Blog: Climate

So the US government is suing BP (along with a bunch of other oil spill sidekicks).  The announcement this morning sent investors running scared and wiping a cool £2.8 billion off BP's share price. Shame the wildlife don't get lawyers.

From Chevron to Shell, Nigeria to the North Sea, the slippery mask of big oil was briefly removed this week.

On Tuesday we learned from a leaked internal company report that Transocean – the operators of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig – had a partial “blow-out” on one of its North Sea rigs only months before the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe.

Daniel Vockins and Maddy Carroll get ready to present 9,000 letters written by Lighter Later supporters to their MPs at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

Daniel Vockins from the 10:10 Lighter Later campaign explains how a simple change of the clocks can have a host of benefits, including reducing emissions.

Everybody loves the sunshine. But every year we set our clocks so that we get less of it in our lives, sleeping through the sunlit mornings while we use expensive, polluting electric lights to keep out the dark nights. Lighter Later is a campaign to brighten our days by changing the clocks so we are awake when the sun is out.

The idea is simple: we shift the clocks forward by one hour throughout the entire year. We would still go forward in spring and back in autumn, but we would have moved an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening, when more of us are awake to enjoy it.

Plantations, like this eucalyptus one in Sumatra, are gradually replacing Indonesia's rainforests (c) Beltra/Greenpeace

Laura Kenyon from our Making Waves blog explains how money intended to protect forests could actually encourage deforestation.

Norway and Indonesia are about to make history. A US$1bn forest protection deal between these two countries could help set Indonesia on a low-carbon development pathway and become a positive model for the rest of the world. It could clearly demonstrate that lowering carbon emissions to address climate change does not mean sacrificing economic growth and prosperity. What's more, this prosperous low-carbon development does not need to come at the expense of Indonesia's natural forests and peatlands.

But this deal is at risk. Today we released a report - Protection Money - which outlines how the deal is in danger of being undermined, unless action is taken to protect it from notorious industrial forest destroyers in the palm oil, paper and pulp sectors.  There is a potential that international money intended for the protection of Indonesia's forests and peatlands could end up being used to support their destruction.