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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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On climate, leading from the front (for a change)

To avoid maxxing out on my July quota of irony in the first week of the month, I will simply report this as a straight news story.  The UK Times reports:

With temperatures across much of France surging above 30C this week, EDF's reactors are generating the lowest level of electricity in six years, forcing the state-owned utility to turn to Britain for additional capacity.

Fourteen of France's 19 nuclear power stations are located inland and use river water rather than seawater for cooling. When water temperatures rise, EDF is forced to shut down the reactors to prevent their casings from exceeding 50C.

Now everybody who is anybody knows that no single weather event can be attributed to human-caused global warming.   And those same people know that nuclear power is the one and only possible solution to human-caused global warming.  So, to all those non-cognoscenti inclined to use this one-time, freak occurrence to diss nukes, let me say as loudly as I can, "NOTHING TO SEE HERE!  MOVE ON!"

Also, the image above is presented solely as an example of the kind of inappropriate humor one should eschew in these troubled times.  Any resemblance between the nuclear power plant employee depicted above and advocates of nuclear power living or mortified is purely coincidental.

The story explains:

EDF warned last month that France might need to import up to 8,000MW of electricity from other countries by mid-July - enough to power Paris - because of the combined impact of hot weather, a ten-week strike by power workers and ongoing repairs.

EDF must also observe strict rules governing the heat of the water it discharges into waterways so that wildlife is not harmed. The maximum permitted temperature is 24C. Lower electricity output from riverside reactors during hot weather usually coincides with surging demand as French consumers turn up their air conditioners.

One power industry insider said yesterday that about 20GW (gigawatts) of France's total nuclear generating capacity of 63GW was out of service.

Much of the shortfall this summer is likely to be met by Britain, which, since 1986, has been linked to the French power grid by a 45km sub-sea power cable that runs from Sellindge in Kent to Les Mandarins.

A statement from EDF played down the heat problems, saying that the French system continued to meet customer demands - but similar heatwaves have caused serious problems in France in the past.

In 2003, the situation grew so severe that the French nuclear safety regulator granted special exemptions to three plants, allowing them temporarily to discharge water into rivers at temperatures as high as 30C. France has five plants located by the sea and EDF tries to avoid carrying out any repairs to them during the summer because they do not suffer from cooling problems.

Okay, so maybe this wasn't a one-time event.  But it's not as if the planet is entering a prolonged period of ever hotter and hotter conditions, leading to longer and stronger heat waves where the 2003 heat wave will be an every other year occurrence by the 2040s, and ultimately leading to average temperatures rising 5°C or more by century's end, is it?

And this is certainly no reason for people to all of a sudden start questioning nuclear power as a primary solution to global warming - at least not if you've already decided to swallow the exorbitant cost, lengthy delays, safety, terrorism, proliferation, and waste problems.

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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."

--

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

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"Give me coal," Ernest Bevin, Britain's immediate post-war foreign secretary told the nation's miners 53 years ago, "and I'll give you a foreign policy."

UK climate change secretary Ed MilibandWikimedia CommonsExhausted, and almost bankrupt after defeating Hitler's Reich, but still insisting on maintaining a huge army and air force to remain a world power, Britain turned to its traditional source of wealth -- the black gold that had made it an industrial nation.

Now another rising British minister facing an even greater crisis -- this time a planetary one -- is effectively coining a new slogan. "Give me clean coal," Ed Miliband seems to be saying, "and I'll give you a climate policy."

In an abrupt turnabout from previous policy, the young Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change has set out to make Britain the first country in the world to make carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology compulsory for all new coal-fired power stations. Last week, he formally issued a consultation document laying out his plans, but no one has any doubt that they will be put into force.

"The era of unabated coal is over," Miliband told Parliament.

It's been a long era -- more of an age, really. Coal has been mined in Britain since before the birth of Christ. The Romans found it in use when they came, and by the end of the second century AD were tapping almost every subsequently exploited coalfield in the country. Coal fueled the Industrial Revolution, powered the expansion of the British Empire, and long dominated the country's energy supplies.

