Will world leaders rocket at Copenhagen?Photo: jurvetson via Flickr Creative CommonsSuddenly -- and just in the nick of time -- next month's Copenhagen conference is starting to gain momentum. National leaders have rushed to say they are going, elevating it to the status of a major summit. More and more commitments to action are coming in, from both developed and developing countries. And there are signs that even the United States may put an, albeit provisional, offer on the table.

It has all been enough to cheer up the phlegmatic Yvo de Boer, who -- as  Executive Director of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change -- is in charge of the talks. Last month he was sounding downbeat, but now he says: "There is no doubt in my mind that (the meeting) will yield a success."

"Almost every day now we see new commitments and pledges from both industrialized and developing countries," he added. "I am confident that the President of the United States can come to Copenhagen with targets and a financial commitment."

Maybe de Boer is now erring on the optimistic side, but there is no doubt that there is, at present at least, a new mood in the air. It is reflected in -- and partly caused by -- a stampede of heads of governments promising to come.

By the weekend, just a week after the Danish Government had sent out the formal invitations, 65 leaders had committed themselves to attend. They included such heavyweights as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown,  German Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, Prime Ministers Yuki Hatoyama and Kevin Rudd of Japan and Australia, and Presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia.

Several key leaders have yet to reply -- including President Hu Jintao of China, India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, South African president Jacob Zuma and, of course, Barack Obama. But so far the Danes have not had a single refusal, and expect many more acceptances.

The promised turn-out is a big vindication for Gordon Brown, who was the first leader to commit to going -- as long ago as September. Brown insisted that only heads of governments would have the authority to negotiate and strike a deal. He has since spent much time telephoning and talking to other leaders face-to-face to persuade them to attend.

He will be at it again this weekend at the summit of leaders of the former colonial countries that belong to the British Commonwealth in Trinidad. Manmohan Singh and Jacob Zuma can expect to come under particular pressure if they have not accepted by then.

Meanwhile offers of emission reductions continue to come in. Russia has agreed at a summit with the E.U. last week to accept a 25 percent cut on 1990 levels by 2020, doubling its previous target. This is hardly ambitious because the collapse of its economy in the 1990s means its emissions are now much lower than they were at the start of that decade -- but it is important because it represents another developed country coming into the range which will trigger the big cuts promised by the E.U., Japan, and Australia if others followed suit.

South Korea offered a four percent reduction from 2005 levels by 2020. Again, this may appear paltry, but is psychologically important because the country is (somewhat anomalously) classified as a developing one, making South Korea the first developing country to announce an absolute cut in emissions as opposed to just reducing its rate of growth.

Even more importantly, Brazilian officials made clear last week that the ambitious target of at least a 36.1 reduction in projected 2020 emissions, would involve an absolute cut of at least 10 percent from current levels.

The big questions are what the U.S. and China will offer. President Hu has promised a "notable" reduction in expected 2020 emissions, and is expected to attach a figure on it in Copenhagen. And Todd Stern, the chief U.S. negotiator indicated that  President Obama was considering going with a provisional number for emissions reduction even if the Senate had not voted on it by then.

There is also a growing consensus on the even more important -- and difficult -- issue of providing finance to the world's poorest countries to help them tackle their own pollution and adapt to the devastating impacts of climate change. This is settling out at an acceptance that about $100 billion a year will be needed by 2020 (a figure originally proposed by Gordon Brown last summer), that 22-50 billion euros of this would come from international aid, and that "fast-track finance" of 5-7 billion euros should be provided to finance immediate action.

Of course there will be many stomach-turning ups and downs before the leaders leave the Danish capital, and it could well all come unstuck. But the very fact that leaders are going makes that more unlikely, because the one thing that unites them is a determination to avoid being associated with failure.

