Also by jossg

A meeting with “the Elvis of sea ice science”

Posted by jossg - 12 September 2011 at 9:08am - Comments
Two crew members get their first sight of sea ice from the bow of the Arctic Sun
All rights reserved. Credit: Greenpeace / Nick Cobbing
Two crew members get their first sight of sea ice from the bow of the Arctic Sunrise, in waters off Arctic Svalbard

A few months ago I took the train down from London to Cambridge with my colleague Frida Bengtsson, who is leading this expedition, so that we could meet up with Professor Peter Wadhams. As head of the University’s ‘Polar Ocean Physics Group’, it’s fair to say Peter knows a thing or two about Arctic sea ice. Friends at Greenpeace like to call him ‘the Elvis of sea ice science.’

Climate change is literally eating into the body of our civilisation

Posted by jossg - 9 September 2011 at 1:35pm - Comments

Georgia Hirsty writes about her role in the recreation of Vitruvian Man. She's a deckhand aboard the Arctic Sunrise, at 80 degrees north.

Everything north of Holland was new territory for me. I’d never seen the ice and could barely imagine it. When I asked a shipmate of mine what it was like, he said: “you feel how old it is, how untouched.”

Bearing down on us at 80 degrees North

Posted by jossg - 6 September 2011 at 10:57am - Comments
All rights reserved. Credit: Greenpeace / Nick Cobbing
Polar bear and cub in the Arctic

Woken up as usual at 7.30 for breakfast and cleaning, I'd had a shower and was getting clothed when someone said 'polar bears outside'. I said to Ethan, the assistant cook who is also my roomie, who has been aboard two weeks already: 'Wow, they're saying there's polar bears outside.' He replied, 'Nah, there isn't man. They're just saying that to get us up.' 'Well, I'm popping outside to check.'

What is the meaning of Cancun?

Posted by jossg - 13 December 2010 at 2:26pm - Comments
All rights reserved. Credit: Elizabeth Ruiz / Greenpeace

First published in the Independent on Sunday.

Climate Secretary Chris Huhne rightly warned over the past few days that the climate talks in Cancun risked becoming a milestone on the way to the lingering death of the whole UN climate process. In his words, the replacement would be "a zombie conference where there won't be anybody at a senior enough level to take any serious decisions at all." As Ministers and officials fly home they will be grateful to have averted that scenario.

Measures to clean up power sector won't be in coalition's energy law

Posted by jossg - 17 August 2010 at 2:38pm - Comments

This blog first appeared on Left Foot Forward, and this decision could have far-reaching implications for where we get our energy from. If that gets your goat, 38 Degrees have made it very easy to write to your MP about emissions performance standards.

Yesterday The Guardian splashed with the news that the coalition's promise to introduce an emissions performance standard (EPS) to stop the most polluting power stations has been ‘put on hold' and wouldn't be in the coalition's first energy law, which is expected to come before Parliament later this year.

Copenhagen - historic failure that will live in infamy

Posted by jossg - 21 December 2009 at 11:05am - Comments

Spontaneous demonstration by NGOs outside the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen, after world leaders failed to agree on a fair, ambitious and binding treaty. © Greenpeace/Myllyvirta

This article by our climate campaigner Joss Garman is reposted from yesterday's Independent on Sunday:

The most progressive US president in a generation comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speaker-phone from a beach in Hawaii. His aides argue in private that he had no choice, such is the opposition on Capitol Hill to any action that could challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in American life. And so the nation that put a man on the Moon can't summon the collective will to protect men and women back here on Earth from the consequences of an economic model and lifestyle choice that has taken on the mantle of a religion.

Protest taking off

Posted by jossg - 26 February 2008 at 11:11am - Comments

Written yesterday for The Guardian's Comment is free.

Today's Greenpeace demo at Heathrow upped the ante of climate change activism. But if that's what it takes to get the government to act...

In 1971, the United States government proposed testing its nuclear arsenal near the tiny island of Amchitka - a wildlife paradise off the west coast of Alaska. A number of protest groups sprang up. One particular group of people came together with the idea to charter a boat - the Phyllis Cormack - and sail it into the nuclear testing site. Through placing themselves in the area of the bomb blast, they wanted to draw a line in the sand, and to make sure that the whole world would bear witness to what their government was doing. Later, the US government called off its tests. Greenpeace was born.

Won't Kingsnorth use carbon capture and storage technology?

Posted by jossg - 18 February 2008 at 6:09pm - Comments

Capturing carbon from coal: not currently a viable option

Click on this graphic to see a larger version

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology promises to remove dangerous greenhouse gas emissions from the coal power generation process before it gets into the atmosphere. As such it has been presented as a sort of fossil-fuel Holy Grail. The trouble with CCS is that no-one knows when - if ever - it will be commercially available. At the moment there are only a few small scale demonstration plants.

Fight the power

Posted by jossg - 9 October 2007 at 10:07am - Comments

See all Kingsnorth updates.


By Joss Garman, writing for Comment is Free yesterday from the conveyor belt.


Britain's biggest greenhouse gas polluter plans to build a new coal-fired power station, which is why I've been chained to a conveyor belt today.

Al Gore recently expressed surprise that there weren't thousands of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from building new coal-fired power stations; this morning, I was part of team of 60 trying to do just that - shutting down a coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent where the owners want to build a brand new station. I'm with one team stopping the conveyor belts by pressing the emergency stop buttons and chaining ourselves to the mechanism while at the same time another group are scaling the smokestack and painting "Gordon Bin It" in 10ft-high letters down the side. The Kingsnorth station has enough coal in its boilers to function for a few hours. After that is used up, sometime this afternoon it will cease to emit the estimated 20,000 tonnes of CO2 that it emits every day.

Upping the ante

Posted by jossg - 13 February 2007 at 3:44pm - Comments
Part of the Trident: we don't buy it tour blog

MSPs in front of the ad van

MSPs with John Sauven, Greenpeace's Executive Director, and the van of shame (and name). © Greenpeace/Cobbing