What do you do when oil prices rocket?

1. Swap the car for public transport?
2. Burn more energy to extract oil from sand while leaving behind toxic wastelands?

Well, if you are Syncrude Canada Ltd operating near Fort McMurray in northern Alberta, Canada, you choose option B. But since Greenpeace would rather go ahead with option A; we decided to show Syncrude how wrong their tar sands project really is.

Now its really not safe going near a tar sands wasteland because of the toxic fumes and the poisonous tailings waste that killed 500 ducks earlier this year. But our activists entered Syncrude's Aurora North tar sands operation early yesterday morning and blocked a pipe into the two-kilometre wide tailings pond. The activists also suspended a banner that read "World's Dirtiest Oil: Stop the Tar Sands" while erecting a banner that transformed the opening of a tailings pond pipe into the "mouth" of a giant skull.

Oil companies are to nearly triple production of oil from Canada's tar sands as a result of the region's large oil sands reserves and the rise in global oil prices. Extracting oil from sand is an energy-intensive process that deposits heavy metals and other toxics when bitumen is separated from the oil sands using large quantities of water. Toxic wastelands left behind as a result of the extraction process is a threat to Alberta's ecological systems.

Moreover, vast areas of forests are being cleared to make way for companies such as Syncrude to continue their tar sands operations. So not only does the extraction process consume more energy than the oil it digs out but also destroys local environment by clearing forests and leaving behind a toxic wasteland. Ingeniously, the companies planned on installing noisemaking devices that sound like shotguns to scare away birds from landing in the toxic wastelands. What Syncrude really need are alarm bells ringing in their ears on how they are trashing the environment.

While our own drive to drastically improve car efficiency changes gears, there are of course plenty of other people trying to get the message across. One such group, Mundo Cars, isn't the new line of Slovakian automobiles it might appear to be, but a collaborative effort by several organisations working on transport issues.

With groups like Friends of the Earth Europe and the Alliance against Urban 4x4s involved, the Mundo car has been paraded around Brussels to get the attention of MEPs who, in a few months, will be voting on the issue. But the car itself isn't real, it's an imaginary car brand designed to get people wondering why it seems so difficult to have minimum fuel efficiency standards for all cars.

With rising fuel costs and general economic gloom, you'd think car makers would be falling over themselves to have the most efficient car around, but nothing could be further from the truth. It's certainly not technical know-how that's in short supply, and a lot of fearsome lobbying of MEPs on the part of the car manufacturers means there's a danger that the legislation up for debate in the autumn won't deliver the kind of rigorous standards required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from cars.

More than a tenth of those emissions in the EU come from cars and while fuel efficiency is only part of the answer in lowering them, there's a lot of room for improvement.

It's even more bizarre when you watch the Mundo Cars video featuring interviews with car drivers from across Europe, who all say the same thing: cars should use less fuel, a lot less. If you agree, look to the Mundo Cars website and our own international site for action you can take right now.

Well, what do you know? Another news story has broken which demonstrates that the UK's nuclear industry is not the robust, well-managed machine our ministers would have us believe. The government has sneaked out a report assessing the working practices of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) which is managing the clean-up of existing power stations and waste. They were clearly hoping no one would notice as there's no doubt that many people have been caught with their pants anklewards.

Setting aside the spiralling costs of nuclear waste management (which are now about the same as the bill for the Apollo moon landings), we find the NDA in a sorry state of mismanagement. Staff apparently lack basic financial skills and were confused about accountancy terms, leading to severe errors in the balance sheets. I'm happy to report that employees in the finance team have been sent for retraining to brush up on their times tables.

It's not just specialised knowledge that's lacking. Simple tasks like taking notes at meetings seem to have been overlooked, to the extent that major decisions made between the NDA and the Treasury have gone unrecorded, leading to gross misunderstandings over budgets. Everyone has since agreed that it would be a good idea to write these things down and put them somewhere safe. Like a filing cabinet.

The audit goes on to say that there are "inherent risks" in the way the NDA operates, pointing out that half of its income is dependent on unreliable sources such as fuel reprocessing at Sellafield's Thorp plant (closed since a leak was discovered in 2005) so perhaps a more stable financial model might be in order.

Given all this, investing in less volatile and more reliable sources of energy might seem appropriate. But oh dear, it looks like the government is still set on knobbling those in favour of its twin obsessions, nuclear and coal.

The proposed EU renewables directive - legislation designed to set minimum levels of energy generated from renewable sources across Europe - wants to see the UK getting 15 per cent of its energy from clean sources by 2020. A section has been included in the directive to ensure that "member states shall also provide for priority access to the grid system of electricity produced from renewable energy sources", but British ingenuity has been focused on changing "shall" to "may".