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British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has committed his politically battered government to sealing a climate deal in Copenhagen this year. Above, Brown speaks at the Major Economies Forum, held this past weekend in London.UK Dept. of Energy & Climate Change

It certainly caught the eye. "The world's future is being decided this weekend" ran the headline over an op-ed piece in Sunday's Observer.

And the byline was pretty compelling too: Nicholas Stern, now Lord Stern, the author of the groundbreaking report bearing his name on the economics of climate change.

The rather more sober text of the article did not quite bear out the dramatic headline, as the big climate decisions aren't expected to come until the Copenhagen climate conference in December. But a meeting in London last weekend was crucial nonetheless. And it did make some progress.

Ministers from the 17 key developed and developing countries that make up the Major Economies Forum (MEF) got together to try to chart a course through the deadlock bedevilling the formal UN negotiations on a new deal to combat global warming. After seven intense weeks of negotiations so far this year, held at four sessions in Bonn and Bangkok under the auspices of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the major issues are nowhere near being resolved.

Worse, the negotiating text remains an unwieldy, lengthy document studded with hundreds of square brackets, denoting disagreement. Only five negotiating days are left, in Barcelona at the beginning of next month, before the representatives of the world's governments fly to the Danish capital.

With little chance of this calamitously cumbersome process reaching anything like a conclusion, most of the hopes of sealing a deal in Copehagen rests on the shoulders of the ministers who attended the London meeting, and those of their nation's leaders. The MEF has proved invaluable in providing a place where delegates from these key countries can talk and try to move towards agreement outside the constricting confines of the UN negotiations.

That must be enough to set George W. Bush turning in his political grave, for the Forum is a direct descendent of one he set up in 2007 (under the slightly different name of the Major Emitters Forum) to try to block progress on climate change by bypassing the UN altogether.

An MEF summit this summer took some of the most significant, if still small steps forward of the year so far, with participating countries agreeing for the first time that the rise in global temperatures should be halted at two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels. Rich countries agreed, again unprecedentedly, to slash emissions of greenhouse gases by 80 percent by 2050, while developing nations broke new ground by accepting that their own pollution should "peak as soon as possible."

The London gathering also modestly moved things forward. Both U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern and British Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband -- both of whom, privately and publicly, were pessimistic beforehand about the prospects of agreement -- emerged more hopeful.

While stressing that "this is absolutely not a done deal, it remains in the balance," Miliband went on: "today this feels a more doable proposition than it was yesterday." Stern added, with similar cautious optimism: "More progress needs to be made, but we think that something can be done."

In an important move, the rich countries have quietly softened their stance on insisting that all nations agree that global emissions should be cut by 50 percent by 2050. Developing countries had refused to agree to the target, fearing it would be used to justify forcing big cuts on them in future. As one senior source put it: "Discussions on 2050 have been eating up time that could be more usefully spent on determining what we do before we are all dead."

Eight MEF working groups will shortly announce the results of talks on developing and sharing clean technologies. There was productive discussion on how a plethora of national programs and commitments, by both developed and developing countries, could be fitted into a global deal.

There was even a little progress on the thorniest issue of all, with participants reaching "substantial agreement" that "significantly scaled up finance" will be needed to help the poorest countries reduce their own emissions and adapt to the potentially devastating effects of climate change. (Those hopes, alas, were set back when European finance ministers on Tuesday again reneged on a promise to put money on the table.)

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a call to action ("we cannot compromise with the catastrophe of unchecked climate change, some must compromise with each other") and made clear his on commitment to "work tirelessly...to negotiate a deal." The first head of government to commit to going to Copenhagen, he is already intensely lobbying his fellow leaders to join him there: Downing Street says that several have privately agreed also to go, but will not identify them.

Successful UN negotiating meetings need two things among others -- some degree of trust between the major players, and one national leader who will push hard for agreement.

The MEF is beginning to provide the former, and Gordon Brown could become the latter. The odds against agreement in Copenhagen remain long, but they shortened just a tiny bit last weekend.