Ernest Bevin, Britain's foreign minister under the postwar Labour government, tied his country's security to output from the coal mines.Wikimedia CommonsEven now, a quarter of a century since Mrs. Thatcher beat the miners and began the demise of the deep mining industry, coal still provides a third of Britain's electricity, predominantly from opencast mines and imports. And yet it is emerging more and more clearly as the biggest global warming villain of all.

James Hansen, long prophetic on climate change, calls it "the single greatest threat to all life on our planet." And warnings of the devastating effects that global warming will have on Britain, as on the rest of the world, continue to mount: last week a report by its Metereological Office's prestigious Hadley Centre warned that a two degree national temperature rise by 2040 was now inevitable, and warned of a future of droughts and floods unless urgent action is taken.

But until recently, the British government was turning a deaf ear and making plans (despite claiming to lead the world in combating climate change) to move back to coal. Last year Miliband's predecessor as the top energy minister, the Blairite John Hutton, came within days of giving the go-ahead to build the country's first coal-fired power station in 20 years.

Kingsnorth in Kent, in Britain's southeast, was expected to be the first of some six such plants to be waved through. And there was to be no question of fitting it with CCS technology; leaked emails showed Hutton's ministry to be colluding with the energy company to rule out the expensive technology. So, by itself, the plant would have emitted three times as much carbon dioxide each year as the entire country of Rwanda.

Even worse, Hutton and his own predecessor -- Alistair Darling, now the Chancellor of the Exchequer -- effectively stopped an attempt to build Britain's first CCS plant in Scotland. Indeed, the most the government was prepared to do was to "consult" on making new plants "CCS-ready," a virtually meaningless concept that would do little more than set aside space for it in the car park.

Miliband's plan is to insist that all new coal-fired power stations immediately fit CCS to cover about a quarter of their emissions. They would then have to provide 100 percent coverage within five years of Britain's Environment Agency pronouncing the technology proven, expected in about a decade. And, he has recently intimated, existing power stations might have to follow suit. The technological development would be funded by a two percent levy on electricity bills.

The cooling towers of Ferrybridge power station in Britain.Greenpeace UKEnvironmentalists have welcomed the plan, though some want full CCS technology fitted at once. The government retorts that companies would then avoid building coal plants where carbon dioxide is removed after combustion and so the technology -- which will be badly needed as China and India burn their coal -- would not be developed.

And the government points out that a second form of CCS, where the coal is gasified and the carbon removed before it is burned, is achievable and produces the full reduction. It is planning to get two such pre-combustion plants built, alongside two post-combustion ones, and produces figures to show that this would save marginally more carbon than scrapping coal and building gas-fired plants instead.

Ultimately, of course, the government hopes the plan will give Britain an edge in a post-carbon world, just as Bevin hoped the country's coal would in that distant post-war world.

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The following post was written by The Guardian's Dunan Clark

The climate change debate often seems to focus more on the problems than on the solutions. It's not hard to understand why: almost every week brings another scientific report predicting impacts sooner and more devastating than we were previously expecting.

With so many gloomy headlines, it would be easy to believe that irreversible runaway climate change is now inevitable. But that's not true – at least, not yet. The world is packed full of ingenious people with ideas for tackling global warming, either through emissions cuts, the removal of CO2 from the air or even the reflection of sunlight into space.

The problem for policymakers, investors and others attempting to pave the way for a low-carbon future is knowing which of these many solutions to get behind. Should we, as some scientists have suggested, spend our environment budgets on painting the world's roofs white or filling the Sahara with solar panels? Or might it be better to focus on reducing demand? If so, is that better done with, say, energy monitors in homes or the encouragement of bottom-up campaigns to give green makeovers to towns and districts? Or do we need to do all the above?

