Blog: Climate

Climate emergency - no third runway

As the banner on top of this London - Manchester flight says, we're in the middle of a climate emergency. The fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in the UK is just about to get another boost from Brown's government. On Wednesday, the consultation on whether to nearly double the size of Heathrow by building a new runway will close, and the government looks set to cave in to the aviation industry.

This morning, four of our volunteers have climbed on top of a plane at Heathrow and are wrapping a banner around the tailfin. The plane - one of 32 flights every day between London and Manchester - had just arrived in Heathrow and the passengers had disembarked when four volunteers walked through the double doors at Heathrow Terminal One, crossing an area of tarmac and climbing onto the fuselage of the British Airways flight.

London mayor Ken Livingstone was never going to get an easy ride over his planned changes to the congestion charge, and Porsche's threat of a legal challenge is perhaps no big surprise. Famed for its fast, sleek, inefficient cars, it claims the new £25-a-day charge on gas guzzlers is "unfair and disproportionate".

As well as the promised judicial review, the company has started a petition for the Jeremy Clarksons of this world to voice their opposition to Ken's plan. "We know that huge numbers of people in London and across the rest of the country support our case," they claim. "They agree with us that it would be bad for London - that it is unfair and sends the wrong message about what sort of a city London is whilst having no meaningful benefit on the environment."

My carbon footprint according to Defra

As I've been winding down my experiments with carbon calculators, I've been noticing more and more just how variable they can be. The results they spit out fluctuate wildly but as they all ask slightly different questions, that's not surprising. What surprises me are the differences between what they claim the CO2 emissions of your average Briton are, and if your trying to figure out whether you're a relatively big emitter or a teeny tiny one, that can be something of a problem.

An iceberg made of hard, dense ice reflects late evening light
© Greenpeace/Cobbing

Oooh, this is gorgeous. I know some of Nick Cobbing's photographs pretty well (he's done a fair bit of work for Greenpeace in the past) but, on the advice of our picture editor, I went to have a nose around his website where he's organised some of his photos into stories.