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Leaders of the world's richest and fastest-growing economies are pushing for climate action even though their citizens have yet to wake up to the scale of the problem. Above, national leaders pose at the most recent G8 meeting last June in Italy. (White House Photo).Something unusual seems to be happening in the struggle to wake the world up to the reality of climate change. Almost unprecedented for an environmental issue, national leaders appear to be out ahead of public opinion in their respective countries.

President Obama has made climate action one of his top priorities after health care. Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, is spending much of his time trying to lay the grounds for a successful deal at December's climate conference in Copenhagen, while his chief rival, Conservative Party leader David Cameron (expected to succeed him after national elections in the spring) has made combatting global warming a signature issue.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, an unexpected environmentalist, is backing a carbon tax. The recently reelected German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has long been in the vanguard of moves to tackle climate change. The new Japanese prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, announced a stringent target for carbon cuts as one of his first acts after being elected last month. And Kevin Rudd, Australia's leader, has likewise radically overturned the obstructionist position of his predecessor.

Yet not one of these leaders has been under great pressure from their citizens to get serious about global warming. Though there is plenty of evidence that the majority of people in their countries accept climate change as a reality and think that something should be done to tackle it, there is little sign of an overwhelming demand for urgent action. Indeed, Gordon Brown and his ministers have often privately urged green NGOs to mobilize a mass campaign so as to give them the "political space" to act.

The paradox is even more marked in some rapidly industrializing countries in the developing world, where there is even less sign of popular pressure. Yet, Mexico's president, Felipe Calderon, is preparing a detailed offer to cut the growth in his country's carbon emissions to place on the table in Copenhagen. Hu Jintao, meanwhile, chose to make the first-ever speech by a Chinese president to the UN General Assembly at last month's climate summit.

Even Manmohan Singh, prime minister of the hitherto somewhat recalcitrant India, has ordered a more internationalist approach, telling ministers: "We may not have caused the problem, but we must be part of the solution."

This leadership of the leaders is welcome, but it has its limitations, most obviously in the United States where the constitutional separation of powers makes senators responding to their respective states' interests prove a powerful obstacle. But other countries are not immune from political inaction. The embattled Gordon Brown is getting no measurable political uplift from his work on climate change, while a sympathetic Conservative backbencher says that support for David Cameron's sincere concern is "paper thin" in his parliamentary party.

Yet the leaders surely need not be isolated, for despite a vocal skeptic minority, solid majorities in developed countries, at least, understand that climate change is real, is caused by human activity and requires action.

Eighty-five percent of Britons, polls show, are convinced that global warming is already a threat or will become so soon. Sixty-seven percent of Australians back their government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, even though it has run into trouble in parliament. And 83 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of Republicans in the United States have told pollsters that they believe global warning is already happening.

So why does this not turn into intense political pressure? One reason seems to be that much of the concern is still relatively soft and has not been translated into action even on a personal level. In the United States, one survey found that just 18 percent of respondents were alarmed enough to be doing something in their own lives to address climate change (not bad compared to the 7 percent of outright deniers, but far short of overwhelming). In Britain, only about a third of those concerned said that they thought they did enough personally to address global warming.

Experts point to two apparently contradictory, but not mutually exclusive, reasons for this. The first is that most people do not realize how serious things are, partly because the scientists have not been yelling. "For long we have been reluctant to spell out clearly the true implications of our analysis, instead couching out conclusions as challenging but politically palatable," says Prof. Kevin Anderson of Britain's blue-chip Tyndall Centre for Climate Change. Prof. Clive Hamilton of the Australian National University adds: "There is a widespread belief in the scientific community that the public cannot handle the truth, and so it has been pulling its punches."

The second reason is that people are not sure what they can do, or if any actions will actually make a difference. But there is mounting evidence that changes in behavior come when people get information from a trusted source on what needs to be done, and why it is worthwhile.

National leaders, of course, do know they can make a difference and have been briefed on the true extent of the climate crisis. That may explain why they have leapt out front on this issue. Their countrymen now urgently need to be brought up to speed.

