At the end of June, hundreds of people joined a mass action camp blockading energy company Cuadrilla’s Preston New Road (PNR) fracking site in Lancashire, three years after Lancashire county council rejected the company’s application to drill for shale gas.
Anti-fracking network Reclaim the Power organised ‘Block Around the Clock’ as a 48-hour non-stop non-arrestable festival of resistance…
On 12 July, Ireland became the first country to commit itself to completely divesting from fossil fuels. The country’s €8bn sovereign wealth fund will sell €300m of investments in 150 oil, gas and coal companies within the next five years.
Fossil fuel companies are defined as ones that have 20 percent or more of their revenues from exploring for, extracting or refining fossil fuels.
In June, climate group 350.org noticed that oil and gas company Shell had recognised ‘…
At the end of March, I travelled to Stafford to attend the second Fossil Free UK national gathering as a representative of Divest East Sussex – one of scores of local groups campaigning to get universities and local councils to ditch their investments in the fossil fuel industries (coal, oil and gas).
I’d arrived insanely early. Rapidly exhausting the delights of the town centre, I retreated to a bench in Victoria Park, beside the river Sow, where a young man with a guitar…
According to longtime activist and author Jeremy Brecher, ‘we are witnessing the birth of a global nonviolent constitutional insurgency’ to prevent catastrophic climate change. In this short and timely book he attempts to explain how and why this insurgency has emerged and seeks to ‘[lay] out a strategy for climate insurgents in the US’.
The ‘why’ of the insurgency is a relatively straightforward matter. PR aside, governments and corporations have thus far failed to take…
There can be few more dogged campaigners than David Polden.
When I arrived at the Jobs and Climate conference on 10 March at 10am, the start of the 45-minute registration period, the seasoned 77-year-old peace campaigner was already there, distributing flyers to the general public. Believing that the event would start at 10am, David had been there since 9.15am. Given that no one else had arrived during the intervening period, it was a miracle that he hadn’t given up.
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The two-week COP23 climate talks in Bonn, Germany, in November were met with a 25,000-strong march; a 4,500-strong mine invasion (above right); the occupation of a nearby coal-fired power station; a banner-hang on a coal ship in Bonn itself;…
On 3 November, 10 Greenpeace anti-fracking activists were acquitted of highway obstruction by Blackpool magistrates court. The 10 had locked themselves together for eight hours, blockading the entrance to the Cuadrilla shale gas exploration site at Preston New Road near Blackpool in May.
In his judgement, the district judge said: ‘I have to consider location, duration, interference with the rights of others and overall reasonableness. If the crown cannot show that these defendants…
In JG Ballard’s classic novel, The Drowned World, people are struggling for survival on a post-apocalyptic, overheating planet. A ‘sudden instability in the sun’ has unleashed increased solar radiation, melting the polar ice caps and causing global temperatures to rise by a few degrees each year. Once-temperate areas, such as Europe and North America, have become flooded…
At the end of August, 800 people were arrested as over 6,000 climate justice activists gathered in western Germany for the Rhineland Climate Camp, taking part in different protests against brown coal mining in the area. The arrests came during the Ende Gelände (‘Here and No Further’) weekend of mass civil disobedience involving 3,000 people. Affinity groups crossed fields (see above) to enter the Tagebau Garzweiler lignite coal mine or to block coal trains to the…
Ellen Gibson: It’s been a slogan for a long time: ‘Think global, act local’. I think divestment is one of the campaigns that really tangibly offers people an opportunity to do that. It taps into the institutions and things that they have control over locally, but make a statement at a global level.
I think that’s a really, really powerful thing for people because it’s really getting to the heart of the climate change problem. It isn’t…
You never actually own a lock-on....
Local families, councillors and anti-nuclear power activists joined the first days of the ‘Rolling Resistance’ month of anti-fracking action in Lancashire organised by local groups and national climate activist network Reclaim the Power.
As PN went to press, we were half-way through the month of action, which aimed to disrupt work every single day in July at the Preston New Road site near Preston, owned by oil and gas company Cuadrilla.…
At the heart of this book lies the unresolvable dilemma between economic growth and ecological sustainability. Its key contribution is to combine a global study of the Anthropocene (the ‘proposed epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems’ – Wikipedia) with an anthropological analysis of how it is perceived locally. The result is an informative, multi-scaled account of our fast-paced times.
Over five chapters, Eriksen…
Montage of 2005 Hurricane Katrina damage in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, USA (showing the cargo ship M/V Caribbean Clipper and fishing boats pushed ashore near the bayou) and David Attenborough. Photos: NOAA, agency of US Federal Government; and Malcolm McCallum via wikimedia Commons
Sometimes Mother Nature gives climate change activists a boost. She tried in the summer of 1988. She tried again in August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina bullseyed New Orleans. She tried again in the long hot summer…
On 8 May, a wedding was broken up on the steps of the London headquarters of the Church of England.
Christ’s bride (representing the church) was about to be given in marriage to the fossil fuel industry, when Jesus objected and persuaded the bride to break her engagement with fossil fuels and to seek forgiveness.
Christian Climate Action’s sketch was one of dozens of actions around the UK during the Global Divestment Mobilisation (5 – 13 May).
Thousands of people…
Climate activists block the rail head terminal road at Ffos-y-frân on 21 April. PHOTO: COAL ACTION NETWORK.
On 8 May, five Welsh activists learned the price of nonviolent action they had taken in April to save lives and mitigate environmental harms. Sentencing them to 18 months’ conditional discharge, magistrates in Merthyr Tydfil also ordered them to pay compensation of £10,000 to the Miller Argent mining company plus court costs of £525.
On 21 April, environmental activists had ‘…
