Kate Griffin freelance journalism and editing

The current government promised to be the “greenest government ever”, but the UK’s carbon emissions are still too high, risking catastrophic climate change. However, many people don’t realise that 80% of emissions are as a result of local activity. We talk a lot about government action, but it’s time to bring the discussion closer to home.

I recently wrote to my MP, who also happens to be the Prime Minister.

29th March 2011

Dear Mr Cameron,

I understand that you have recently sought the independent advice of the Committee on Climate Change and I congratulate you for doing so. I am now writing to urge you to accept the advice they give you and set serious targets for reducing the UK’s carbon emissions.

I've written a short post for the Sustainable Witney blog about switching to greener energy. Writing it took me about ten minutes; switching my household's electricity and gas to Ecotricity took about five minutes.

An article I wrote is the cover story for the latest edition of Metal World, the quarterly magazine for the International Federation of Metalworkers (IMF). I was very excited to see the feature in print today, accompanied by Andrew Wiard’s excellent photos.

The Times website was criticised for its coverage of Saturday’s “Mili-band”, the climate change protest where hundreds of people formed a ring around Kingsnorth Power Station in Kent. Robin Henry’s piece was illustrated with a stock photo of helmetted police in a riot situation. (This has now been removed, after reader complaints, and replaced with a stock photo of a power station which may or may not be Kingsnorth.)

Twitter is full of the claim that the Green Party is “anti-science”. Some of the people making that claim are on my own feed; they’re people I like and respect. So I’m disappointed that so many of these self-appointed champions of science seem to be basing their claim on the same Times article, while others don’t bother to give any source at all.

The #amazonfail furore made me angry, but not for the reasons you might expect. I'm angry at the sheer numbers of people who put their energy into mobilising against Amazon. The whole affair showed us just how easily Twitter and blogs can be used to spread a message about a company's unacceptable actions (in Amazon's case, removing LGBT-themed books from their sales rankings) and to generate massive amounts of negative publicity. Perhaps a month after the problem was first spotted, the complaints reached a tipping point; after that, it took just a few days to give Amazon the PR headache of a lifetime.

And I'm furious that it happened this way. Perhaps I should explain why.

What should we do instead of building a third runway at Heathrow? Share your ideas here.

Protests certainly are hardcore these days. Last night I was obliged to do without any dressing on my helping of salad. Thankfully the music of the string quartet soothed my shattered nerves. As you can probably guess, I was attending Dinner At Domestic Departures, a peaceful protest against the building of a third runway at Heathrow airport. The event was organised by Climate Rush, who take inspiration (sartorial and otherwise) from the suffragettes.

Yesterday I joined ten thousand people to march against climate change on the Global Day of Action. The march was one of hundreds of protests happening all over the world.