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A view of the climate talks in Bangkok. Can you imagine getting this many people to agree on anything more substantive than the lunch menu?UNFCCC via FlickrHere they go again. As delegates from some 180 nations gather yet again to try to make progress on negotiating a new climate agreement, they are beginning to feel stir crazy. After all, this is the fourth time they have met this year ... with remarkably little to show for it. Wading through quicksand would seem easy by comparison.

Two things are different this time. One is that the meeting is being held in Bangkok; the previous three were in the less exotic city of Bonn. The other is that the delegates are assembling with the words of their leaders ringing in their ears. The hope is that the strong statements made last week during the UN General Assembly meeting on climate change will inject new momentum and political will into the negotiating process.

It needs to, for this is a make-or-break meeting. When delegates leave the Thai capital at the end of next week, there will only be five short negotiating days left -- in Barcelona in November -- before the vital conference that is supposed to seal the deal opens in Copenhagen in early December. And even Yvo de Boer, who as executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change will run the negotiations, admits that the negotiating text is "utterly useless" as it stands.

Fortunately, success or failure is not entirely being left to the formal negotiations. Vigorous efforts are being made to keep the heads of governments involved, and a series of parallel, high-level meetings are hurriedly being arranged to try to generate progress outside the sclerotic UN process. And at the heart of them is the increasingly active figure of Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, who, despite mounting political difficulties at home, has made pulling off a deal at Copenhagen a top personal priority.

But back to Bangkok, where de Boer warns: "Time is not just pressing. It has almost run out." A top-level chorus agrees. Danish environment minister Connie Hedegaard says; "We have talked for long enough; the world expects action." And even the newly reelected German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, says: "When I consider what has to happen before Copenhagen, we cannot be happy."

They're right. If the delegates arrive in Copenhagen without resolving much of the present 2,500 disputed passages in the negotiating text, there will be precious little chance of an agreement. So the negotiators need to dramatically change pace. As Tove Ryding of Greenpeace told Reuters: "We need to see late nights and fights. That's what these people do for a living. The need to smell like sweat and coffee. If they don't do that, they're not actually at work."

But even if they do clear up most of the text, no one expects the big breakthroughs to take place in Bangkok or Barcelona. That was the point of last week's summit in New York, which did move matters forward, if less than had been hoped.

President Hu Jintao promised to reduce the carbon intensity of China's economy by "a notable margin" on 2005 levels by 2020. This was less than had been expected; Hu's own chief climate envoy had said the president would lay out "the next policies, measures and actions that China is going to take", and there was even speculation that he would announce a firm target.

But the contents of the speech were less important that the symbolism. A Chinese president had travelled to New York to address the UN General Assembly for the first time in 40 years -- and had chosen to do so on climate change. That alone signified how seriously his government was taking the issue.

The second advance came at a dinner UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon put on for heads of governments of the most polluting countries to meet their counterparts from the most vulnerable ones. Participants say that a sense of common purpose to tackle climate change was forged.

But the G20 summit in Pittsburgh put off discussions of new $100 billion annual fund to help developing countries deal with climate change, proposed by Gordon Brown this summer in an attempt to break the negotiating deadlock. Instead, they have been put back to the next meeting of their finance ministers in November.

A protest outside the UN climate talks being held in Bangkok.UNFCCC via FlickrThe good news is that these talks will be held under British chairmanship, which means that there will be a hard push to get agreement on the fund. And Britain is also to host a meeting of the Major Economies Forum in mid-October.

This reflects Mr. Brown's activism. He has made Copenhagen a top priority, and is losing no opportunities to press his fellow leaders to do the same. A details man, unusual for a political leader, he is getting deeply involved in the nitty-gritty of what needs to be done. This is important, for UN climate negotiations rarely succeed unless a powerful, committed figure decides to make sure they do.

