The UK government has chosen to allow the last great expansion of the oil industry, the decision was taken in the mid nineteen eighties, before the threat of climate change was fully realised. The Atlantic Frontier is a vast swathe of water located to the North West of Britain. It is a place where great ocean currents meet, a wilderness home to blue whales, rare birds and marine life.

In nineteen ninety, the world's climate scientists announced that the build up of carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere is causing a gradual warming of the earth. Carbon dioxide acts like glass in a greenhouse trapping the sun's heat, which would otherwise be radiated away into space at night.

The burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil is causing the level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere to grow at an alarming rate. By two thousand and thirty it will be double that of pre industrial times.

The worlds climate scientists now believe the effects of climate change are discernible. Nineteen ninety five, was globally, the hottest year on record and in Antarctica an iceberg the size of Jamaica broke away from the the Larsen ice Shelf.

Matthew Spencer - Climate Campaigner

"Greenpeace believes that this enormous problem of global climate change needs to be tackled at both ends of the chain, both where oil and coal are used in the home and in factories and in cars, but also at the other end, where the fuel actually comes from. The supply and production of fossil fuels has to be controlled.'

How much of a temperature rise can be considered safe? The United Nations Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gasses concluded that temperature increases beyond one degree centigrade may lead to extensive ecological damage.

Using the same computer models on which scientists base their predictions of climate change, Greenpeace estimate that no more than two hundred and twenty five billion tonnes of carbon can be burned if global warming is to be limited to an increase of one degree centigrade. The total amount of Fossil fuels currently due to be extracted is one thousand billion tonnes, which if burned would result in an unacceptable temperature rise for the planet. But this is only a fraction of the fossil fuels thought to exist in the Earth, a staggering four thousand billion tonnes.

Greenpeace is calling for a gradual phase out of fossil fuels and at the same time the world needs to switch to renewable and sustainable sources of energy. The potential for solar energy in the UK is vast. Research by the Department of Trade and Industry shows that a wholesale application of solar technology could generate up to two thirds of the nation's electricity. Yet in the whole of the UK there are only two grid connected solar homes presently in operation.

Greenpeace challenges the UK government to create a programme for fifty thousand solar homes by the year two thousand and ten.

Matthew Spencer - Climate Campaigner

"Governments in the industrialised world have essentially committed to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels through the climate convention. It doesn't make sense that at the same time they actually give licenses for the expansion of fossil fuel supply in frontier areas like the Atlantic Frontier. We would like the UK Government to withdraw licenses for new oil exploration in the Atlantic Ocean."