A teeny tiny change, you might think, but in practice it would remove any obligations on our government to make sure renewable sources were given access to the National Grid before others such as, well, nuclear power and coal. And it's a stance at odds with the energy strategy launched by Gordon Brown last month which promised to "[remove] grid access as a barrier to renewables deployment". But then maybe someone didn't take minutes at that meeting.

And I can't finish without mentioning the fourth leak from a French nuclear power station in just two weeks. Safe, reliable energy, no doubt about it.

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Gordon Brown's been in some sticky situations over his Heathrow expansion policies but yesterday he found himself super-glued to the sticky hand of Plane Stupid activist Dan Glass.

Strangely, Dan was invited inside Number 10 Downing Street to receive the Sheila McKechnie Award for campaigning against airport expansion. Given the opportunity to get inside the Fort Knox of Downing Street, Dan decided to live up to his credentials and smuggle in some superglue in order to take his message right to the top.

When the time came to shake hands with the prime minister, Dan glued his spare hand to Brown's jacket and asked him not to build a third runway if he is serious about tackling climate change. But Brown shook off the glued hand like an expert, just as he has tried to shake off his responsibility to cut carbon emissions. Dan did however manage to squeeze in a little speech while being stuck to the prime minister about the climate emergency we're facing and Heathrow's contribution to it.

Downing Street underplayed the incident and laughed it off just like it does regarding all things environmental, saying, "There was no stickiness of any significance." It seems to me that the government is either in denial about the problems associated with building the third runway or that it simply doesn't care about what local people think. Perhaps if Dan's hand was a little stickier, we would have seen how much effort Gordon Brown would have taken to shrug off something as sticky as climate change.

As a special dignitary that evening, Dan wasn't thrown out or jailed but allowed to stay inside for another 40 minutes. Once outside, however, he tried sticking to Number 10's gates but was prised off by a policeman. He then called it a day. "I didn't have much glue left by that point," said Dan.

But we're going to mount more pressure on this government by helping to plan the next steps at the Heathrow Conference this Saturday. Join us in prising Gordon Brown away from the sticky hands of British Airways and BAA which lets face it are much stickier than Dan's.

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Stop Climate Chaos activists were at Kingsnorth in Kent this morning to urge the Prime Minister to abandon plans for a new generation of coal-fired power plants. They planted flags outside the existing power station as a symbol of opposition to Kingsnorth 2, a new development which, if it gets the go-ahead, will be the first new coal plant to be built in the UK for 30 years.

Developer E.ON UK plans to demolish the existing plant and replace it with a new coal-fired unit that is 20 per cent cleaner. But coal is the dirtiest, most carbon-intensive fuel known to mankind, and despite the industry's efforts to talk up 'clean coal' technologies like carbon capture and storage (CCS), such developments are in their infancy and would not be available for at least a decade, even if they can be made to work.

The final decision on whether to approve the proposal rests with the government, and ultimately with the Prime Minister. As Ashok Sinha, director of the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, points out: "Gordon Brown's decision on new coal-fired power plants could be a defining moment in the fight against climate change.

Come to Climate Camp at Kingsnorth, Aug 4-11 2008

"If he jumps the right way and unlocks Britain's renewable potential, we could show the rest of the world that low carbon technologies are the answer to the inseparable challenges of climate change, poverty and energy security."

"The reality is that a thriving renewables industry would help us avoid disastrous climate change, create thousands of jobs and keep the lights on."

The PM now faces a choice between investing in job-creating renewables technolgies or remaining wedded to outdated, polluting plants heavily dependent on imported energy sources (even 60 per cent of our coal is imported these days). If he goes with coal we'll have next to no chance of meeting our CO2 reduction targets for 2020, have missed a golden opportunity to ensure genuine energy security, and be blamed by the world's more responsible nations for accelerating climate change.

And just to make his options even more crystal clear, Parliament's own environmental audit committee weighed in yesterday with a report making it clear that if we are to hit our targets for reducing emissions in the face of climate change, then the government must set a deadline for introducing tough greenhouse emissions standards - aready proposed by NGOs and supported by both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats - after which the operation of unabated coal-fired power stations should not be permitted.

So Mr Brown, it's up to you whether we go for cheap dirty energy or make a genuine effort to take the lead in tackling climate change. Your choice.

NB The Stop Climate Chaos Coalition includes the Women's Institute, Oxfam, Greenpeace, WWF, the RSPB, Christian Aid, Tearfund, People and Planet and Friends of the Earth.

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Following the success of the soya moratorium extension, illegal and destructive logging of timber is in the spotlight in the Amazon. A new agreement signed in the State of Pará is set to ban trade in timber that isn't from legal and sustainable sources. What makes this ban significant is that almost half the timber logged in the Amazon comes from the state of Pará.

