August 2009

The number 385 on the tin's stamp tells us it comes from cattle company JBS.

Food manufacturer Princes are 'big in corned beef' - that food cupboard staple with a use-by date sometime in the next millennia. In 2007, they were the third largest canned food supplier to the UK.

We've come across Prince's in the past because they sell a lot of canned tuna, but they also sell a lot of corned beef. With all of the Amazon cattle work we've been doing lately we've developed a keen interest in where they get it from, and tins of Princes corned beef are rapidly multiplying around the forest campaign team's office space.

The Arctic Sunrise is in Greenland to survey melting glaciers and observe the effects of climate change. In this latest update from the tour, Indian journalist Gaurav Sawant decribes his experiences aboard and ponders the implications for the sub-continent. But first web editor Juliette sets the scene...

India seems (and is) quite far away from Greenland and the Arctic. Yet, with the world's second largest population and with major cities like Mumbai (parts of which lie just a few metres above sea level), the country cannot ignore what is happening. India is now a major player in international politics. If its population and leaders start making climate change the political priority, the world will listen.

The American Petroleum Institute is the kind of friendly industry body that lobbies for 'big oil', and has no trouble inspiring grassroots action. The trouble is, from their point of view, it's the wrong kind.

For the oil companies, it must be incredibly tedious to have masses of engaged citizens fired up about the way you're trashing the planet - camping out on your lawn, organising rallies, chaining themselves to your office, asking pointed questions to politicians. How irritating that there are people who think you're so wrong they'll actually get out onto the streets and protest about it! It sucks to be on the wrong side of history.

You may have already seen this on our Making Waves blog, but for the sake of completeness (and to help demolish the climate denial zombie that's risen once more) here's Brian's piece on the arctic sea ice controversy.

The right-wing, conservative, climate-denial blog-and-twitosphere is abuzz with the news: Greenpeace admits live on the BBC that it lied about arctic melting.

That's not true, it's being promoted by the handful of global warming skeptics still standing, and we're hitting back. You can help us by tweeting, blogging, and sharing this clarification on Facebook.

Every once in a while in my meanderings through the web, I come across something that really hits the spot - like this amazing animation from Phil Reynolds, for example. Phil's taken an idea from Charles Clover's book about overfishing, The End of the Line, and he uses it beautifully to illustrate the problem of 'bycatch' - the non-commercial species which are also killed during the process of bringing our favourite fish species to the table.

Since we published the Slaughtering the Amazon report, the Amazon cattle campaign has moved rapidly, with shoe companies and cattle producers feeling the pressure from you, and changing the way they do business as a result. In this video Sarah explains the progress we've made so far, and check out www.greenpeace.org.uk/bertin for the recent news.

The Esperanza visits Papua New Guinea

There's a small but growing community of people who are trying bring some clarity to the debate about forest protection in the run-up to Copenhagen - specifically the REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) process.

Natasha Loder, who writes for the Economist, is covering the intricacies of the carbon trading markets in Papua New Guinea on her blog. Her latest post is a look at the tangled web of project-based carbon offsetting. A 'project based' approach for REDD would allow bits of forest to be 'bought up' by organisations, who'd pay to protect the forest in return for securing rights to the future carbon credits from it.

It's not just on this country that people get so riled about climate change that they're driven into taking drastic action, action such as, oh I don't know, climbing a chimney stack in a coal-fired power station.

A new series of videos from our Indian office (compiled into one above) showcases six activists who explain why they climbed the chimney at Kolaghat power station in October 2007 and spent a few days in jail after their arrest.