Greenpeace Blog

Given that we have the best renewable resources in the European Union, the fact that Britain languishes near the bottom of the European renewables league table is pretty humiliating.

On Monday though, the International Energy Agency added insult to injury. Britain's renewables strategy, it said, is 'ineffective' and 'very expensive'. The agency's new report (published here, but you have to pay) ranks Britain 31st out of 35 countries - "including all the major industrial nations such as the US, Germany and China" - in its green energy cost league. And our 'renewables effectiveness', it says, is a paltry three per cent.

Greenpeace volunteers at Newquay airport in March 2007

You might remember that, 18 months ago, we set up ticket exchanges at airports across the country, and called on British Airways to show genuine leadership instead of launching new, unnecessary short haul routes that just add to the huge threat to our climate caused by runaway aviation growth.

While the preservation of civil liberties is an ongoing struggle (the government's ID database plan is one I think is definitely worth challenging), we've still come a long way in the last 100 years.

Back then in the days of empire, Britain might have straddled the world but women had no voting rights and it was only thanks to a group of determined women waging a persistent (and sometimes violent) campaign of direct action that, in 1928, the government finally passed a bill granting equal voting rights to both sexes.