is further from the truth - mouthpiece for big business, or mouthpiece for Greenpeace?

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Posted by graham at 2:49 PM | Permalink