Lest we forget, just after midnight yesterday, Greenpeace activists boarded a bulk freighter carrying coal to Kingsnorth power station in Kent. After stopping the massive ship in its tracks with flares and speedboats, a number of the activists swam across the water and boarded the vessel, climbing the huge, “Eon”-emblazoned funnel and foremast. The climbers are still in position, with several days’ supply of food and water, demanding that the ship and its cargo turn back.
Said Sarah Shoraka, one of the activists on board:
“In the short term, we are trying to keep the ship from reaching the power station – it’s got enough coal to release thousands of CO2 into the atmsophere.
“In the long term, it’s about stopping the dirtiest power station for 30 years being built in the UK.”
Here’s some footage of the action. Damned inspiring (and a little bit scary …)
Some good news from our friends in the north today: the proposed eviction of anti-open cast campaigners from the Mainshill Solidarity Camp in South Lanarkshire, Scotland, has not come to pass.
The camp was set up on Friday, to protest the proposed mining of 1.7 million tones of coal from the 340-acre site in the Douglas Valley. Local residents of what is one of the most heavily mined areas in Europe – with four other mines within 5km, two of them clearly visible from the site of the protest – have been campaigning fiercely against new open cast for years, sending over 700 letters of protest against Scottish Coal’s planning application for the mine to the local council (not bad for a local population of around 1,000 people). Nevertheless, South Lanarkshire council gave the scheme the go-ahead.
As a statement by members of the Camp put it:
“This new coal mine is only one of 20 such others to have recently been given planning permission in Scotland. If we are to have any chance of limiting dangerous climate change and protecting communities from carbon-intensive industries we must take matters into our own hands.”
In what is becoming an increasingly familiar pattern, Scottish Ministers approved the Mainshill open cast in spite of its contravention of Scottish planning policy on new open cast sites, 18 houses falling within the 500m buffer zone – whose residents will have to suffer the noise, coal dust pollution and constant heavy vehicle movements in the local area. The scheme will also impact on the local environment, itself part of the Douglas Water Area of Great Landscape Value, and home to bats, otters, badgers and water voles.
Locals have been delivering supplies of food and water to the Campers throughout their stay. One, a surveyor who spoke to the Herald, said:
“I have done everything I can possibly do for them. We are surrounded by open-casts and it’s the health issues as well. This area has one of the highest cancer rates in the whole of Scotland.”
As another, Tommy Cronin, told the paper,
“It’s all about money. I grew up here and it’s always been forestry. They say they will restore it but how long will it take to be back to this?”
Workers from the company Apex have today been trying to gain access to the site, to pursue preparatory bore-holing and tree-felling work (apparently illegally: Scottish Coal have been required by the Council to carry out a wildlife survey of the site before work can go on). Some even threatened to smash the windscreen of a vehicle blocking the entrance to the site earlier today, but were forced to back down as Campers and carloads of locals gathered to block their way.
Katie Smith, from Glasgow – one of the protesters at the site – said:
“We are building tree houses and structures which will mean we can’t be evicted. One of the main reasons we are here is to support the local community. We feel they are being bullied. We are also here for environmental reasons. A lot of the activists are climate change campaigners. We want coal to be left in the ground and not burned because we are concerned about our future and the future of our children.”
Campers are aiming to stage a continuous occupation of the site, and plan to host a Tea Party and open day on Sunday 28th June, from 3pm, where “families and others from the surrounding areas will be invited to partake in fun and games whilst learning about how a protest site is run and about what can be done to protect the local environment and prevent runaway climate change.”
As activist Marcus Anderson comments, “Mainshill Solidarity Camp highlights how community resistance and direct action go hand in hand in securing a future for generations to come”.
The Mainshill Solidarity Camp are currently looking for people, food, money, building materials, climbing equipment and other materials to help keep the Camp going. You can contact them on 07806 926 040.
April 1’s Climate Camp in the City was undoubtedly something pretty special. For one day only, the street outside the climate exchange on Bishopsgate in central London became home to a thriving hub of sound, colour, laughter and excitement, as thousands thronged to participate in the first such mass protest in the square mile.
Looking back on the Camp, it all seems more than a little dreamlike. After an audacious “swoop” on the road at midday, hundreds of activists proceeded to take it over, unveiling pop-up tents, banners and costumes, blasting out music from mobile sound-systems, singing, dancing and generally creating the atmosphere of an open-air festival. One woman did the rounds handing out daffodils to an appreciative crowd. The stony faces of workers in the towering office building next to us, lined up against the glass, looked on.
This was a lot more than just a street party, though – as quickly became apparent, we were witnessing a fully-fledged Climate Camp in miniature. There were informative and involving workshops for those who wanted to know more about the key issues – from the failures of carbon trading, to the use of poetry as an activist tool, to banks’ involvement in carbon-extracting industries. (The Royal Bank of Scotland’s record on this count is particularly dismal – something worth remembering now that the bank is effectively our property.) An open-air central kitchen handed out food, while Climate Camp newspapers floated around among the crowd. Each side of the Camp for Climate Action was on display here: a plethora of educational and skills-sharing events; an atmosphere of exuberance and excitement; and the delivery of a concerted message of urgency to the self-appointed governors of the global economy.
