New Greenpeace USA Director Phil Radford has only been in post for three days, but already he's been arrested for taking action against climate polluters - he's one of the climbers in this banner hang outside the US State Department in Washington on Monday.  Read more »

Nicholas Stern - panning Kingsnorth, Heathrow and now the budget?
CC Thiago Karrapatoso

I never thought I'd feel particularly warmly towards an economist. But then, Lord Stern of Brentford (as he's known to his friends), has a special place in the hearts of many climate change policy wonks.

He's responsible for the Stern report - an attempt, back in 2006, to figure out exactly what tackling climate change would cost. The full report ran to 700 pages, but the top line was this: 1% of global GDP a year would hold greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere to 550 ppmv, 3% of global GDP would hold it to 450 ppmv - gettting closer to limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees. But if we don't start spend that now, climate change will end up costing us 20% of global GDP. In other words, make significant but realistic investment now (the global military budget is about 2.5% of GDP, after all), or destabilise the climate and break the economy permanently. He basically took the environmental debate around addressing climate change and put it into the language of economics.

Stability, growth, jobs all good - but where's the climate leadership? CC Image from London Summit on Flickr

Well, there we go. After the media circus, the protests, and a conference so exclusive that even some NGO participants were banned at the last minute, the G20 have pronounced, and it turns out that their environmental leadership is... er... down at the bottom of the document somewhere.

It's nice to believe that for one beautiful moment there was the chance to extract ourselves from the economic mess we've stumbled into, and at the same time create the foundations for the difficult but necessary tasks of addressing climate change.

Like helping China and India find a model for development which doesn't go hand in hand with rapidly rising carbon emissions, for example, or restructuring the way we ‘do business as usual' in the UK and taking advantage of our relative wealth to harness wind, wave and solar power (along with a whole heap of other clean technologies).

But it turns out that our leaders have dropped the ball completely. Read more »

As the assembled G20 world leaders take a break from negotiations at the ExCel centre today - maybe have a few drinks, regard the lovely vistas of the Thames, and wonder to themselves how they can be as cool as Barack Obama - perhaps the words "Yes You Can" fluttering by at 45 mph will remind them that sorting out the global financial system to make it more equitable and sustainable is not some impossible dream, it's the only thing that's going to actually work.

That's because it's not only the economy which is in trouble, the climate is facing its own ecological-credit crunch. There's not much point fixing the finance system if we're going to ignore the climate crunch that threatens much bigger problems for the world.

Greenpeace climbers scale the Bank of England. Green, not greed - well, it's a nice idea.

It's a cliché, but these are troubled economic times. And so it was that with great fanfare the government's pre-budget report announced a £50 billion recovery plan for the British economy.

Even better for those of us with an interest in the relative green-ness of our economy, Gordon Brown declared that about 10 per cent of the money would go to "environmentally important technologies and potentially jobs in the green industries". Sounds good. One MP said that the £50 billion was going to be used in "greening our economy as a whole".

Isn't it disappointing when something that sounds good turns out to be an illusion? According to a report we commissioned from the New Economics Foundation, any shoots of recovery from the recovery plan aren't going to be particularly green, because behind some creative accounting the government is only stumping up peanuts for the environment. It's not so much a 'green new deal' as a 'greenwashed new deal'.

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.