aviation

With the government's long-delayed decision on a third runway at Heathrow rumoured to be imminent, the intrepid women and men of the Climate Rush will be making their suffragette-inspired opposition felt at the airport next week.

MPs return from their winter holiday on Monday 12 January, so that evening at 7pm the Climate Rushers will hit Heathrow Terminal 1 for a peaceful picnic. Terminal 1, for those not familiar with the airport, deals principally with domestic flights, the sort of short-haul journeys which could easily be made by other, less climate-wrecking forms of transport. And they are inviting all of us who are fed up with the obvious lack of action on this most serious of issues to join them.

'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.

EU leaders - 20 years of broken promises...

On 11 December at Poznan in Poland, our governments will decide Europe's response to climate change for the next 12 years. Unless they agree to at least 30 per cent cuts in European greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, we'll have no chance of keeping global warming below 2°C and avoiding climate catastrophe.

So far there is still an utter lack of any kind of visionary leadership in these talks. There are still governments that repeatedly fail to grasp the urgency of the crisis. That's why we need to make ourselves heard, because the impacts of climate change are racing ahead of the scientific projections.

Yesterday's pre-budget report presented a great chance to Alastair Darling to fire the starting gun on a clean energy revolution, given that the combination of impending economic meltdown and climactic chaos facing us provide an historic opportunity to invest billions in a low-carbon, smart technology future.

But rather than take that opportunity - by encouraging the development of a new UK manufacturing base capable of exporting renewables and energy efficient technologies to the world, and creating hundreds of thousands of green collar jobs in the process, the Chancellor blew it.