Since the Big If pledge launched in March, when Age of Stupid actor Pete Postletwaite promised the UK Energy and Climate Change minister Ed Miliband that he would return his OBE if the government gave the go-ahead for a new coal power station Kingsnorth, thousands of people have joined him in making pledges of their own.

Greenpeace UK has been a core member of the Big If coalition from the start, together with a wide range of other organisations including the RSPB, World Development Movement, Oxfam and the Women's Institute. Because if Kingsnorth and the other 10 plants planned to follow it get built, then we'll have next to no chance of meeting our CO2 reduction targets and reining in runaway climate change.

As someone born in Australia, now living in London, it's been a poignant few weeks to be working as a senior campaigner on the Greenpeace forests campaign.

When I was a young kid in Australia, we lived on a three acre property in a valley that was a mixture of bush, pasture and citrus orchards in the foothills of Perth, Western Australia.  In summer we would sniff the wind nervously. Some years, we watched with grim fascination as uncontrolled fires swept the opposite side of the valley. One year, before I was born, the flames came close to my families' home, but we were fortunate. 

At primary school, diligent teachers instructed us in the risks of bushfires. There's nothing like a match dropped on a pile of dried eucalyptus leaves, even in controlled conditions, to make the point to a group of rapt five year olds. Eucalyptus trees are full of oil - they explode and the fire jumps. When I was eight, Colin Thiele's classic Australian children's book The February Dragon, telling the story of an idyllic rural life consumed by summer fires, drove the lesson home. Some times as a child I couldn't sleep because I imagined the smell of smoke. 

You will often find climate campaigners at loggerheads with the government's claim of reducing emissions, and for good reason. Two reports from the Stockholm Environment Institute based at the University of York show that the government hasn't taken into account emissions from aviation, shipping and importing goods from overseas. If these three are included to calculate our emissions levels which they should be, then our carbon emissions are increasing as opposed to the government's claim that they are decreasing.