People & Planet, WDM and Platform have just launched an audacious campaign against the Treasury, seeking a judicial review to transform RBS from the UK's largest "dirty development" investor into the foremost green finance institution. Check out the Financial Times story for the lowdown (it made the front page!) and lobby your MP to sign the Early Day Motion supporting this move.

AS Jonathan Porritt said at today's SDC Breakthroughs event, the Treasury has held the UK back for too long. It is years behind the public, and even business, on climate change. Using our 70% public share in RBS is exactly the kind of initiative that could unlock the green new deal, using the skills and experience of RBS staff to finance investment in low carbon industry and infrastructure.

I'm very proud of P&P! After contacting your MP and pestering the Treasury, support People & Planet to help them pay for the campaign, and for the judicial review if they win it.

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like mainstream journalists and celebs are starting to talk about the Greens in a totally unprecedented way. With a few exceptions we're seen as credible, with good policies and a great leader. Notwithstanding the occasional backlash, we're definitely on the way to establishing ourselves as the fourth "main party". Just the increased number of nods to the Green Party shows that - in our largely first past the post scene - fewer people think Labour will always be the only viable progressive force in British politics.

Caroline evoked a lovely analogy at the recent Compass conference to sum up the change in mood: we no longer need New Labour's big tent to bring all progressives together. From now on, we should have a campsite of many small tents, cooperating to progress environmental and social justice, and competing where we disagree.

Maybe 2010 will be the year that the Lib Dems stop shamelessly lieing to undermine Labour and Green votes, and that Labour supporters - especially in publications like The Guardian and the New Statesman - relax their tribal obsession with The Labour Party?

Gavin Baker, a really fantastic free data activist from the US, nudged me recently about his post on the position of different European parties on open access to research. Scott Redding, one of our Green Party candidates in the elections and also doing amazing work getting more online activism for the party, gave a fairly strong statement on his intention to support the cause of open/free data.

So where do we stand? It's easier to explain by talking about our wider policy and activism around intellectual property. So here's an update on a previous post:

• The Green Party in England & Wales has very strong, explicit policy on intellectual property with specific statements on open source software, public data (especially maps) and open data generally.
• Lots of Green MEPs and candidates have signed the Free Software Pact;
• In Liverpool City Council, Greens have passed a motion encouraging the use of free and open source software;
• The Greens led the fight against software patents in Europe;
• We ran an amazingly successful media campaign against Microsoft Vista and DRM in the BBC iPlayer;
• We co-wrote the free software, free society open letter promoting free software;
• Our conferences literature uses OpenStreetMap to help people find them!

The Green Party in England & Wales hasn't done much work specifically on open access to research but I guess the message to Gavin and other activists is: we have strong, clear policy on this, and we're an open door. Green MEPs will always listen to you, turn up to vote on directives, write letters and within reason support the cause!

In preparation for the Peckham Mapping Party this Wednesday evening (3rd June) I tried out the house numbering system in OpenStreetMap known as the Karlsruhe Schema around the south east corner of The Lane area of Peckham. Well, mapping and leafletting again with the all-important Euro elections on Thursday.

With all the buildings, points of interest and house numbers it's getting pretty crowded!

It will be good if this is picked up by the search function on the OpenStreetMap homepage, so one could search for "15 East Dulwich Road" and get at least the right end of that rather long road.

All that time in the sun left me completely wiped out, though. I'll be glad when the elections are over so I can spend a few consecutive weekends and evenings with no leafletting on the horizon. Just the Exec meeting in June, and lots of local events to do with Transition Towns Peckham & the slightly locally-bungled Sustainable Communities Act round in Southwark.

But hey, it's sunny and my tomatoes & rocket & lettuce are shooting up!

Isn't it great when two hobbies collide? I've been using OpenStreetMap to plan leaflet delivery and canvassing in the run-up to the European elections in June. They're just PDFs of cake diagrams, exactly the same as those used for mapping parties (like this one). The OSM maps are detailed, attractive, easy to export and annotate, and without any legal problems! Plus they chime with Green Party policy on free, open public data such as maps.

Whilst leafletting in East Dulwich, Peckham and Nunhead I've been able to finish off areas that lacked points of interest (like churches and post boxes) and landuse areas. I've also spent some time sorting out the road classifications around this part of South East London - lots of roads mistakenly labelled as secondary (they aren't B roads), and some weird choices for tertiary roads.

My last stint on this leafletting + mapping lark comes on the eve of the election - the Peckham Mapping Party on the 3rd June!

A sense of urgency is common to any discussion amongst experts discussing climate change. When I turn my mind to carbon in the built environment, I quickly lose what little faith I have in our current political leadership to steer and push us in the right direction. If the need to act yesterday wasn't bad enough, the length of time it will take to turn the problem around is really worring.

