Energy

The BP stations we closed down last week have all long since opened again but the effects our thirst for oil is having on the planet continue. The oil spill in the Gulf is now officially the largest accidental spill ever, and the environmental havoc being wrought in China, Nigeria and elsewhere doesn't get the same news coverage but is just as disastrous.

Meanwhile, lobbyists working for BP and other oil pushers are busy trying to hobble laws and legislation which could set us on the road to reducing our oil dependency and making the transition to a cleaner energy future. One such piece of legislation is the Fuel Quality Directive and if its full potential is realised, it could prevent fuels from dirty sources like tar sands being sold in Europe.

Fishermen scoop oily sludge from the oil spill in Dalian, China (c) Arthur JD/Greenpeace

Arthur JD writes from Dalian in China...

I arrived in Dalian on the day of the funeral for firefighter Zhang Liang, who drowned beneath the thick crude when his crew jumped into the ocean - without safety gear - to attempt, in vain, to fix an underwater pipe. Our lead photographer, Jiang He, who by now has reached legendary status globally for capturing the final seconds of Zhang's life, continued to cover the very emotional moments of this oil spill disaster.

Our colleagues in the US have been blogging regularly about the ongoing disaster in the gulf and Greenpeace's involvement in the response to the oil spill. Here, Mike Gaworecki sheds some light on the clean-up operation BP has been carrying out on its image.

There's no way to clean up an oil spill. We've seen this time and again - in Alaska's Prince William Sound, for instance, where oil from the Exxon Valdez spill is still having an impact on local ecosystems. Corporations like Exxon or BP that find themselves responsible for an oil spill - or, as was the case for Exxon and now is the case for BP, an oil disaster - are really left with only one option to handle the problem: public relations, damage control and fierce lobbying.

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.