In order to work out which climate solutions are likely to be the most effective, and to showcase new ones that haven't yet made the headlines, the Guardian has teamed up with the Manchester International Festival (MIF) and high-profile thinkers in an ambitious project called the Manchester Report.

The first stage is to invite anyone with a plan for tackling climate change to let us know about it. Whether you're an an inventor, a geo-engineer, a policy-maker or a member of the public with a great idea to encourage greener lifestyles, we want to hear from you. Simply complete and return the short form available on the festival's site.

A dozen of the most promising applicants will be invited to present their idea to a high-calibre panel of experts in front of a live audience at Manchester Town Hall on the weekend of 4 and 5 July. The panel, chaired by Lord Bingham, previously the UK's chief justice, and featuring leading lights from the worlds of science, business and policy, will rate the various ideas in terms of their feasibility, impact and commercial potential. .

The results of this landmark event will form the basis of a report – the Manchester Report – to be published two weeks later at the end of the festival. The report will not only be made available online but also sent to policy-makers, to help them decide which low-carbon solutions to support in the run up to this year's crucial climate summit in Copenhagen.

Republished via The Guardian Environment Network

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Old soldiers, as they say, never die -- and at 97 the legendary Vietnamese Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap seems intent on proving the point.

But he does not seem to be that interested in fading away, either. For the man who drove out first France and then the United States is enthusiastically embracing a new battle -- as an eco-warrior.

For a European child of the 1960s like me -- for whom the Vietnam War was a youthful defining event -- this is truly riveting news. It is like someone of my father's generation discovering Germany's Field Marshal Rommel campaigning to save the whale in the 1970s, or people of my son's age coming across, say, Saddam Hussein running an animal sanctuary in forty years time.

Giap was just as feared in his day -- and many readers could be forgiven for assuming him to have passed away years ago.

Be that as it may, the general's emergence provides a dramatic personalization of one of the more surprising trends of the last few years -- the greening of the military. Britain and the United States are in the vanguard of what we may one day come to call the "military-ecological complex."

But before we get to that, spare a thought for the Chinese firm, Chinalco, that now finds itself in the sights of the man who routed the French Army in the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu (55 years ago last week) and then led North Vietnamese forces against far superior American military between 1965 and 1974. The national Vietnamese communist government, which Giap did so much to make possible, calls Chinalco's bauxite mining in the country's beautiful Central Highlands "a major policy of the party and of the state."

But the general will have none of it. He cites a report that concluded that the mining would cause "devastating, long-term ecological damage" and says: "We should not exploit the bauxite. The exploitation will cause serious consequences on the environment, society and national defense."

It is, of course, defense considerations that have awakened military leaders in the West to the importance of green issues. Gen. Giap may be concerned about inviting investment from Vietnam's old enemy, China. But top brass in Britain, the United States and many other countries are most worried about the potential for future conflict caused by resource scarcity, environmental refugees and -- above all -- global warming.

"Just a few years ago," former British defense official Derek Twigg told a conference last September, "it would have been fanciful, to say the least, for a defense minister to be speaking about climate change, let alone stating categorically that it will have a crucial effect on the defense operations of Britain and its allies.

"Climate change will serve to amplify instability. Because of it, our troops will be asked to complete more challenging tasks, in more places, more often." He added: "It is a long term danger that must be tackled head on."

U.S. military leaders were even sooner to see the threat. "We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, or we will pay the price in military terms later on," said General Anthony Zinni, a former commander of American forces in the Middle East, at the launch two years ago of a report that concluded that global warming was a "threat multiplier", creating breeding grounds for terrorism.

Another of the report's authors, Admiral T. Joseph Lopez, former commander-in-chief of U.S. Naval Forces in Europe, added that the "rising ocean water levels, droughts, violent weather and ruined national economies" that would result from global warming "can provide the conditions that will extend the war on terror."

