Energy & fossil fuels

After Lancashire county council unexpectedly rejected Cuadrilla’s application to frack at Preston New Road, near Blackpool, on 29 June, I wanted to hear a bit more of the story from someone at the frontline of this monumental decision. Bob Dennett is a co-founder of Frack Free Lancashire. On 1 July, he told me a bit about the story that led to Monday’s campaign win, and the…

It’s easy to forget, but art galleries are ‘our’ galleries: they are supposed to belong to us. You might even like to think of them as having taken the place of (now defunct) churches. So how did oil money seep through their walls?

Mel Evans begins by charting the journey of arts funding in the UK. The Arts Council of Attlee’s postwar Britain was deliberately at arm’s length from the state. Thatcher and Tebbit increased government involvement, which enabled New Labour to follow…

Eviction of Borras and Holt Community Protection Camp. Photo: Dave Ellison

In January 2014, Westminster prime minister David Cameron announced that his government was ‘going all out for fracking’. (Fracking is the high-pressure hydraulic fracturing of shale rock deep underground to extract natural gas or other fossil fuels.) As an inducement to local authorities, councils were allowed to keep 100% of business rates from shale gas sites.

Defying public opinion, the government also…

The Alberta tar sands in Canada may be the largest hydrocarbon resource in the world, as well as the largest single potential source of climate-warming carbon dioxide. If the tar sands are completely exploited for fuel, 240 billion tons of carbon will be added to the atmosphere and global temperatures will rise 0.4°C from this source alone. At the same time, mining, pipelines, and ocean shipping threaten devastation in places stretching from one end of North America to the other.
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‘We have little mini-successes and we celebrate them because we need to; otherwise we’ll go stark raving mad,’ New York activist Maura Stephens said during a Peace News round-table discussion via video chat on 17 April.

During the conversation, two US and two British anti-fracking activists compared how their movements have organised, and brainstormed tactics for fighting ‘hydraulic fracturing’ for oil and gas in the future.

Stephens thinks organisers need to reflect on what is…

Nant Llesg opencast coalmine protest.
PHOTO: WALESONLINE

Desperate to stop the plans for the opencast coalmine development at Nant Llesg, campaigners staged a spectacular mock funeral ‘the death of the valley’ at Caerphilly County Borough Council’s headquarters on 22 April. The council decision is still pending.  

Ray Davies (centre) and Gerald Williams (right)
at Hedd Wyn’s cottage. PHOTO: WENDY LEWIS

On our way through North Wales, we passed through Trawsfynydd and called on Hedd Wyn’s nephew, Gerald Williams. He led us over the threshold of the poet’s isolated farmhouse amidst the beautiful mountains of Snowdonia. Hedd Wyn’s mother had kept the cottage exactly as it had been – the books with his handwritten notes on the shelves by the fireplace, the photos on the walls, the small parlour…

‘I think fracking is entirely the wrong direction for UK energy policy, and I feel that if we act now we can prevent the establishment of a fracking industry in this country,’ Laura Bannister said.

Bannister is a European election candidate from Manchester and Salford, an area currently being exploratory drilled for natural gas. She has been a member of the…

An industrial truck creeps down the road towards the gate, held up by 35 slowly-walking individuals. It could take up to two hours for the driver to arrive with equipment necessary to keep operations moving at IGas Energy’s Barton Moss fracking site just to the west of Manchester.

‘That happens every day. That’s happening right now, as we speak,’ Robbie Gillet of Frack Free Greater Manchester said in an interview, with sounds of a…

Demand for biomass is sky-rocketing in the UK. Burning wood for large-scale electricity generation is a key element of the UK government’s renewable energy policy and 42 new biomass power stations have already been proposed. Energy companies have announced that they intend to burn 68.9 million tonnes of wood a year in these power stations. This works out to eight times the UK’s total annual…

The peaceful anti-fracking protests at Balcombe in West Sussex this summer helped to reverse steadily-growing public acceptance of shale gas extraction, according to a Nottingham University report published in October:
www.tinyurl.com/peacenews963

The consortium Miller Argent have submitted a planning application to Caerphilly council for the Nant Llesg open-cast coal mine. If Miller Argent obtain planning permission, Nant Llesg near Rhymney will mine up to nine million tonnes of coal and be responsible for approximately 20 million tonnes of CO2.

Local opposition the United Valleys Action Group (UVAG) say this will be a disaster in terms of climate change. UVAG also know the impact of the dust and noise from mining on…

Balcombe, 22 September. Photo: Gabrielle Lewry

On 16 September, a high court judge adjourned an application by the West Sussex county council to remove anti-fracking protesters from Balcombe after describing it as ‘flawed’.

Justice Beverly Lang said there was a need to consider the protesters’ right to peaceful assembly.

Demonstrators have been camped along London Road…

It’s possible for every person on the planet to have a good quality of life powered entirely by renewable energy, thus avoiding runaway climate change. That’s the message of ‘Two Energy Futures’, a new interactive website launched at the end of July by the UK Tar Sands Network, with evidence drawn from the Zero Carbon Britain: Rethinking the Future report from the Centre for Alternative Technology, and the book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air by energy expert Dr David Mackay.

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