Carlos Minc, the Brazilian environment minister had said that extending the Soya moratorium for another year was a success and should inspire similar initiatives across other sectors operating in the Amazon. This is the first of those other initiatives. This is an important step in protecting the Amazon rainforest from illegal and destructive logging. Brazil is the fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions due to deforestation in the Amazon.

In September, the European Commission will announce proposals to tackle the trade in illegal timber coming into Europe. An EU ban on illegal timber imports will compliment this announcement in Brazil and should help to combat illegal logging activities worldwide. Write to President Barroso now to bring about an immediate ban on illegal timber reaching Europe.

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Gordon Brown says the UK is at the forefront of a global 'nuclear renaissance'. But despite all the rhetoric, the real picture is grim, writes John Sauven for The Guardian's Comment is free.

Just this week Prime Minister Gordon Brown confidently assured us that the UK was at the forefront of a global "nuclear renaissance" and that within a few years we'd be home to at least eight bright, shining new reactors. We're told a week is a long time in politics, but it must seem an absolute eternity to the ever more bedraggled British nuclear industry.

Yesterday the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) published its annual report and the predictable news was that the cost of decommissioning existing reactors and dealing with our legacy of radioactive waste has rocketed yet again. The bill now stands at a whopping £73bn, up from £53bn in 2006. That's an increase equivalent to the entire cost of the London 2012 Olympics each year.

Some experts believe that the real total might be more than £85bn. This is a staggering amount of taxpayers' money. Just to put the figure into context, it's about the same cost as the entire Apollo Programme that took man to the moon. Sadly, unlike JFK's lunar mission, in this case we have nothing to celebrate. What that money buys us is merely desperate grappling with the radioactive and toxic legacy of nuclear power.

The NDA claims the overall figure will be kept down because it will generate revenue through its commercial operations. But the idea that the NDA's commercial operations can guarantee this income is laughable. A big slice of the revenue they want to rely on for a century or more depends on two of the biggest white elephants in nuclear industry history - Thorp and the Sellafield Mox Plant. The Thorp reprocessing facility was shut for years following dangerous radioactive leaks and is now closed until Christmas while a new evaporator is fitted. Meanwhile it was recently announced to surprisingly little fanfare that the Mox plant, which cost nearly half a billion pounds, has produced next to nothing since it was built. Relying on these for a guaranteed income is like putting your faith in a sprig of flowers to ward of the plague.

The fact that the NDA is playing a central role in working out how much waste from new reactors might cost to dispose of should make all of us stop and think about the merits of any new nuclear programme. The taxpayer is picking up the tab for all these failures and cost increases now, and as the Public Accounts Committee stated recently, it is impossible to guarantee that the taxpayer will not pick up the tab for new nuclear power stations too. Government promises that there will be no subsides for its new nuclear programme are almost worthless.

Despite all the rhetoric and improbable promises about the benefits of new nuclear reactors, the real picture is grim. Much like the recent news that British Energy is paying twice as much to get two of its creaking UK reactors back on line (the bill is now more than £100m). And the rumours that French state-owned nuclear utility Electricite de France is having second thoughts about buying British Energy.

But before we conclude that this is a British malaise, this week brought the startling announcement from France that all its nuclear reactors must now be checked so that leaks of radioactive waste into local rivers, as happened at one site last week, don't happen anywhere else. This comes hot on the heels of the construction blunders at the new reactor site in Flamanville that led to the French nuclear authority suspending the project. These are the reactors and companies that are touted to deliver Brown's "nuclear renaissance", but unless stopped, the prospect is of a much more disastrous and expensive rerun.

A fall from the giddy heights of Brown's expansive nuclear dreams at the start of the week takes some beating. However, the one thing the nuclear industry really excels at is shooting itself in the foot. Which means we can probably expect more of the same before the summer's out.

More good news on the renewables front today: Al Gore has challenged the US to produce 100 per cent of its power from renewable sources in 10 years.

Gore has pitched his plan as the solution to not only climate change but also to high oil prices and energy insecurity - and as a way to keep the US economy healthy and to ensure national security.

A few of my favourite bits (the full text is here):

In my search for genuinely effective answers to the climate crisis, I have held a series of “solutions summits” with engineers, scientists, and CEOs. In those discussions, one thing has become abundantly clear: when you connect the dots, it turns out that the real solutions to the climate crisis are the very same measures needed to renew our economy and escape the trap of ever-rising energy prices. Moreover, they are also the very same solutions we need to guarantee our national security without having to go to war in the Persian Gulf...

Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.

This goal is achievable, affordable and transformative. It represents a challenge to all Americans – in every walk of life: to our political leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, and to every citizen...

