ROBIN GROVE-WHITE
Chairman Greenpeace UK

INTRODUCTION

Good morning everyone. Thank you all very much for coming. I'm Robin Grove-White, Chairman of Greenpeace UK.

Welcome to the campaign for sane energy.

This is a campaign unlike any other I've been involved in. It's a campaign that is too big and too difficult for Greenpeace alone.

We know from research that most people see environmental issues either as too big and too impossible to get engaged with (like global warming), or so small – as to be hardly worth telling your neighbour about (like recycling or lagging your loft).

Our task is to bridge that gap.

This campaign is designed to protect the climate. Not simply by arguing that "something must be done". But by engaging with a solid, real target which is a lynchpin of the problem - that is the exploration end of the oil industry. And, with an equally real, solid solution - and that is solar power.

One must and can be stopped. The other must and can be started in earnest.

Government can of course achieve both. But so can industry. And so can citizens and consumers.

We are here today to launch some projects that we hope will take us on that journey.

• A film which will show in cinemas up and down Britain, and abroad.
• A petition aimed at Tony Blair.
• A "sane energy" tour.
• A major new internet site which contains far more information than we have ever even tried to make available for any campaign before.

And there will be more.

These days there is renewed hope that Government is reinventing itself.

The Chairman of Shell said earlier this year, "it is the role of Government to draw a line in the sand".

We agree.

Our line is at what the oil industry calls the "Atlantic Frontier": a project to create a massive new oil field in the Atlantic north and west of Britain.

It is here, we believe, that Government should draw a line in the sand and say "no new oil" - we already have more than enough to create a huge problem.

Greenpeace believes an end to oil exploration is the first step in beginning a new sane energy future; one that runs on renewable, clean energy, and which works with nature not against it.

One lesson we learnt from the Brent Spar is that working together with the public - with consumers - groups like Greenpeace stand a chance - at least sometimes - of changing the minds even of oil companies and governments.

We have high hopes for our new Government.

We also have low expectations. Why ?

Because of the overwhelming inertia of "Business As Usual".

Not questioning basic assumptions, not upsetting the applecart, not doing anything dramatic or radically different.

As the climate scientists are telling us with increasing clarity, in the case of fossil fuels and the climate, business-as-usual spells disaster, in the form of escalating instability of the global climate.

The Atlantic Frontier is like Sellafield's nuclear reprocessing plant, THORP. Conceived in the 1960s and 1970s under a Labour government, a giant scheme careering along out of control and out of date by the 1990s .

Now New Labour has the chance to set Britain in a new direction.

In fact no major political party has yet grasped the nettle of fossil fuels. So far as we can tell, the issue has not entered their heads, let alone their policies. Perhaps this is not surprising. It won't be simple. We're all in this together – all implicated – almost every family in the land. And that's why we need serious leadership from Government.

While John Gummer was banging away at the Climate Convention, even denouncing fossil fuels and the fossil fuel lobby, the UK Government's official policy has been to expand oil production at home.

Fossil fuels are the problem.

Unjustifiable, increasingly out of date but unfortunately not out on a limb. Most industrialised nations are still at it.

The Labour Manifesto said: "we will put concern for the environment at the heart of policy making, so that it is not an add on extra, but informs the whole of government, from housing and energy policy through to global warming and international agreements".

Wonderful. So say all of us. That is what this campaign is all about.

But it is easy to say things should be at the heart of something. John Major always said he wanted to be at the heart of Europe but what counted, to coin a phrase, was the beef.

So let us see a reversal in the current "business as usual" policy, and an end to the mounting dependence on fossil fuels.

Will the Government do it ? I don't know. They could.