Greenpeace Blog

Clean coal technology like this is at work right now in a coal-fired power station near you

Energy companies putting in bids to run new coal-fired power stations have been quick to seize upon carbon capture and storage (CCS) as the ideal solution to their biggest problem - explaining why they're so keen to return to using the dirtiest fossil-fuel possible at a time when we need to cut CO2 emissions dramatically to reign-in climate change.

While the IWC talks, the whalers are on their way back to the Southern Ocean © Greenpeace / Davison

This week, the International Whaling Commission is having an intersessional meeting in Cambridge to discuss its future. Whilst it's good news that these meetings are taking place (Greenpeace has been pushing for reform of the IWC into a body that works for the whales for many years), you have to ask yourself how much of this is just bluster.

At the same time as the international delegations are meeting, the Japanese whaling fleet is on its way to the Southern Ocean to kill whales for a bogus 'scientific' programme that is not endorsed by the IWC, and will take place in an area the IWC has designated a whale sanctuary. Despite measures to avoid confrontation at the last proper IWC meeting (which basically meant the pro-conservation countries not raising any issues that would be contentious with Japan and its allies), there has been no compromise from the whaling nations. Japan has not even officially reduced its own self-appointed quota.

Norwegian coastguards filmed this UK trawler discarding 80% of its catch of endangered fish just outside Norwegian waters earlier this year

Every year the EU and Norway get together to agree how to share out fishing quotas in their adjacent waters (remember, Norway is not a member of the EU, and has it's own exclusive fishing zone, unlike EU countries). They are gathering this week, and it always happens before the annual quota-haggling meeting of the EU Council in Brussels, where the EU decide and divide on quotas for fish in EU waters.

Usually they do their best to ignore scientific advice, and amazingly all of the fisheries ministers seem to manage to go back home claiming to have won a 'good deal' for their respective fishing industries.

'Please DO something' - Plane Stupid send a message to the government

My favourite climate protesters Plane Stupid struck again this morning when they shut down Stansted, London's third airport.

Taking advantage of a temporary maintenance closure in the small hours of the morning, they set up a camp on the runway. Wearing high visibility vests with the message, "Please DO something", and raising a banner which read 'Climate Emergency', they barricaded themselves with fortified security fencing. The blockade led to 56 Ryanair short-haul flights being cancelled, and the eventual arrest of over fifty young climate activists. Oh, and prevented the release of thousands of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere in the process - the average flight out of Stansted has a climate impact equivalent to 41.58 tonnes of CO2.