A few years ago, it would not have been possible to issue such a challenge. But here’s what’s changed: the sharp cost reductions now beginning to take place in solar, wind, and geothermal power – coupled with the recent dramatic price increases for oil and coal – have radically changed the economics of energy....

To those who say the costs are still too high: I ask them to consider whether the costs of oil and coal will ever stop increasing if we keep relying on quickly depleting energy sources to feed a rapidly growing demand all around the world. When demand for oil and coal increases, their price goes up. When demand for solar cells increases, the price often comes down.

Of course the greatest obstacle to meeting the challenge of 100 percent renewable electricity in 10 years may be the deep dysfunction of our politics and our self-governing system as it exists today. In recent years, our politics has tended toward incremental proposals made up of small policies designed to avoid offending special interests, alternating with occasional baby steps in the right direction. Our democracy has become sclerotic at a time when these crises require boldness.

It is only a truly dysfunctional system that would buy into the perverse logic that the short-term answer to high gasoline prices is drilling for more oil ten years from now.

Am I the only one who finds it strange that our government so often adopts a so-called solution that has absolutely nothing to do with the problem it is supposed to address? When people rightly complain about higher gasoline prices, we propose to give more money to the oil companies and pretend that they’re going to bring gasoline prices down. It will do nothing of the sort, and everyone knows it. If we keep going back to the same policies that have never ever worked in the past and have served only to produce the highest gasoline prices in history alongside the greatest oil company profits in history, nobody should be surprised if we get the same result over and over again. But the Congress may be poised to move in that direction anyway because some of them are being stampeded by lobbyists for special interests that know how to make the system work for them instead of the American people.

If you want to know the truth about gasoline prices, here it is: the exploding demand for oil, especially in places like China, is overwhelming the rate of new discoveries by so much that oil prices are almost certain to continue upward over time no matter what the oil companies promise. And politicians cannot bring gasoline prices down in the short term.

So I ask you to join with me to call on every candidate, at every level, to accept this challenge – for America to be running on 100 percent zero-carbon electricity in 10 years. It's time for us to move beyond empty rhetoric. We need to act now.

Via The Sietch, EcoGeek, EnviroWonk, Grist etc.

Yesterday, the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) released their annual report and, as surely as night follows day, the news is that the bill for decommissioning and cleaning up our existing nuclear plants is rising. And rising. And rising.

In fact, we could have funded two London Olympics just from the rises in the estimated costs over the past two years.

Although no one really has a precise figure (and the NDA admits it can't tell us what the final bill will be), the estimate now stands at around £73bn - about the same amount as the Apollo Moon Landings cost*.

There's more bad news for British Energy too. They announced yesterday that their reactors at Heysham and Hartlepool, currently off line because of faults, will now cost at least twice as much to repair – the bill will now be over £100m.

Their chairman said, with a straight face, that "output from our nuclear stations last year was disappointing." Somewhat unsurprisingly, this news appears to have dampened EdF’s appetite for buying BE.

(*Apologies for the Friday afternoon-related typo here - now fixed.)

Avedore CHP plant in Denmark

Remember how we said last month that industrial combined heat and power (CHP) plants could save us money, increase our energy security and help slow climate change?

Well, we've just heard that plans are afoot for just such a plant in Scotland. The Tullis Russell paper mill plans to reduce its annual carbon emissions by around 250,000 tonnes a year by switching to biomass CHP for its electricity and steam.

Up until now, the mill has been using coal to provide the steam and electricity it needs, but RWE npower has announced plans to build a 45 MW biomass plant on the site - 45MW being the equivalent of the electricity needed for around 50,000 homes.

(Last month, we commissioned research which showed that industrial CHP plants could generate about enough electricity to meet the annual needs of two thirds of UK households – about 14GW.)

Assuming the biomass for this new plant comes from sustainable sources, it's excellent news for the climate, and a pretty good metaphor for the energy revolution we need across the UK: a transition from fossil fuels to a decentralised energy system founded on CHP, renewables and efficiency.

What's more, the project has enjoyed robust support from the Scottish government. Not only is an £8.1m grant helping to fund the project, but Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond has been waxing lyrical about biomass CHP with an enthusiasm that Gordon Brown seems to reserve for nuclear power and coal:

"The new biomass plant in Markinch... pays testament to our competitive advantage in terms of skills and workforce and the development of energy supplies that are cleaner, greener and economically competitive," he said.

"This announcement points the way to the future and shows the resilience of the Scottish economy in the face of international financial pressure."

Here’s hoping Brown learns a thing (or two) from Salmond.

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  Residents in the Vaucluse, a popular southern French tourist destination, were banned yesterday from drinking well-water or swimming or fishing in two rivers after a uranium leak from one of France's nuclear power plants.