If a picture speaks a thousand words, a multimedia-packed, animation-filled interactive town must speak a million. Which is why on the Greenpeace UK website we've launched EfficienCity (like Sim City, but greener) to explain exactly what decentralised energy is and how it works in practice (which can otherwise be a wordy business).

If you believe our government, you'd think we need nuclear power and coal to stop climate change, but come and pay a visit to EfficienCity, which shows how pioneering, real world communities around the UK are using decentralised energy. As a result, they're enjoying lower greenhouse gas emissions, a more secure energy supply, cheaper electricity and heating bills and a whole new attitude towards energy.

We've been working with the incredible team at Biro Creative to build the town and we're pretty chuffed with the result. It's full of video case studies, animations and slideshows that explain exactly how a genuinely clean and efficient energy system works - from wave and tidal power to micro-hydro and anaerobic digestion.

And, most importantly, UK residents can find out how to make their own town climate friendly.

Anyway, enough of the words - just go and visit EfficienCity to discover a cleaner, greener energy future. Enjoy.

That means this blog will eventually be closed down, so point your browser and RSS readers over to the new site. See you there!

He's clearly concerned, and has agreed to talk directly with Paul Wolfowitz, Head of the World Bank, about the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He's also visiting the country later this month, and so he'll also talk to representatives from the government while he's there. But concern just isn't enough, and real action has to be taken on the ground to prevent the wholesale ransacking of the rainforest by the big logging companies.

We'll let you know what transpires at the World Bank meeting, but in the interim we need you to keep emailing Benn, pointing out to him that a crate of beer for vast tracts of valuable rainforest is a bum deal of the highest order - write to him now.

In recent years, we've put a lot of effort into highlighting the threats facing what remains of the world's forests in North America, South America, and South East Asia. But there's one major area we haven't touched on for some time now: Africa. That's all about to change, however, and you'll be hearing more about what we've been up to in the coming weeks and months.

But first let's set the scene. The forest of the Congo basin stretches across central Africa, about two-thirds of which lies within the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) but also covers parts of Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, the Central African Republic and the Republic of Congo. And it's huge: only the Amazon rainforest is bigger. Millions of people depend on it for their survival, including semi-nomadic pygmy communities, and it's another biodiversity hotspot: forest elephants and three of the great ape species - gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos - all form part of a rich ecosystem.

It's a story familiar from other areas of our forest work, but all this is being threatened by our old friend, industrial logging. Huge tracts of the forest are being opened up by logging companies with hunters and miners following in their wake into previously inaccessible areas.

If every UK retailer did the same, we’d save over five million tonnes’ worth of carbon emissions – more than the CO2 emissions of the 26 lowest emitting countries combined! That’s on top of saving UK consumers around £1.2 billion in electricity bills per year. Not bad for a little gas filled tube...

Kimberly-Clark, the makers of Kleenex, Andrex and other big name tissue brands, are chewing their way through the Boreal Forests of North America, all to make the stuff we wipe our nether regions on and flush down the toilet. Is that a sensible use of natural resources? Of course not, so in the latest action a crack team of activists were dispatched to New York City where a camera crew were filming material for a new Kleenex advert.

Thanks to Shedwa for sharing this video of what happened...

Blimey. I’m not sure how time has slipped past so fast but, after a five week frenzy of Faslane blockading, crane climbing, arrests, solitary confinement, losing the ship, getting it back again, bearing witness, gigs, press conferences, political events, rallies and general sleep deprivation, the Trident: we don’t buy it tour has just come to an end.

The Arctic Sunrise set sail for Scandinavia a couple of hours ago, cheered on from the quayside by a smattering of exhausted Greenpeace folk and watched by the police boat that inevitably appears every time the ship moves.

It was a strange moment; I’d realised I was getting sucked into ship life when, about 10 days into the tour, I found myself shouting “Heave to the aft!” without any sense of irony. Waving the ship off this morning, I realised how badly I was going to miss the Sunrise and her crew. It’s hard not to fall in love with the intense whirlwind that is life onboard a Greenpeace ship, and I’m not sure how I’m going to deal with a home that has no portholes and an office that doesn’t rock from side to side.

