Coal

Emily Hall - one of the Kingsnorth Six - on the coal station's chimney stack

Crack out the balloons and the (recycled) paper hats - it's party time.

Kingsnorth is shelved. Again.  Yesterday the news came out that Eon, the company behind the plans for the first new coal plant in the UK in over 30 years was scrapping its proposal to build another climate-wrecking monster to replace its current power station in Kent.

China is the king of coal. It is the world's biggest producer and consumer - but this reliance on coal is costing the country dear.

Because coal kills.

From the miners who dig it, to the people who breathe in its fumes, to the skies that swallow immense clouds of carbon dioxide, heating the earth and causing climate change and rising seal levels, coal takes more than it gives.

It's been a long, difficult and wild ride at times, but an end to climate damaging carbon emissions from new coal power stations could be in sight at last. Finally, some politicians seem to have recognised that we can't cut our CO2 emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 AND keep pumping the stuff out of our power plants - hooray!

Last December the government announced a new energy bill that explicitly recognises this reality. So far so good - but (as you'll be shocked to discover) there's a problem. As yet the bill has no teeth - whilst it says that new power stations must be able to capture some of their emissions from the get go, it contains no guarantee that by 2025 all carbon emissions from coal must be captured, and that's the bit that really counts.

Ed Miliband receives some light reading material 

As if using a large fluorescent pen to highlight the reason why our volunteers were sitting up on top of the Palace of Westminster, on Monday the Climate Change Committee (CCC) released its first annual report on the government's progress in meeting its own emissions targets.

Not everything in the report chimes with what we think is required (there's no room or need for nuclear power, for instance) but what comes through loud and clear is the scale of the challenge and the radical action required to meet it. Our climate manifesto is exactly the sort of thing needed to deliver it.