Even more interestingly, the two countries' armed forces are setting out to tackle their own gas-guzzling consumption of fossil fuels. Britain's Ministry of Defence, responsible for 70 percent of all the Her Majesty's Government's carbon dioxide emissions, has so far cut them by ten percent this decade and has certified its planes to fly entirely on biofuels, probably made from algae, when they are available.

The Pentagon, which gave humanity the 68-ton, less-than-one-mile-to-the-gallon M1 Abrams tank -- now aims to get a quarter of its energy from renewable sources by 2025. It is saving fuel by removing floor mats and redundant tools from its planes, and has saved 100,000 gallons of oil a day by insulating tents in Iraq and Afghanistan with a layer of hard foam.

General Giap, notoriously profligate with his men's lives, might not have appreciated the Pentagon's combat-zone energy-efficiency efforts, but the U.S. military reckons these steps prevent casualties, as every one per cent of fuel excuses 6,444 soldiers from traveling in fuel convoys, favored targets of insurgent forces.

And, the newly green military chiefs add, their multi-billion-dollar acquisition budgets may boost the development of green technologies, just as military spending once led to the development of jet engines, microchips, the Internet and the global positioning system.

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With "green stimulus" all the rage this side of the Atlantic too, there's a fair amount of interest in a) how much we're going to spend and b) on what.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, savior of the world and (apparently) originator of the whole green-new-deal concept, would, you might think, be anxious to be sporting a particularly large package. Sadly, the money's already been spent -- and reprinted and spent again -- stimulating a dead horse. Currently obsessing the nation are bankers' bonuses and particularly the pension of "Fred the Shred" Goodwin of the Royal Bank of Scotland, who has become the main lightning rod for all public and government wrath about the banking fiasco. (Apparently a picture of Fred Goodwin "enjoying himself" would now be worth £30,000 [$43,000] to a paparazzo, easily trumping Britney and up there with Brangelina's kids. This all seemed quite funny until a couple of days ago when vigilantes attacked his house. Security advisers are now advising all bankers to adopt a low profile. Strange days indeed.)

The other focus for rage is the upcoming G20 summit in London on April 1; protest group G20 Meltdown is leading the charge with a mixed anti-capitalism and sustainability message. They're even paraphrasing Obama: "Can we make capitalism history? Yes we can!"

Anti-capitalist rage is a challenging context in which to launch a market stimulation package, and sure enough, Brown's plans are wilting fast. With a failed auction of gilts last week, he is managing expectations in the run-up to the budget, and we are not to hope for anything beyond what was promised back in the autumn. Of the £3 billion [$4.3 billion] then announced to rescue Britain from the economic abyss, the official claim is that £535 million [$765 million] will go on green stuff. Sounds impressive, perhaps, but the government's own environmental audit committee is not convinced it's up to the job. Much of the money, they say, is not new, or is brought forward from 2010/2011 and will then be clawed back. The only big lumps of new wonga will go on 200 new train carriages, and £100 million [$143 million] for home energy efficiency.

And given the shockingly poor energy performance of the U.K. housing stock (source of 25 percent of our CO2 emissions), it's questionable what difference it will make. By 2050, when we are to have achieved the 80 percent reduction in emissions set last year in the Climate Change Act, 80 percent of those homes will still be with us. So that's about 20 million houses to tart up, with about £5 [$7.15] each. It's a tiny sum compared to the £2.3 billion [$3.28 billion] to be spent bailing out the country's car manufacturers, but at least that package has carbon reduction in the mix, largely because it's part of a European scheme and they take the practicalities (like actually doing something) a bit more seriously.

So, sadly, the forecast is rather bleak for a green boom over here. By 2011, with the public finances falling off a cliff, whatever investment in infrastructure, skills, and R&D we're able to squeeze out of the system will be largely over. Private investment seems to be pulling out too -- witness Iberdrola's recent decision to cut 40 percent of its investment in British wind farms, a state of affairs sufficiently worrying for ex-BP chair Lord John Browne to warn that the U.K. will not meet its green energy targets without state intervention. In all, it's a fair bet that Britain will be -- once again -- left behind in the race to develop low-carbon energy and clean tech. And the winners? Europe and the U.S.