The British Prime Minister has been the first leader to announce he will go to Copenhagen, and he is urging others to join him; he is convinced that the deal can only be done at that high level. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France is calling for another pre-summit in November.

An additional meeting and attendance by more world leaders will probably be needed ... for the prospects for a treaty can certainly not be entrusted to the negotiators now meeting in Bangkok.

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The Science Museum is one of London's best-loved landmarks, largely because generations of children have been taken there by their parents to play with its increasingly sophisticated sets of hands-on gadgets. But it also houses the originals of some of the iconic inventions that made possible Britain's Industrial Revolution.

Lord Mandelson, Britain's deputy prime minister, climate secretary Ed Miliband and Lord Adonis, the transport secretary, at the UK Low Carbon Transition Plan launch event at the London Science Museum on July 15, 2009, Courtesy UK Dept. of Energy and Climate Change via FlickrThat revolution, of course, was powered by coal, so it was appropriate that British ministers chose the museum last week to announce that, two centuries later, the country is to turn its back on the world's dirtiest fuel. They were there to unveil a series of policy documents, totalling some 640 pages, detailing how Britain would develop a low-carbon economy, multiply many fold its use of renewable energy, and achieve one of the world's most ambitious targets for cutting emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

In the process, they promised to create some 400,000 new green jobs and to revive the country's economy by grabbing a bigger share of the world's market for low-carbon goods and services, which, they estimate, already stands at a massive $4.5 trillion.

"Our plan will strengthen our energy security," said the 39-year-old Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband. "It seeks to be fair to the most vulnerable. It seizes industrial opportunity. And it rises to the moral challenge of climate change."

The plan partly stems from last year's passage of Britain's Climate Change Act, the first in the world to set legally binding, statutory carbon budgets for a nation. The Labour government accepted the recommendation of a specially established expert committee that greenhouse gas emissions should be cut by 34 percent of 1990 levels by 2020.

One of the documents sets out in detail how this is to be done. Because Britain has already reduced emissions substantially since 1990 -- largely through the closure of almost all its coal mines after the Thatcher government broke the miners unions in the 1980s -- emissions will only have to be cut by 18 percent from today's levels to reach the target.

The biggest reductions are planned for energy supply (with a 38 percent cut from todays levels), and homes (30 percent), with the public sector (27 percent) and transport (14 percent) in third and fourth place.

In the public sector, the document allocates individual targets for each government department. Meanwhile, the emissions reductions for energy supply -- and to a lesser extent for homes and transport -- will be largely made by a dramatic expansion in renewable energy.

Under a European Union directive, agreed to by Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government, Britain is obliged to get 15 percent of its energy from renewables by 2020. This represents an enormous change, because at present the country gets less than two percent from them -- the third lowest proportion in Europe after Malta and Luxembourg, even though it has the best resources of them in the entire continent.

Ministers mainly plan to achieve this seven-and-a-half-fold expansion in just 12 years by increasing the proportion of electricity generated by renewables to 30 percent, from its present 5.5 percent -- another huge transformation. Most of this will come from thousands of new wind turbines, both onshore and increasingly offshore.

"Feed-in tariffs" will take effect next April to provide money to householders who generate their own electricity, largely from rooftop photovoltaic panels, and a year later there will be a similar incentive for those that produce renewable heat as from solar water heaters or ground source heat pumps.

The government also plans to reduce emissions from homes through a "house by house, street by street transformation" on energy efficiency and by providing smart meters, which enable families to monitor their energy consumption, to every home in the country.

On transport, the plan promises to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from new cars, encourage low emissions buses and electric cars, and -- more controversially -- calls for using biofuels for 10 percent of the country's vehicle fuel by 2020.

The last element in the plan is a "low carbon industrial strategy," which ministers promise will "transform our whole economy and change our industrial landscape, our supply chain and the way in which we all work and consume."

