Also by John Sauven

If new coal is the answer, Mr Brown's asking the wrong questions

Kingsnorth exposes a government energy strategy in disarray. One week the Prime Minister commits the UK to generating around 40 per cent of its electricity from renewables, the next his Business Secretary sings the praises of the most carbon-intensive form of power generation around. We can only hope that John Hutton's words were an attempt to stake out his territory in the Cabinet, not a wider signal of government intent.

You know something strange is afoot when four politicians from conflicting corners of the political spectrum find themselves in agreement, and even more so when it comes in the middle of a hard fought mayoral campaign.

Yesterday, instead of spending their energy fighting each other for the support of Londoners, all four candidates - representing Labour, Conservatives, Lib Dems and the Greens - have joined forces to fight the expansion of Heathrow. In an advert published this morning in several newspapers Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson, Brian Paddick and Sian Berry slam the government's plan to almost double the number of flights in and out of Heathrow.

By John Sauven, Greenpeace UK executive director. This first appeared on Comment is Free.

It really comes as no surprise to see the Financial Times has today reported that Gordon Brown's plans for more nuclear power stations appear to be in total disarray. Government rhetoric has long masked the fact that the ailing, subsidy-gobbling nuclear industry should have been put out of its misery years ago.

This claim to Antarctic land epitomises the government's lack of a coherent approach to tackling climate change.

In April, the British foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, took climate change to the UN security council for the first time. Of major concern of the government, she said, were the expected "major changes to the world's physical landmass during this century," that would result from unabated climate change. It is a bitter irony, therefore, that it should now be that same British Foreign Office that is trying to profit from the melting ice of Antarctica and exploit precisely the changes to the world's landmasses that Beckett warned us about.