Climate Change

Update: our executive director John Sauven has written on why Gordon Brown's reluctance to embrace the economic and environmental potential of renewable energy technology is costing us time, money and could eventually cost us the climate here.

British prime ministers have a longstanding tradition of taking on the less savoury characteristics of their US counterparts pretty soon after coming to office. For Blair, it was a propensity towards using weapons of mass destruction. For Brown, it's trying to scupper vital climate change deals.

On the same day that scientists have shown that carbon emissions are accumulating far more quickly than predicted, leaked documents reveal that Labour wants to work with the nuclear-obsessed French and the climate-sceptic Polish presidents to undermine a vital European deal on renewable energy. The deal - to generate 20 per cent of energy from renewables by 2020 - was only finalised by European leaders including Tony Blair earlier this year.

See all Kingsnorth updates.

Just a very short update from Kingsnorth:

The chimney crew are all down; they were arrested when they reached the bottom. The conveyor belt team were held overnight and most of them are still in police custody, although I've just heard that five of them have been released. We reckon the rest of the conveyor belt team will be released in the next few hours.

Something that drives me nuts is when people use the example of developing economies such as China or India as an excuse for inactivity on climate change - the "what's the bloody point" argument, which insists that any savings we might make in CO2 emissions using renewables will be more than cancelled out by their use of dirty energy. It's not that there's not an element of truth in this - it's the refusal to recognise that we in the west have any influence or responsibility in the matter. After all, a key driver in India and China's rapid development is our insatiable demand for insanely cheap products - which forces them to use the clapped out and dirty technlogies we are trying to break away from.