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.

Hey there Greenpeace afficionados. Want to go to Glastonbury festival? How's your store of GP-related facts? Do you, for instance, know which power station's chimney the Kingsnorth 6 climbed, leading to their arrest, trial and aquittal? Or which major Airport's expansion plans have been challenged by our Airplot campaign?

On Tuesday morning I received a call from my colleagues in Paris inviting me to pop over and see them as they had had some worrying news that they needed to share. So the next day, long before the sun was stirring and the local rooster was warming his vocals, I was on my way to St Pancras heading for a lunchtime appointment in 20^th Arrondissement. It turns out that the French state owned energy company Electricité de France (EDF), who have allegedly been spying on Greenpeace since 2004, are more involved in the scandal than it initially appeared.

Dramatic glacier melt is just one sign that climate change is happening faster than we thought possible.

"Act now or face climate catastrophe" was the Telegraph headline. There must have been a climate conference on. That the Telegraph are giving front page space to the climate is a clear sign of how difficult it's getting to ignore the realities of how the world is changing.

Well so what?  Another day, another bad news story about the climate, right? I'm not so sure. In fact, I think the Telegraph piece summed up by that headline might actually be a good news story.

Everyone is excited about Airplot. (Have you joined up?) I'm excited, the 32,000 people (and counting...) who have signed up are excited, and now the design community have also been getting excited - specifically about the amazing designs for the campaign that creative types Airside put together for us. We got them to do it not because their name sounds a bit like the campaign, but because the work they produce is immaculate. (My friend Rich, who is a bit of a design geek, was spectacularly envious that we were working with them.)

I guess that there are some experiences which are pretty standard in the first week of a new job. Filling in forms, getting the printer to work, trying to remember people's names. There are some experiences, like stumbling into the middle of a plot to buy up the proposed third runway at Heathrow from beneath the government's noses, which might be considered a little more unusual.

This was my first week as a web editor for GPUK, and on Tuesday when ‘Airplot' was unveiled - Greenpeace's cunning plan to foil the third runway at Heathrow - it all kicked off. There is general popular acclaim for the campaign, an absolute media scrum, rocketing visits to the website, and over 10,000 people signed up to be beneficial owners of the plot within the first day. At one point Ben who heads up the press team sticks his head around the corner - "You think this is busy? We buy airports all the time - it's going to be Stansted next week."

Yay - Rex Weyler's latest Deep Green column has arrived!

Rex Weyler was a director of the original Greenpeace Foundation, the editor of the organisation’s first newsletter, and a cofounder of Greenpeace International in 1979. He was a photographer and reporter on the early Greenpeace whale and seal campaigns, and has written one of the best and most comprehensive histories of the organisation, Greenpeace (Raincoast, 2004). His book, Blood of the Land, a history of the American Indian Movement, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. “Deep Green” is Rex’s monthly column, reflecting on the roots of activism, environmentalism, and Greenpeace’s past, present, and future. The opinions here are his own.

Since the late Pleistocene, 100,000 years ago, when a few thousand Homo sapiens poked around Africa, Asia, and the Mediterranean, human population has doubled 22 times. We have one more such doubling left, and that's it. Human population will likely level off at 10 to 14 billion sometime around 2100, exceeding the Earth's carrying capacity. Mass human starvations are already underway in degraded environments.
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