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. Read more »

China is the king of coal. It is the world's biggest producer and consumer - but this reliance on coal is costing the country dear.

Because coal kills.

From the miners who dig it, to the people who breathe in its fumes, to the skies that swallow immense clouds of carbon dioxide, heating the earth and causing climate change and rising seal levels, coal takes more than it gives.

An emissions performance standard would mean no more unabated power stations.

We almost did it. Thousands of you emailed your MP via our website, WWF's, and with online campaigners 38 degrees. And they listened, and turned out to vote, and we almost secured an emissions performance standard - a legal limit to pollution which would have stopped dead any future plans to build dirty, unabated coal power stations.

It's been a long, difficult and wild ride at times, but an end to climate damaging carbon emissions from new coal power stations could be in sight at last. Finally, some politicians seem to have recognised that we can't cut our CO2 emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 AND keep pumping the stuff out of our power plants - hooray!

Last December the government announced a new energy bill that explicitly recognises this reality. So far so good - but (as you'll be shocked to discover) there's a problem. As yet the bill has no teeth - whilst it says that new power stations must be able to capture some of their emissions from the get go, it contains no guarantee that by 2025 all carbon emissions from coal must be captured, and that's the bit that really counts.

With Kingsnorth on hold, what's the future for coal in the UK?

National policy statements sound cool. They sound like they might actually sort stuff out. Instead of scrabbling around doing little bits of policy here and there, like some sort of policy tapas, a national policy statement means you're going for the policy hog roast - go on, have a big national slab of policy sir, there you go.

But no matter what you might have heard in the news, today's key announcement was about coal. If we're talking about climate change, we're talking about coal. Coal is responsible for over half the human-made carbon emissions in the atmosphere. If we, as a planet, carry on building new coal powered plants, we're all in a lot of trouble. That's why we spend so much time campaigning against new dirty coal plants - or ‘unabated' coal plants as they're known.

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A round-up of October's images from around the Greenpeace world.

Ed Miliband receives some light reading material 

As if using a large fluorescent pen to highlight the reason why our volunteers were sitting up on top of the Palace of Westminster, on Monday the Climate Change Committee (CCC) released its first annual report on the government's progress in meeting its own emissions targets.

Not everything in the report chimes with what we think is required (there's no room or need for nuclear power, for instance) but what comes through loud and clear is the scale of the challenge and the radical action required to meet it. Our climate manifesto is exactly the sort of thing needed to deliver it.

With parliament coming back, a general election looming and the Copenhagen climate summit just weeks away, this is the time for rhetoric to stop and action to start. That’s why we’ve written this manifesto. The policies show that we can protect the environment while also protecting our economy. We want all politicans to steal our policies.

By using the big economic levers we can have sustainable recovery, create green jobs and cut emissions. But for this to happen politicans need to set aside short term party politics and work together to tackle the really important issues. And frankly, if any political party doesn’t adopt these policies, we should be asking them why not?