Also by jossc

It’s amazing that the blog baton has actually reached me - although I've worked for Greenpeace for over 14 years, I am only in the UK office once a month - I work from home in Manchester (England’s greatest city!)

I have one of the best jobs in the world. I'm the Network Developer for the North, one of five staff in the Active Supporters Unit. Active Supporters are the people who support Greenpeace with their own precious time and energy, taking the campaign messages to the public on the streets and at local events in their stylish green tabards, going to visit their MPs, giving talks, taking risks on direct actions. They are inspiring and brilliant people, often working full-time in demanding jobs, then giving their weekends and evenings to Greenpeace.

It's certainly far from everything we've been asking for, but when Ed Miliband announced his new consultation on coal policy in the House of Commons this lunchtime it was clear that something had changed. For starters, E.ON isn’t going to get its way over Kingsnorth, at least not with its current plan.

Showing admirable signs of climate leadership in the face of resistance from Whitehall officials and his cabinet colleagues, the Energy and Climate Change secretary told MPs that no new coal-fired power stations would be built in Britain unless  equipped with at least some carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. In a key departure from previous policy, he said that from now on power companies planning to build new coal plants will be required to fit full CCS by 2025 at the latest, provided that the Environment Agency is convinced that the technology works. 

Huge areas in the Amazon rainforest are illegally logged to clear land for soya plantations © Greenpeace/Beltra

Some good news just in from Brazil, where soya traders have reinforced their commitment to boycott soya grown in newly deforested areas of the Amazon.

Clearing-cutting to make space for new soya plantations has been one of the main causes of rainforest destruction in recent years, which is why we campaigned successfully for a moratorium (temporary ban) three years ago.

This article by Lisa first appeared on our Making Waves weblog on 10th April.

Junichi on his first day back in the Greenpeace Japan office

After nine months of disconnection from their colleagues and workplace, Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki walked back into the Greenpeace Japan office last week like long-missed adventurers finally home.

Of course they did not come in on the same day, as while the bail conditions binding them have been relaxed enough for them to speak to their colleagues and come back to work, there are still a lot of kilometres left on their road, and they still cannot communicate directly with one another or be in the same place at the same time.