If only it was as easy to move government as it is to move biscuits

Coal campaigner Emma is next up in the blog relay, a whistle-stop tour of Greenpeace staff here in the UK. Click here to catch up on the other entries.

When I applied for a job at Greenpeace and was then actually offered the job I couldn't believe it. In fact I asked them if they'd phoned the wrong person. A week before I was due to start I got a phone call asking if I could come in a bit earlier on my first day. At 4am in fact. Oh, and I'd be dressing up as a puffin and would probably get arrested. And I wasn't allowed to tell anyone about this phone call!

I started to wonder what I'd let myself in for but on my first day at work I took part in the occupation of a Mc Vities biscuit factory in London.  After a matter of hours, Mc Vities agreed to stop using oil from sand eels (food for puffins) in their biscuits.

Success came very quickly on that occasion but quite often campaigns can go on for years before achieving any real success.

As a campaigner I've worked on trying to stop GM crops from being grown, stopping new nuclear power stations from being built, campaigned for the Government to back more wind power and I'm currently trying to persuade our climate and energy minister Ed Miliband not to back the building of a new coal fired power plant at Kingsnorth in Kent.

Burning coal is the most polluting way to produce electricity ever invented so its almost unbelievable that the Government is thinking of building more climate-damaging coal power stations instead of shutting down the ones we already have. Professor James Hansen of NASA has said that if Kingsnorth is built it would result in hundreds of species of plants and animals becoming extinct around the world. The World Development Movement has estimated that the 6 million tonnes of CO2 that Kingsnorth is projected to emit annually would result in 20,000 people becoming new climate refugees. This is totally unacceptable when there are readily available alternatives to coal.

We've been working on Kingsnorth for over 2 years but only had our first bit of campaign success last month when Ed Miliband said that any new coal plants would have to capture a proportion of their carbon dioxide. However, this is not enough and Greenpeace will keep the campaign going until Ed says that he will stop all CO2 emissions from dirty coal plants like Kingsnorth from day one.

So what am I doing today to stop Kingsnorth being built? Chaining myself to Ed's desk? Sadly not. Today I'm at my computer reading emails and writing the text for a new leaflet. But at least I can drink as much tea as I can manage (and not worry about when I next get the opportunity to go for a wee!)