Posted by jamie — 20 February 2009 at 12:42pm
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One of the great things about working for an
international organisation is that my inbox is constantly filling with emails
from around the globe detailing what other Greenpeace offices are working on. A
thread I've been following particularly closely is the stream of messages
coming from the Arctic Sunrise which is currently back in Brazil on a two-and-a-half month tour of the country.
The purpose of the tour - which goes under the
name of 'Save The Planet Now... Or Now!' - is to highlight the important role Brazil (as the fourth largest emitter of
greenhouse gases on the planet) can play in fighting it in the lead-up to the
UN climate change negotiations in Copenhagen this December.
Posted by jamie — 12 February 2009 at 12:16pm
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The cooling towers of Ferrybridge power station
The decision on a new coal power station at
E.ON's Kingsnorth facility in Kent
is still expected later this year - the current rumour is around June but as
with all government pronouncements you should take that with a very large pinch
of salt. Whether it gets the go-ahead or not, it will have ramifications for
the other proposed coal developments - including opencast mines - elsewhere in
the country.
One of these is at Ferrybridge in west Yorkshire where half of the power station is due to go
out of service in 2015. A more immediate threat is the opencast mine planned
for the area, which will sit next door to an RSPB nature reserve at Fairburn
Ings, and the group Yorkshire Against
New Coal (Yanc) is standing in opposition to both plans.
Posted by jamie — 4 February 2009 at 2:47pm
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I have a confession to make - I've never seen The Inconvenient Truth. Or The 11th Hour (If you missed that one, it was Leo DiCaprio's contribution to the climate change debate). It might sound slightly arrogant, but my sense is they won't tell me anything I don't already know. Plus it's over two years since Al Gore's Powerpoint slides made it into cinemas and with climate science accelerating at a furious rate, it's no doubt already looking a little archaic.
Posted by jamie — 3 February 2009 at 5:40pm
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The latest episode of our podcast is all about Heathrow and the plan to build a third runway. James visited the plot of land we've bought on the proposed site of the new runway, while Joss went to find out why organisations from the National Trust to the RSPB are also opposed to the idea. Meanwhile, Christian went to see what happened at the latest Climate Rush event down at Heathrow's Terminal 1.
Last month our Emerald Paintbrush award presented to BP highlighted how far the company, which previously styled itself as going 'beyond petroleum', has moved back to its traditional profit source at the expense of its alternative energy division, and most likely its long-term profitability.
Investors may have been patting themselves on the back yesterday as BP posted record profits for 2008, but they should be wary - a quick trawl through the figures reveals major flaws in the company's long term investment strategy. Massive profits during the first half of the year (when oil prices reached over $100 per barrel) were undermined by a collapse in the final quarter, when prices fell back to around $40 per barrel.
For about three years now, we've been working on curbing the impacts of the soya industry on the Amazon rainforest in Brazil which, before the current moratorium was put into place, was replacing the forest with plantations on a massive scale.
However, there's another agricultural sector cutting deep into the forest which we're also going to tackle: cattle ranching. To assess the scale of the problem, Greenpeace researchers in Brazil have produced a new set of maps showing how the Amazon region has suffered.