To totally decarbonise the built environment, you need to transform industry skills; contend with the length of the learning cycle from project to project (4-8 years); convince the entire country that a disruptive refurbishment of their home / office / factory is absolutely necessary; reinvent chunks of the industry to support low embodied carbon construction materials and techniques; and rethink future planning to reduce the sheer amount of infrastructure and buildings we want to throw up in the next century. Just to add a sweetener, all of this will inevitably kick out a short-term increase in emissions.

The urgency and scale of the challenge require action far beyond the UK Government's extremely limited strategies and timid consultations. It would be interesting -- though not very uplifting! -- to model the likely impacts of the carbon emissions we'll see in the next 30 years as a result of the Labour Government's inability to grasp the carbon question. Short of that, look out for an update to CAT's Zero Carbon Britain report before the UN climate change meeting (COP-15) in Copenhagen this December for a good overview of the changes we need.

What a bank holiday! Saturday morning out leafletting for the European elections with Jenny Jones, followed by an afternoon in the wonderful Bussey Building with the Peckham Power Company. Never mind the sandwiches, the sun brought out a great mix of people, including a policy expert from DECC no less. Anna from the PPC took us through the mix of energy we currently use -- nice to see people quite so shocked by the proportion of energy 'embodied' in the stuff we buy; next, the mix of energy we could physically generate in the UK; and finally some realisation of the challenge both for the UK and for Peckham in responding to the triple crunch of the recession, climate change and peaking fossil fuel reserves.

The recipe for Peckham and The Lane area? That'll be lots of refurb, solar thermal & PV, a ground-source heat pump system under Peckham Rye Common and the possibility of some co-generation replacing the old boiler houses in estates and big public/private buildings. I'm not sure that Southwark Council has the officers and councillors who understand what this really needs, yet!

I've offered to help Anna & co with their response to the Peckham Area Plan, and Jenny and I are meeting with a very nice guy from the Council planning department to discuss it soon.

Now to the Centre for Alternative Technology for a two day seminar to revisit and update their Zero Carbon Britain report. I'll be presenting some work about the construction sector and embodied energy, whilst not-very-secretly wishing I could get out into the hills for a good walk!

Sunny Hundal writes on Liberal Conspiracy that the left is paralysed by tired old slogans, an aversion to new ideas and a failure to harness the energy of new activism. Thank goodness for the Green Left, then! If only that web site wasn't quite so offensive to the eyes...

Sunny charges that the Green Party has failed to "harness" the energy of new and online activism. I don't think we should be harnessing it. Our strength is in getting good people into council, London Assembly, European Parliament, Scottish Parliament and (soon, soon) British Parliamentary seats; in taking effective action on a local level on local issues. Who got the GLA to set-up the Living Wage unit? Who has made four councils to date adopt the policy of paying all their subcontracted workers a Living Wage, pulling thousands out of working poverty? That's right, the Green Party. Labour -- supposedly the party of working people -- has not only sat by, but has been actively opposing the Working Time Directive in Europe at the same time, a directive which would have saved people from unjust working hours.

The future for anyone interested in fresh ideas, effective activism and genuine solutions to the "triple crunch" of recession, climate change and peak oil has to be an alliance of the Green Party (to get good politicians) and a messy overlapping swell of grassroots activism that will always refuse to be "harnessed".

It's the failure of the likes of Sunny Hundal to jump ship from Labour, and the tired old ideologues in Fabian & co, that is holding them back. OR, if you really want to stick with Labour, then renew their approach and ideology by making sure the party strategists realise the kicking they'll get in elections for the next two years will be because people see an alternative in the Greens.

... was much as expected. I'm the Campaigns Coordinator for the Green Party (national) Executive, and the good news is that everyone approved the stategy I've developed recently. I'll start blogging about this more soon. The meeting was only 4.5 hours and only overran by an hour an a half, so not that bad for a national political party!

The main message I took away from the meeting was: get out and leaflet! We only have six weeks left until the European Parliament electins, so I went out to chat to people at a local sustainable community stall this afternoon then did a spot of leafletting down Lordship Lane. Southwark Green Party is meeting this Thursday so we can plan out lots of evening and weekend sessions to mobilise our members and get out the vote!

It doesn't take long before a friend or family member suggests that the Green Party should change its name to show we're not just about the environment. I suppose not everyone is familiar with the differing political philosophies of Green and environmentalist. But Jean Lambert is a good example of a prominent Green - an MEP seeking re-election this June - who has worked tirelessly for workers rights, human rights, against the war in Iraq and for effective trade unionism.

Just a quick example of how elected Greens can be effective in protecting workers' rights. In London, we have been getting councils to pay their subcontracted workers the London Living Wage (£7.45/hour, or about £2 more than the minimum wage). Our local parties have campaigned and gained public support; our elected councillors have pushed this through the councils; Jean Lambert MEP raised questions with the European Comission to clarify legal questions that are helping to persuade more reluctant councils.

This is why all Londoners need to vote to re-elect Jean this June, and donate to her campaign today.