Our executive director John Sauven is writing today about green investment and starting the office off on a spring blog relay. Over the next couple months we'll be asking different Greenpeace staff and volunteers to write for our blog each day so that you can find out a bit more about the many different people, ideas and roles behind our campaigns.
Since the 'big crunch', world leaders have been forced to think the unthinkable.
Even Peter Mandelson, who once said he was "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich", now questions New Labour's unbridled, unregulated capitalism.
He recently explained: "Partly through our need to reassure that we were no longer the 1980s Labour party, partly because there was a new economic orthodoxy prevailing in the economy, we emphasised or played up our belief in markets, profits, even privatisation as a model."
I also noticed that David Cameron talked about "capitalism with a conscience" at Davos rather than Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society":
"I think we've been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it. 'I'm homeless, the government must house me.' They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society."
Tony Blair didn't do much more than put a smiley face on Thatcherism. And maybe Cameron's "capitalism with a conscience" isn't a real development either but an opportunistic reaction to circumstances.
What the current times are showing us is that there are shifts in the tectonic plates. But underneath all this hubris, are they doing the right thing to solve the triple crisis of economic collapse, climate change and energy security by investing in a low-carbon economy?
Last week, I wrote a letter to Ed Miliband, the climate and energy secretary, urging him to give a shot in the arm to the renewable energy sector before we fail in both meeting our target for renewable energy and creating green jobs.
The UK government launched its £20bn recovery plan as part of the November pre-budget report - equivalent to 1.4 per cent of GDP in 2009. The package included a paltry £535m in "green stimulus".
The green stimulus did not allocate any additional public spending to renewable energy or other low-carbon power sources.
Globally, UK is near the bottom for investment in green stimulus packages with just seven per cent of the total investment in green measures. South Korea is at the top of the list with a whopping 81 per cent of economic stimulus in green initiatives.
The US is at 12 per cent and has the only plan containing a real boost for renewable energy sources.
Changing course on climate change will require a transformation in the global economy, a transformation that is certainly unprecedented but one that is both achievable and comes with a lot of spin-off benefits in terms of security, innovation and green growth.
The timing of climate investments is just as important as their scale and allocation. Scientists at the UN's IPCC have indicated that global emissions need to peak by 2015, after which they need to decline, making action in the next few years vital to change the emission trajectory.
This year will not be a normal one for the global economy or for climate change. Designing a low-carbon recovery will be on the agenda of the forthcoming G20 summit in April before the key climate negotiations this December in Copenhagen.
The UK has a long way to go. It has made far less progress on clean energy than its major competitors, with only 1.6 per cent of its energy mix in 2006 from renewable sources. This has to rise to 15 per cent by 2020, as part of the implementation of the EU's Renewable Energy Directive.
At this rate we are going to need a tectonic movement in government policy and action or we will not only fail to meet our renewable energy target but we will have missed a once in a life-time opportunity to develop new low carbon industries.
