December 2008

Fire burns through forest in Sumatra, clearing the area for plantations © Greenpeace/Novis

It's been a few weeks since the Esperanza's tour of Indonesia wrapped up with an exhausting but thrilling week of direct action focused on various palm oil tankers, and I've since left those humid equatorial climes to return to a chilly British winter. But even though the ship has moved on to other countries and campaigns, the palm oil campaign continues and in the past few weeks there have been some developments.

The most obvious has been annual meeting of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in Bali - this could have been the moment the industry got its act together and did something other than spin the usual load of greenwash over its involvement in the destruction of south east Asia's rainforests. Sadly, it was not to be. Although our ship painting/blockading actions drew a lot of attention, as did our earlier revelations about United Plantations and their 'sustainable' palm oil, no real progress was made.

Exciting footage just in from the London HQ of international energy giant BP. After discovering internal company documents which reveal that the company, which has been stying itself 'Beyond Petroleum', is actually still spending 93 per cent of its budget on oil and gas extraction, we sent a crack team of smartly dressed greenwash-busters to locate BP boss Tony Hayward and present him with our coveted Emerald Paintbrush award for this year's most outstandingly brazen piece of greenwash.

Find out how they got on below:

But remember folks, this is just the tip of the greenwash-berg. With so many companies desperate to trumpet their 'green' credentials, even if the reality is very different, there are bound to be many more potential award winners out there. So if you know of, or work for, one of them, be sure and drop us a line so we can consider them for furture Emerald Paintbrush presentations...

Ed Miliband demonstrated the confusion at the of the heart of the government's energy and climate change strategies this morning when he refused to rule out new coal plants which don't capture and bury their emissions – just weeks after his own advisers warned there was no future for these power plants.

He attacked Conservative plans for the introduction of green standards for power stations that would rule out the dirtiest coal plants like E.ON's for Kingsnorth, as "knee jerk" and "not thought through". Apparently, he's happy to play party politics with coal and climate change, just days after he called for a people-powered movement on global warming. Hardly the way to inspire action on the most important issue of our time.

The tension built as the judges deliberated. Then at last the results were were all in and - ta-da! It was time to announce the winner of the first annual Greenpeace 'Emerald Paintbrush' award for greenwashing above and beyond the call of duty. Cue a quick roll on the drums, and step forward into the spotlight - BP!

The energy corporation with an income larger than most of the world's nation states has spent a lot of time and money restyling itself as being 'Beyond Petroleum' in recent years, but a trawl through their accounts quickly reveals just how empty that assertion really is - 'Back to Petroleum', more like it.

Trident - costs and 'independence' are both spinning out of control

The management of the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, the 'bomb factory' which makes and maintains the UK's nuclear warheads, is now controlled by private US companies following the sale of the government's 33 per cent holding yesterday.

The news, a further nail in the coffin of the flimsy pretence that Britain has an independent nuclear deterent, only came to light in a three line press statement released by BNFL, the state-owned group which officially 'owned' the government's stake.

In many ways the bluster from Europe's fisheries ministers the week before Christmas is as predictable as a pantomime script, if only it were meant to be funny! They all trumpet a 'fair deal' and talk about 'striking a balance', and most hilariously, 'respecting the science'. But in reality short-term political expediency continues to trump scientific reality. Today the EU announced its fishing quotas for 2009, as usual doing their best to ignore their own scientists' recommendations. Instead they agreed to increase quotas for endangered North Sea cod by 30 per cent, after the scientists had recommended that to be safe they shouldn't be catching any.