Written yesterday for The Guardian's Comment is free.

Today's Greenpeace demo at Heathrow upped the ante of climate change activism. But if that's what it takes to get the government to act...

In 1971, the United States government proposed testing its nuclear arsenal near the tiny island of Amchitka - a wildlife paradise off the west coast of Alaska. A number of protest groups sprang up. One particular group of people came together with the idea to charter a boat - the Phyllis Cormack - and sail it into the nuclear testing site. Through placing themselves in the area of the bomb blast, they wanted to draw a line in the sand, and to make sure that the whole world would bear witness to what their government was doing. Later, the US government called off its tests. Greenpeace was born.

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Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology promises to remove dangerous greenhouse gas emissions from the coal power generation process before it gets into the atmosphere. As such it has been presented as a sort of fossil-fuel Holy Grail. The trouble with CCS is that no-one knows when - if ever - it will be commercially available. At the moment there are only a few small scale demonstration plants.

See all Kingsnorth updates.

By Joss Garman, writing for Comment is Free yesterday from the conveyor belt.

Britain's biggest greenhouse gas polluter plans to build a new coal-fired power station, which is why I've been chained to a conveyor belt today.

Al Gore recently expressed surprise that there weren't thousands of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from building new coal-fired power stations; this morning, I was part of team of 60 trying to do just that - shutting down a coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent where the owners want to build a brand new station. I'm with one team stopping the conveyor belts by pressing the emergency stop buttons and chaining ourselves to the mechanism while at the same time another group are scaling the smokestack and painting "Gordon Bin It" in 10ft-high letters down the side. The Kingsnorth station has enough coal in its boilers to function for a few hours. After that is used up, sometime this afternoon it will cease to emit the estimated 20,000 tonnes of CO2 that it emits every day.