It adds up to an impressive package, which has been generally welcomed by environmental groups. But there are still grounds for concern. For a start, ministers do not plan that the greenhouse gas cuts will really start to kick in until after 2012, when the Brown government may well be out of office. The planned levels for the feed-in tariffs appear to too low to encourage a rapid expansion of rooftop renewables, while other incentives are being phased in slowly. A sense of urgency appears to be lacking.

But if the program does succeed, sparking a green industrial revolution in Britain, then the Science Museum, as its launch pad, will have something else to commemorate.

--

Read UK climate secretary Ed Miliband's recent op-ed for The Guardian. Below: Miliband discusses the low-carbon plan.

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At home he is almost universally seen as a politician running out of time, but Prime Minister Gordon Brown continues to stride onto the international stage as if he were guaranteed many more years in power. He may have lost his rapport with the British public, chalked up blunder after blunder, and already faced two attempted coups by fellow Labourites in Parliament, but he continues to try to "save the world."

Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown talk Monday during a pre-G8 summit in Evian, France. Both leaders support a new international accord on greenhouse gases, but Brown has gone further than other G8 leaders, advocating that rich nations spend billions to support climate adaptation and clean energy programs in poor countries.Courtesy Elysee.frWe know that is what Brown thinks he's doing, because he used that very phrase when under pressure recently in the House of Commons. In Britain's rather puerile political discourse, this was enough to condemn him to instant and recurrent mockery. But there is every sign that this somewhat serious son of a Church of Scotland minister really believes it.

Brown made the boast in a reference to his attempts to lead the global response to the international financial crisis. And it is true that, whatever his role in helping to cause the credit meltdown in the first place, he did react decisively. Now he is extending his self-imposed mission to combatting global warming, launching a campaign that he somewhat immodestly says "will effectively change the world."

Brown claimed this when answering questions after a speech on climate change he made recently in the unlikely surroundings of London Zoo. The speech received almost no media attention because he had the misfortune to deliver it on the morning after the death of Michael Jackson. But it did contain an important proposal, deliberately put on the table in time for this week's climate gathering in Italy, with just might break the deadlock in the international negotiations leading up to December's vital climate conference in Copenhagen.

The talks are deadlocked because, even though time is rapidly ticking away, no one has been prepared to make the first significant move. Emissions cuts so far offered by rich nations amount in total to a reduction of about 8 to 14 percent in 1990 levels by 2020, a third of the 25-40 percent they agreed to make in principle 18 months ago in Bali.

Developing countries, for their part, are refusing to make pledges on reducing the rate of growth of their emissions -- an essential part of any deal -- because industrialized nations are neither doing enough at home nor offering funds to help them fight, and adapt to, climate change. Serious money was promised, and the EU undertook to specify what it should be by last spring. But EU finance ministers have so far refused to name a sum, fearing that they will just be asked for more.

The result has not just ensured that the already sclerotic UN negotiations made no real progress, but blighted President Obama's attempt to inject some energy into the process through this week's meeting, held alongside the annual G8 summit. So Gordon Brown's proposal, which was discussed and agreed in depth in his cabinet, was both targeted and timed to try to break the impasse.

Brown suggested a financial package to be worth around $100 billion a year by 2020 for funding low carbon technologies to reduce emissions, strategies to prevent deforestation, and adaptation measures in developing countries. He proposed that the money should be raised from an expanded and reformed carbon market, a limited amount of official overseas aid, and new mechanisms which could include funds from reducing emissions from aviation and shipping.

And he did not stop there. Over the next week he rang both Obama and Wen Jiabao of China to canvass their support, and is working his way around most of the other leaders at the summit before they actually meet. He does not expect agreement on the idea in Italy, but hopes that governments will work on it over the next two months in time for the next climate summit, called by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, in New York in September.

Brown made a bold move, for it meant breaking ranks with the rest of the industrialized world, and defying countries like France that had explicitly pressed him not to do so. And no one knows if it will work, though there has been some public support on Denmark (host of the the December meeting) and the vulnerable, low-lying countries of Bangladesh and the Maldives.

