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100 months to save the Earth

John Sauven Today's G8 announcements on climate change set the bar too low, writes Greenpeace's John Sauven for Comment is free.

The informal annual gathering of the world's most powerful leaders emerged after the oil crisis and the subsequent recession in the 1970s. The vested interests of this group in the global economy and access to the world's resources are obvious. The eight countries now forming the group represent between them the bulk of the world's economic activity; they also own most of the world's firepower and consume most of the world's resources.

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Bluefin thinking

Our Executive Director John Sauven, writing for comment is free explains why tuna, once the 'chicken of the sea', is now at grave risk from overfishing.


The MV Esperanza confronts overfishing and pirate fishing in the Pacific.

Tuna, particularly the canned variety, has long been one of the UK's staple foods and most of us probably have a couple of tin or two somewhere in our cupboards. More recently, we've been developing a taste for raw tuna, as sushi bars continue to spread throughout the country.

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Goal posts shift again as Hutton tries to fudge green energy targets

Lady Vadera addressing the the EU energy ministers meeting

Energy minister John Hutton has been caught trying to sabotage the EU renewable energy targets again. A minister from Hutton's department has been working in Brussels to try and redefine what constitutes 'renewable energy.' After last year's fiasco when Hutton’s department were seen trying to wreck EU renewable targets altogether, now the business minister Lady Vadera has been filmed trying to water them down at an EU energy council meeting.

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Out of commission

The cost of taking nuclear plants out of service is spiralling out of control. Is this just poor financial management, or does it have wider implications? Written by Greenpeace Executive Director John Sauven for comment is free.

This week, the National Audit Office released its damning assessment of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority's (NDA) ability to estimate the true financial cost of decommissioning and cleaning up the UK's fleet of ailing reactors and contaminated facilities. As costs for decommissioning appear to spiral out of control - rising sharply from £56bn to £73bn over just a few years - the burden on the taxpayer grows ever more. And it doesn't end there. The NDA has also been made responsible for disposing of the UK's stockpile of legacy wastes which is estimated at an additional £10-20bn. The industry argues these increased costs have arisen in the face of "significant challenges", but the echoes from this announcement are all too familiar from a sector that has been plagued with industrial and financial incompetence.

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We've never been so consulted

Gordon Brown's public consultation on nuclear power is being fixed by the market research company carrying out the polling.

Dr Paul Dorfman, a senior research fellow at the National Centre for Involvement at the University of Warwick, told the Guardian that the questions being asked in the consultation were deliberately skewed to get a thumbs up for nuclear power by massively overplaying its role in tackling climate change - because the government knew this was the only way they could ever get people to accept new nuclear power.

According to Dr Dorfman, "partial information was rammed down the public's throat. It was totally impractical for people to make a rational decision based on the information they were fed. The way it was put together was designed so that a particular view would emerge."

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New nuclear weapons: "do as I say, not do as I do"

Current Executive Director for Greenpeace UK John Sauven

"Britain cannot expect other countries to refrain from acquiring nuclear weapons if it upgrades its Trident nuclear weapons system", says the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency in a recent speech at the London School of Economics. Mohammed ElBaradei cast doubt on his own moral authority in seeking to curb the nuclear ambitions of countries like Iran if governments like the UK just stick two fingers up at the world and say 'do as I say, not do as I do'.



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