The 2012 Olympic Games will open in exactly two years' time.  London is set to put on a dazzling display, and just a couple of miles away from the Olympic stadium in Stratford, we’ll be cheering the action on from our office in Hackney.

Among the first strategic moves by the new UK government is to kill the Sustainable Development Commission. This is deeply misguided.

photo: wallyg

This week in the United States, a new law called the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protections Act (or the 'Dodd-Frank Reform Act' for short!) passed both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and is expected to be enacted by the President later this week.  Ground-breaking 'anti-corruption' provisions in this new legislation will have big implications for the extractive industries, and global justice.

ClientEarth successfully held its first event in the UK parliament earlier this week, co-hosted with FairPensions.  The topic for discussion was company transparency on environmental and social issues; the event title 'Avoiding environmental Enrons: Environmental and social issues as financial risks, and the future of company reporting'.

Shortly before joining ClientEarth I found myself standing on a verge in Germany, hiding behind a tree, dressed as a carbon emission. To the average onlooker, I was a young man who had lost his mind. To the trained eye, however, I was protesting against loopholes in the Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry strand of the UN climate negotiations that would allow developed nations to ‘hide’ emissions through logging. Luckily for me and my colleagues in the UK Youth Climate Coalition, all dressed as greenhouse gases, we were being passed by lots of trained eyes:  the negotiators attending the UN climate talks in Bonn in preparation for the Copenhagen follow-up in Mexico this December.

photo: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Reto Stöckli

Deepwater Horizon has spelled out in no uncertain terms the risks that extractive companies take with the environment and people's lives on a daily basis, and the impunity with which they are used to doing so.  It is long overdue that this recipe for disaster gets the degree of attention that Deepwater has, and Deepwater is a catastrophe worthy of attention.  But now we need to see the bigger picture.