Too right it doesn’t. Banner at the south end of the Camp.
Later in the day, and particularly around midnight, things took a turn for the worse. The police had been “kettling” the Camp throughout most of the day, blocking either end of the road and preventing those inside from leaving. They now repeatedly brought a shocking amount of force to bear, charging and striking out with batons and shields against peaceful protesters – many of them sitting on the ground, hands held up in a gesture of non-violence. Eventually, sometime shortly after midnight, waves of police pushed back the protesters, and the Camp was shut down. Frightening as this experience inevitably was, it failed to dent the generally inspiring nature of the event. Seeing the assembled campers exercise such an unwavering commitment to non-violence in the face of concerted police aggression, indeed, was something of an inspiration in itself.
In the wake of the political storm that has sprung up over recent weeks around the violent tactics used by the police, it is worth reflecting on just how routine the intimidation, aggression and brutality from police and security guards against such protests has been, since time immemorial. The fact that it took the death of an innocent man –along with an armada of citizen journalists – to bring this to light is a depressing reflection on the general level of vigilance exercised by the media in recent years. At actions over the last six years – as long as I have been involved in these protests – I have witnessed police Forward Intelligence Teams photographing the faces of protesters in broad daylight; riot police exercising thuggish and brutal repression against three peaceful Climate Camps; and officers concealing their numbers and confining members of the public, in gross violation of their most basic human rights, during protests at the G8 in Scotland. Yet only recently have these routine practices been widely publicised.
Nevertheless, even amid this repressive environment, the vibrant energy of this movement looks unlikely to be deterred. Popular movements in Britain have a long history of disobedience and rebellion, much of it in conditions many orders of magnitude worse than those faced by protesters today. In spite of this, the unjust laws and repressive measures were never able to contain these continual upsurges of protest and dissent. With the stakes as high as they are, they certainly will not do so this time.
Power utility E.ON has joined the banks’ latest craze: asking for taxpayers to fund their risk-taking.
E.ON’s UK CEO Paul Golby is demanding £1billion of taxpayers’ money to build Kingsnorth power station with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. Both critics and supporters of CCS believe the technology is several decades away, and may never work.
“We cannot be confident in the product until we have seen it work at commercial scale,” he said. “But the levels of investment and technical risk required to do this are too great for a commercial organisation to bear alone – particularly given other competing priorities for increasingly scarce and expensive capital.”
So even E.ON believe it is unlikely that CCS will work – Golby admits that “the economic benefits of getting CCS right could be huge for UK plc.” But not huge enough for it to be a sound investment for E.ON, obviously.
Elsewhere this week, Ed Miliband was grilled on Kingsnorth at the premiere of the Age of Stupid film – see him try to wriggle out of it here with the same excuse of CCS.
Last week there was a massive mobilisation in the US against the Capitol coal power station – more than 2500 people braved the snow to shut the power station down – with almost immediate results, with the US government deciding to convert it to burn much cleaner gas!
At 9am today a group of activists began to disrupt the operations of Scottish Coal at the Rosewell open-cast coal mine in the Midlothians. Some of the 10 activists stopping work today are local residents.
They climbed onto digging machinery to prevent works and climbed onto trucks to prevent coal from leaving the Rosewell site for 2 hours this morning. Then police arrived but no-one were arrested.
One activist said “the burning of coal to generate electricity is one of the most polluting and destructive of all human activities. We cannot deal with climate change while companies like Scottish coal continue to profit from coal exploitation.”
A local resident said “With a government committed to expanding opencast, deep mine and new coal power generation across Scotland, asking politicians will achieve nothing. Peaceful direct action is the only way people are going to stop coal expansion.”
Another said. “We are opposed to this climate disaster of an energy policy and to the scarring of scotland’s countryside with these horrible open-cast coal mines, Rosewell and Scottish Coal’s other operations have and will continue to be met by resistance from local people taking direct action.”
This action was done by individuals who are not affiliated to any particular group.
This is another example of the growing resistance to new coal in Scotland.
I was going to give this post a jokey title – something like “good news everybody!” – but in the end it didn’t really feel appropriate. There’s a news item on the BBC today about the latest stats from coal mining in China – turns out that this year the number of deaths of coal miners in China fell 15% last year – which sounds good until you learn that the number of deaths was still about 91,000. Bloody hell.
*UPDATE* – Looks like someone had an attack of the badly-formed statistics – or the Chinese State is pulling a cover up… (See below.)
It’s worth remembering that a lot of the power China generates goes into powering its export industries, making stuff to support our Western lifestyles. For all that China is invoked to justify the expansion of coal in the UK, it’s pretty clear that China is trapped in something of an environmental nightmare when it comes to coal. Whether it’s local air pollution and the health impacts of that, the massivel levels of carbon emissions it’s producing, or the human cost, that’s certainly worth thinking about.