This morning, the streets of Jakarta were buzzing with the sound of chainsaws. It wasn't a loggers' convention causing all the racket but protesters sawing through a huge wooden wall depicting Indonesia's rainforests. They were commiserating a new world record as opposed to celebrating it, and with good reason because Indonesia stands to gain the dubious title of the World's Fastest Forest Destroyer.

We've been pointing out for a long time that the Paradise Forests of South East Asia are disappearing faster than anywhere else on Earth and, according to a new UN report on the world's forests, Indonesia is the juggernaut behind this massive rate of deforestation. Brazil clears more forest each year but, because Indonesia has a smaller area of forest, it's disappearing much more quickly - two per cent is lost each year compared to Brazil's 0.6 per cent.

With the help of some politicians, musicians and celebrities, our South East Asian office were making the point that this was not something the country should be proud of. This was more than just a symbolic gesture though as they will be making an official submission to the Guinness Book of World Records. Not the kind of thing that would have appeared on Record Breakers, I'll bet.

© Greenpeace/Davison

I wake up, my first decent lie-in since Christmas, and realise it's the 15th of March - the ides of March - not a good day for Julius Caesar who was assassinated in the Senate on this date in 44BC. And not a good day for that other megalomaniac with a receding hairline, Tony Blair. His attempts to quell the biggest domestic rebellion in 10 years failed miserably and now his plans to replace Trident have been utterly de-legitimised nationally and internationally.

Here's some of my favourite numbers:

• 95 - number of Labour MPs who voted against the government


• 4 - number of Labour ministers with a conscience, this week's resignations


• 8 - number of Labour ex-ministers who voted against the government


• 76 billion - number of pounds that the world now knows Blair will squander on Trident

© Greenpeace/Vickers

I've just spent the last two days at Westminster but strangely it feels like I have been there for weeks. On Tuesday I got up at 5:30am and headed out from Canary Wharf (where the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise is based) into the heart of London. I joined a bunch of Greenpeace volunteers from local groups across the city and we waited to hand out leaflets to MPs coming in and out of Parliament.

The MPs started to arrive, and quite a few stopped to talk when I asked how they felt about Trident replacement. There was a mix of opinions; some were entirely in support of our campaign against new nuclear weapons, others were ambivalent and some were sadly very supportive of having weapons that can wipe out millions of men, women and children. Nevertheless, whatever their opinions, most of them took leaflets as they went on their way and, at the end of the day, we had given out over 3,000 leaflets to people coming in and out of parliament buildings.

“It’s not the end of the story by any means,” said Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn immediately following the vote. “This is a very big rebellion.”

Indeed, we’re counting on you rebels. The vote passed with 409 in favour and 161 against. That’s 88 Labour MPs voted against Trident replacement, 95 voted for the rebel amendment earlier, that's the biggest since the Iraq war. Blair’s proposal also prompted MPs to quit their posts. (See I can yet convince myself this is great news.)

And those Labour rebels are right to be concerned. By going head with Trident today, in 20 year's time not only will the UK have a new nuclear weapon, there will be more nuclear weapons states in the world. Blair cannot preach to other states to ‘do as I say, not as I do’. Far from making the world a safer place, Blair’s lust for nukes will encourage others to follow his dangerous and unnecessary example.

And secondly, only 24% of the public support the government's plans to replace Trident and 51% think that the final decision to replace the Trident should be made through a public referendum.

You're right Jeremy, it is far from over. It may have Blair’s name on it, but Brown’s going to pay the price.

Really, everyone else is down here, you wouldn't want to miss it:

Here Bianca Jagger, Jon Trickett MP, Anita Roddick, Viven Westwood, Annie Lennox, Kate Hudson from CND and Iain Davison MP hold up a cheque from the British taxpayers for £76 billon - yes that's how much Trident is going to cost us.

You can see more photos from the 30 hour-long occupation of the crane on Flickr