January 2008

All four leading candidates for the forthcoming London mayoral election have joined forces to fight Gordon Brown's push for a third runway at Heathrow Airport. Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson, Brian Paddick and Sian Berry have all agreed to feature in a new anti-expansion advertising campaign launched today. The ad features in the Times, Guardian, Independent and Evening Standard newspapers.

Remember the BT Online Excellence Award we were up for at the end of last year? Well, amidst all the work on energy solutions, forest protection and marine reserves there's time for a quick celebration as news just came though that we won Best Environmental Website! But wait, there's more because we were in the overall top ten across all categories, alongside bbc.co.uk, Amazon and Google.

Sacre bleu. At the end of last week, French president Nicolas Sarkozy took a stand against biotech giant Monsanto and banned a strain of GM maize which has previously been grown by French farmers.

Their MON 810 variety - according to AFP, the only type of GM maize currently being grown in France - has been withdrawn after a committee of scientists, farmers and politicians raised doubts over its continued use. Advocating the precautionary principle, Sarkozy invoked an EU clause to stop Monsanto's maize being grown.

We could be witnessing a seismic and very exciting shift in how UK and EU policies on biofuels are being perceived in official circles. Both the EU Environment Commissioner and Defra's own chief scientist today went on record to say that current plans to vastly increase the amount of fuels such as bioethanol and biodiesel might need to be reconsidered.

Greenpeace campaigner Sakyo Noda contacts the Japanese whaling fleet

Good news from Esperanza, our ice-class vessel on patrol in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. Yesterday the Espy had a face to face encounter with the Japanese whaling fleet's factory vessel, the Nisshin Maru, which was confronted close to the ice edge. As soon as they realised that we were in the area, the whalers put on speed and tried to get away.

After a high speed chase over hundreds of miles through fog and increasingly rough seas (see video clip below), the Esperanza this morning pursued the whalers north of the over the 60 degrees latitude mark - out of the Southern Ocean hunting grounds. The catcher vessel Yushin Maru also followed suit.

You may remember that a few weeks ago we ran a story about British Airways emailing the members of its Executive Club (who number in the tens of thousands) asking them to sign a petition supporting the proposed third runway at Heathrow Airport.

In it, BA chairman Willie Walsh made the rather remarkable assertion that the massive increase in traffic wouldn't increase emissions in climate change gases. According to Mr Walsh, the fact that airliners would spend less time queuing for take-off and landing spots would reduce CO2 emissions by 330,000 tonnes a year, a figure which the email implied had been endorsed by the government.

Our political unit has been trawling through the fine print of this morning's nuclear White Paper. Here's their initial analysis, outlining some of the more subtle ways the government has understated the real risks to the taxpayer and the lack of clarity on economics:

• The White Paper shows how nuclear companies will be able to cap their liabilities, leaving the tax payer exposed if estimates for dealing with waste change.
• It openly admits the government will have to provide extra money if cost estimates are wrong.
• It uses questionable financial estimates to build the nuclear economic case.