The location for this year's Camp for Climate Action - outside the Kingsnorth power station in Kent - was well chosen: it is here that E.ON wants to build the first new coal-fired plant in the UK in nearly 30 years. With coal the most global-warming-intensive fuel on the market, and six more coal plants in the pipeline if Kingsnorth gets the go-ahead, there is a clear line to be [...]

Three years ago, the environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben made a striking observation: that despite overwhelming evidence of a world-threatening rise in temperatures, our cultural realm seemed unaware of the looming crisis. "Where are the books?" he demanded. "The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?" Global warming, he concluded, "hasn't registered in our gut; it isn't part of our culture".

How things have changed. Today, bookshops have entire shelves devoted [...]

If you thought a growing economy was bad, try living through a recession. Environmentalists routinely denounce the "mantra" of economic growth, pointing out - quite rationally and entirely correctly - that infinite growth on a finite planet does not make mathematical, let alone ecological, sense. But the idea of a no-growth, steady-state economy has always sounded like pie in the sky - and you have only to read the papers [...]

I am finding it increasingly difficult to maintain my optimism that we can stabilise global temperature increases below the "danger level" of 2°C. First, there is no sign that emissions are being reduced; rather, the opposite is happening. Second, it is becoming clear that the danger level for temperature increase is a good deal lower than 2°C.

The Arctic Sea ice cover is already approaching a new low. The new [...]

I should start with an apology. In October 2006 I wrote an article for the New Statesman strongly advocating carbon rationing as the only appropriate response to the emergency of climate change. So you might expect me to be furious that the Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn, has shelved a suggested rationing scheme following a lukewarm government feasibility study. But I believe Benn has taken the right decision. Rationing now seems [...]

You may have seen the ads - enough to make any football fan's blood boil: "Germany 200, England 1". No, this was not a report from the World Cup qualifiers, it was a straightforward calculation of how much further forward Germany is in implementing the clean-energy revolution. Germany has 200 times more solar power installed than the UK - and this is not because Germany gets any more sun. The [...]

Whenever I hear cynics complaining that politicians nowadays are all in hock to vested interests and unprepared to show leadership, I respond with two words: Ken Livingstone. London's mayor has made the UK's capital a world leader on environmental and transport issues - often in the teeth of determined opposition from the media and the political Establishment. If he loses the 1 May election to the charming Tory buffoon Boris [...]

Like the Lord Almighty, the Chancellor giveth, and the Chancellor taketh away. On the one hand a 10 per cent increase in plane duty will force aviation to pay more of its environmental costs and help reduce emissions. On the other, Alistair Darling's explicit support for the expansion of both Heathrow and Stansted airports will force emissions ever upwards. A higher rate of first-year tax on polluting 4x4s will reduce [...]

I'm in a darkened room, my face plastered with make-up, somewhere in Manhattan. With powerful lights on all sides, all I can see is the camera lens. My earpiece crackles and the first interviewer comes through, from a TV station in Minnesota. First the pleasantries, then the lead-in to the question: "Some scientists say this global warming is just another natural cycle . . ."

Welcome to the US climate-change [...]

It is strange how little British people know about what goes on in Ireland. The Irish government is just a few months away from introducing a scheme to tackle greenhouse-gas emissions which is revolutionary in its ambition and scope, and could be extraordinarily important as a model for the rest of the world. Yet no one here has heard anything about it. A search I conducted on a news database [...]