coal

Great news just in from Poland, where work on the giant Jóźwin IIB open-cast pit and coal mine near Konin has been suspended. Following a legal challenge submitted last December by Greenpeace, a Polish court has ruled that there were problems with the environmental assessment process undertaken before work began on the site. Construction has now been halted while the process is reviewed.

This is a big victory - Jóźwin IIB was the site for our most recent Climate Rescue Station, set up last winter to remind delegates at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in nearby Poznań that tackling climate change and building new coal-fired power stations are fundamentally incompatible aspirations. It will be particularly well-received by many of the peaceful activists who were attacked by mine workers at the end of last year during the protests.

Update 5 March: watch a highlights video from the Capitol Climate Action

Yesterday was a momentous one for the climate movement in the US. Over 2,500 clean energy activists came to Washington DC to participate in the largest act of civil disobedience on global warming in American history. Former coal miners, ministers, mothers and students - all members of Capitol Climate Action - successfully shut all five entrances to the coal-fired Capitol Power Plant, which is used to heat and cool the Capitol building, for over four hours.

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.

Ed Miliband demonstrated the confusion at the of the heart of the government's energy and climate change strategies this morning when he refused to rule out new coal plants which don't capture and bury their emissions – just weeks after his own advisers warned there was no future for these power plants.

He attacked Conservative plans for the introduction of green standards for power stations that would rule out the dirtiest coal plants like E.ON's for Kingsnorth, as "knee jerk" and "not thought through". Apparently, he's happy to play party politics with coal and climate change, just days after he called for a people-powered movement on global warming. Hardly the way to inspire action on the most important issue of our time.

Our podcast has skipped a month, but then with the Rainbow Warrior gracing our shores things have been a tad busy around here of late. As you may know, she was here in October as part of the international Quit Coal tour, and we went to meet some of the Greenpeace supporters who came to have a look round during the open boat days.

Also on our radar was the recent Indonesia tour undertaken by that other Greenpeace ship, the Esperanza. I was lucky enough to be there and while the crew were busy painting and blockading palm oil tankers in Sumatra, I was able to talk to them about what it's like being in the middle of a major piece of direct action.

And you'll have to excuse my froggy throat in the introduction, there's a cold going around the office.

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