But something is desperately needed to provide a focus for serious, specific negotiations to begin as Copenhagen comes ever closer. And experience shows that there is rarely a breakthrough unless one leader and his or her government shows enough commitment to drive it.

If Gordon Brown can provide it -- and follows through until agreement on a new treaty is finally reached -- history will regard him much better than do today's commentators. And it may even judge that he did, indeed, "save the world."

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Below, watch Brown's speech laying out his "road to Copenhagen" proposal:

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Thanks to the shaky economy, a struggling construction industry, and strong local opposition, sources close to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's eco-town plans say that only "one or two" of the 15 shortlisted sites are likely to go forward.

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In a decision that anti-coal activists say is a gamechanger, six Greenpeace protesters have been acquitted of nearly $53,000 in criminal-damage charges for painting "Gordon" on a British coal plant. The activists climbed a 650-foot coal-plant chimney last year with the intent to paint "Gordon bin it" in huge letters, aiming to pressure Prime Minister Gordon Brown to disallow new coal plants. They only got to "Gordon" before being served with a high court injunction. In court, the six used a "lawful excuse" defense, arguing that burning coal exacerbates climate change, thus putting property around the world "in immediate need of protection." Climate scientist James Hansen testified on their behalf, and the jury found in their favor. "This verdict marks a tipping point for the climate change movement," says chimney-scaler Ben Stewart. "If jurors from the heart of Middle England say it's legitimate for a direct action group to shut down a coal-fired power station because of the harm it does to our planet, then where does that leave government energy policy?"

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British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was in Washington, D.C., Thursday to sit down for a chit-chat with President Bush. Brown told press that he and Bush "agreed we must work internationally to secure progress at the G8 and toward a post-Kyoto deal on climate change. ... I look forward to continuing to work with President Bush and his administration in taking it forward." (Taking what forward remains to be seen, as Bush's recent climate speech had no specifics.) Brown also mentioned Britain's hesitation to go forward full force with biofuels, noting, "We've got to get it absolutely right that we're dealing with the environmental issue as well as dealing with the problem of increased production of food." The prime minister also met with Bush's three viable successors (in alphabetical order by first name, so as not to show bias) and says he is "absolutely confident that through working with any of them we could rise to the great challenges of the future."

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In his first major speech on the environment, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has suggested that Britain could aim to cut its greenhouse-gas emissions 80 percent by 2050. To accomplish said goal, Brown promised that all new dwellings in Britain will be zero-carbon by 2016, and that free insulation, low-energy light bulbs, and efficient appliances will be distributed widely to homes over the next few years. He wants to eliminate plastic bags and source 40 percent of British energy from renewables by 2020. He also said that the climate crisis will spur a "technological revolution" and announced a summit to explore how to maximize economic opportunities in a low-carbon future. Brown also encouraged nations meeting in Bali in December to agree on binding emissions caps for all developed countries. "I know this means facing up to hard choices and taking tough decisions," he said. "That means governing, not gimmickry." Uh oh, George -- he's on to you.

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Gordon Brown, the man widely expected to take Tony Blair's place as prime minister of Britain this summer, has made headlines with a splashy green announcement. Brown, currently the U.K. finance minister, said he intends to create five eco-towns that would meet a demand for affordable housing. The carbon-neutral communities, built on reclaimed brownfields, would contain 10,000 to 20,000 houses each. They'd be powered by locally generated clean-energy sources such as wind and solar, and would feature bus routes and bike lanes. "If we are to meet the aspirations of every young couple to do the best for themselves and their children, then we need to build new homes, and we need to deliver well-planned, green, and prosperous communities where they will want to live," said Brown. Criticized for recycling a policy already laid out by his Labor Party, he retorted, "It's quite new," which made us love him in all his awkward glory. The first town will be built on a former military base in Cambridgeshire.

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