Dear Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg,

Dozens of Greenpeace volunteers scaled the walls of the Palace of Westminster yesterday and spent the night on the roof to welcome you back from your summer break. The threat of climate change is so grave that it requires radical action and we believe that what we are doing here today is necessary to send a clear message to the country's politicians. If we don't change the politics and take real action here and internationally we will lose our chance to save the climate.

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?

Our executive director John Sauven is writing today about green investment and starting the office off on a spring blog relay. Over the next couple months we'll be asking different Greenpeace staff and volunteers to write for our blog each day so that you can find out a bit more about the many different people, ideas and roles behind our campaigns.

Since the 'big crunch', world leaders have been forced to think the unthinkable.

Even Peter Mandelson, who once said he was "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich", now questions New Labour's unbridled, unregulated capitalism.

He recently explained: "Partly through our need to reassure that we were no longer the 1980s Labour party, partly because there was a new economic orthodoxy prevailing in the economy, we emphasised or played up our belief in markets, profits, even privatisation as a model."

Tar sands excavation in northern Canada is a devastating display of the consuming passions of our economy.

Although the global extent, length and depth may be in dispute, everyone agrees the world is suffering a serious financial and economic crisis.

The financial sector in a number of countries, including the US, is close to being technically bankrupt. Beyond the financial sector a number of industries in the UK and elsewhere are teetering on the edge. These include sectors responsible for infrastructure such as transport and telecommunications.

The debts being ratcheted up by some countries will take generations to pay off and in the coming decade will lead to both tax rises and heavy cuts in public expenditure. It's a dramatically changed landscape that will impact hugely on Greenpeace's work along with many other organisations and companies.

In the next few hours we're expecting the government to annouce they're going ahead with the third runway. The aviation industry likes to suggest that building a third runway at Heathrow has become vital to Britain's future economic wellbeing and the government may use this as a justifcation. To listen to some of the more enthusiastic cheerleaders for aviation expansion, you might think that the entire UK economy is about to collapse, and only laying an enormous strip of tarmac through Sipson village will save it. But is it really that simple? We know aviation expansion is a sure-fire way to wreck the climate, but do we really have to choose between the climate and "jobs and prosperity"?

Read more »

Four Greenpeace campaigners scale the Bank of England to highlight need for green investment. © John Cobb/Greenpeace

Update: All four campaigners have now been arrested. You can see more photos from the day on Flickr.

Times are tough. We not only face an immediate global financial crisis but a long-term climate crisis. The urgency of the first is no excuse for neglecting the second.

Four of our campaigners have scaled the Bank of England this morning ahead of the Chancellor’s pre-budget report to highlight that the solutions to our financial crisis are also the solutions we need to tackle climate change.

The answer is a clean energy economy.

It’s pre-budget announcement day, and there is already a lot of talk about the details and how Labour’s plans to reinvigorate the economy are going to shake out. As I tumbled out of bed Radio 4 was discussing the impact this announcement will have on the next election - it could make or break the Labour party.

But while most are focusing on the short term measures to get us through the toughest months, we also need to look at investment that will ensure a better quality of life in the long run and a healthy planet. We’ve published ads in the Guardian, Times and Independent today focused on the longer term investment needed to refocus the economy, provide jobs and protect the most valuable asset we have – the planet.