Of course, big money is not the only solution. No one ever said "massive government intervention is the mother of invention," and clean tech doesn't have to cost a fortune. One advantage of the current turmoil is that it opens up opportunities for new ways of thinking and doing to rise quickly to the surface. Lots of people are just getting on with it and coming up with the products and services that will both get us through this mess and be part of the life we'll have to lead in the future.

At Forum for the Future, we've been working with HP and The Financial Times to surface a few of those products in the FT Climate Challenge. Chosen by the likes of Richard Branson and Eileen Claussen from over 300 entrants, a set of five innovations with the potential to make money and do some good in the world is currently up for a public vote and a $75,000 prize. Which do you fancy: A solar-powered cardboard stove? An energy-saving hub cap? A dietary additive to reduce the methane in cow farts? Who says tackling climate change can't be fun, profitable, and inspiring? Vote now; the polls close on April 1.

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Cash for Clunkers brought us ... more clunkers!

LONDON—A protester threw green custard in the face of British business minister Peter Mandelson on Friday, in a stunt to highlight opposition to a new runway at London’s Heathrow airport.

The former EU trade commissioner was arriving for a London summit on carbon strategy when protester Leila Deen approached him and hurled a large cupful of custard straight in Mandelson’s face, from close range.

Mandelson bent over, turned away and hurried inside, while the protester picked up papers she had dropped and calmly strode off.

“Mandelson is trying to make political capital out of climate change,” said serial campaigner Deen, a member of the group Plane Stupid, which has staged several protests over plans to build a third runway at Heathrow, in west London.   “The only thing green about Peter Mandelson is the slime coursing through his veins.

“We can’t let the ‘Prince of Darkness’ cast his shadow over west London”—a reference to Mandelson’s nickname earned for his media spinning skills.

The incident appeared to raise security questions, since Deen, 29, approached Mandelson unchecked and walked off freely afterwards.

Mandelson, who returned to the British government in October, seemed unfazed by the stunt, saying he did not fear for his security and people should not over-react.

“It could have been nastier,” the 55-year-old told reporters later—minus his splattered coat.

“Whilst I’m prepared to take my fair share of the green revolution on to my shoulders, I’m less keen on having it on my face.

“In a sense I guess I should be grateful to the protester for helping us to put this very important subject on the map.”   However, he added: “I would rather people said it to my face than threw it in my face.”

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: “Police are investigating circumstances surrounding an incident in Carlton House Terrace, SW1, at about 8:00am today. There have been no arrests. No complaint has been received.”

Former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott—who famously punched a protester in the face after being pelted with an egg in 2001—voiced anger and said that Deen should have been arrested.

“For those moments when you receive that kind of assault, you don’t know what it is. He couldn’t have known whether that was acid being thrown in his face,” he said on his video blog.

“What is totally unacceptable is the way the woman walked away, claiming that it was her right in a democracy. She should have been arrested… If it would have been acid, would she still be walking away?”

“Public people shouldn’t be expected to be physically assaulted with such impunity,” he added. “It could have been much more serious. Let’s do something before it is.”

Charity worker Deen told BBC television: “It’s a light-hearted way of making a very serious point… Peter Mandelson had it coming. Everything he touches turns to sleaze.”

Bookmaker William Hill is taking bets on which popular dessert would next be hurled at a British government minister, with spotted dick, a steamed suet pudding containing currants, the 3/1 favorite.

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The United Kingdom held the E.U.'s first carbon-permit auction this week, raising some $80 million -- but has angered environmentalists by socking away the funds into general coffers instead of promising to put the money toward tackling climate change.

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Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Obama going to Copenhagen

‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science

With lawmakers' final approval on Tuesday, Britain has become the first country in the whole wide world to make a legally binding commitment to cut emissions 80 percent by 2050.

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Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Obama going to Copenhagen

‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science