You don’t have to have been indoctrinated by 8 years of Tomorrow’s World to realise that exciting scientists aren’t the norm. It’s worth remembering that scientists are basically just the kids in school who wanted to know how things worked, and climate scientists are no different. In fact, they’re the kids in school who wanted to know how the weather worked. (Or, possibly, they graduated and couldn’t get into investment banking).
It must be tough, being that kind of kid, to have ended up as a climate scientist. Because the thing we have to undersatand is that climate scientists are the most closely scrutinised groups of scientists to have ever lived – by the media, by politicians, by frightening activists like us. No wonder they usually keep themselves to themselves – conferences, peer review, the ivory towers of academia – it’s just a lot less scary than the world of ‘political reality’.
But for every rule, there’s an exception. In this case, the exception is James Hansen. The super-grandadio of climate science. So, while he does occasionally come out with some “sciencey” lines like this…
It is difficult to predict time of collapse in such a nonlinear problem … An ice sheet response time of centuries seems probable, and we cannot rule out large changes on decadal time-scales once wide-scale surface melt is underway.
… he’s also not afraid of stepping back and applying his scientific reasoning to society and politics and simply plain old-fashioned telling it as it is:
The people who are affected [by climate change] in the long-term: the young, the unborn and nature, do not have much voice in our decisions. That is what we have to change and I think young people are beginning to recognise the situation and we are going to see more and more actions to try to force the political systems to respond for the good of young people and future generations, but so far the fossil fuel industry has had more influence on our policies than our young people have.
And:
Coal, specifically prompt phase-out of coal emissions, is the one critical element in solution of the global warming problem, in preservation of a planet resembling the one on which civilization developed.
Oh and:
I think that scientists need to help connect the dots, because otherwise the dots are connected by special interests. The public doesn’t easily connect all the dots themselves, especially when public affairs offices at scientific agencies are controlled by political appointees.
Then there’s:
It’s becoming dire, because we have to start within the next few years on a track—on a different track. We have to realize that we have to get to energy sources beyond fossil fuels, and we need to do that sooner.
And finally, saving the best til last:
It seems to me that young people, especially, should be doing whatever is necessary to block construction of dirty (no CCS) coal-fired power plants.
So, on balance, I’ve decided that James can be my honourary grandad climate scientist. And if you’re doing stuff around coal and want backup from the pre-eminent climate scientist in the world, maybe drop a few Hansen quotes into your press releases, legal defence, of maybe just down the pub.
Remember – it’s cool to want to know how stuff works, but it’s even cooler to want to go out and tell everyone about it.
We found an interesting article in the Hexham Currant a while back, which showed how a proposed new mine in Northumberland – while causing years of blasting, noise, dust and general destruction – would feed a coal-fired power station for only 9 days.
That got us thinking.
So we rolled out our maths geek and set her to work using the Government’s energy figures, found in the “Digest of UK Energy Statistics” – or DUKEs for civil servants under 55 – which are few and far between!
And this is what she came back to us with…
[For those of you with an aversion to maths, you can skip down to the "headline conlusions" below the image]
1. Last year, the UK used 52.5 million tonnes of coal to make electricity (DUKEs, 2.7 cell M17).
2. That 52.5 million tonnes produced 129.4 terrawatt hours of electricity (DUKEs, 5.6 cell B261), a very large amount of energy! 129,400,000,000 kWh – like leaving your toaster on for 130,000 years, or leaving 130,000 toasters on for 1 year – whatever. Anyway, it’s a lot.
3. By dividing, the two figures, we see that every 1 TWh of electricity requires 406,000 tonnes of coal to be burnt.
What’s the significance of that I hear you ask?
4. Well, 1 TWh of electricity is roughly equal to the amount of electricity we use every day in the UK (DUKEs 5.6 cell M261 divided by 365 days in a year, apparently!).
5. Taking those figures, we see that the electricity used in a single day in the UK, is equivalent to 400,000 tonnes of coal being burnt.
5b. Which incidentally, creates around 1.2 million tonnes of CO2 – the same as the annual emissions of Burkina Faso with a population of 13 million – one day in the UK, one year in Burkina Faso! Shit!
So, the headline conclusion – for non-energy geeks – is that a 400,000 tonne opencast mine, would power the UK for only 1 day…
The following proposed mines would power the UK for:
These mines, on average, will blast, dig and extract coal for around 4-6 years… Ffos-y-fran, the largest open cast mine in the UK will operate for 17 years, only 36 metres from the nearest homes… and that’s only enough coal to power the UK for one, single, solitary month.
17 years of blasting, noise, dust and asthma!
That doesn’t seem to make much sense to us.
Whip up an offshore wind farm and you’ve got power for 20 years without destroying local communities. Plus, you haven’t destroyed the global community by causing irreversible climate change. Plus you’ve created more jobs per unit of energy than any fossil fuel. Win-win-win, surely?
Try telling that to a 60-year old energy dinosaur in the Department for Energy!
Climate Camp, central London. Ace.
Too right it doesn’t. Banner at the south end of the Camp.
