‘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…
A demonstration in Oxford in February by COIN (Climate Outreach and Information Network), who are fundraising to deliver community climate training sessions in the wake of the recent flooding in England and Wales. www.climateoutreach.org.uk PHOTO: COIN
Rose Bridger has written a book on aviation quite unlike any other. In its scope, it is unique.
It ranges from the technical details of aircraft to the impact of new greenfield airports on poor farmers in India, from biofuels to aerotropolises.
Plane Truth is a book for activists. Bridger doesn’t hide where she is coming from. It is written from the perspective of an environmentalist: somebody who is concerned about the trafficking of arms across the world,…
On 9 January, a three-day trial in Brighton resulted in acquittals for 10 people arrested for blockading the drilling site near Balcombe on 26 July. This was the first of over 20 trials arising out of protests against energy giant Cuadrilla’s attempts to drill for oil and gas near the West Sussex village.
All 10 were acquitted of ‘obstruction of the highway’. Defence lawyers argued that as the B2036 London Road at Balcombe was closed to…
Although it’s only a small booklet accompanying a very short DVD, produced on a low budget, and it would be easy to overlook it, this new resource from the Movement for the Abolition of War (MAW) is more important than it at first looks. After all, it deals with possibly the biggest global concern for nonviolent revolutionaries today: how war and climate change are inextricably linked and why we need to work on them as one issue.
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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…
On 17 October, five ‘No Dash for Gas’ protesters successfully appealed against their sentences of 150 hours of community service. Nottingham crown court reduced their sentences to conditional discharges.
A year earlier, ‘No Dash for Gas’ members had occupied the chimneys of West Burton gas-fired power station in Nottinghamshire to protest against government plans to build up to 20 new gas-fired power stations (see PN 2552-3).
When the 21 climate activists came to trial…
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
We are of the generation who came of age in the 1980s, terrified that the world might end at any moment through nuclear holocaust. In the decades since then, the people of the world have grown less frightened of a nuclear war.
The risk is still there, as the number of nuclear weapon states increases, and conflicts continue around nuclear tinderboxes, but the fear has declined.
Recent studies suggest that even a ‘small’ nuclear war between India and Pakistan, with each…
Since creating the post-religious Church of Stop Shopping in 1999, the Reverend Billy has held services in churches, community centres, forests, fields, parking lots, shopping malls and – above all – inside brand-name stores across the US and Europe, preaching against consumerism, and for economic and ecological justice.
The creation of actor Bill Talen, the Reverend Billy is…
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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No Dash for Gas spent months planning an action camp called ‘Reclaim the Power’ at the new West Burton gas power station near Nottingham, the power station we occupied for a week last autumn.
Then, just two weeks before the event, we made a momentous decision to change the venue and indeed the focus of our camp.
We realised that now is a crucial time for climate and fuel poverty campaigners to show solidarity with the people of Balcombe in West Sussex, and others around the…
While ‘[m]any people believe that America’s addiction to automobiles is a cultural problem’, in reality – as cartoonist Andy Singer explains in this wonderful ‘pictographic examination’ of the American transport system – the country’s ‘automobile addiction has more to do with politics, government agencies, and the [US] tax structure’.
Indeed, in the 1920s, most North Americans lived in cities, many of which had great public transit and inter-urban rail systems, leading the president…
The biggest-ever US demonstration against climate change
brought 35,000 activists from 30 states to Washington DC
in February. Photo: 350.org / project survival media
The world’s most important CO2 monitoring station recorded short-term CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere above 400 parts per million (ppm), a level not seen for three million years.
Measurements at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii (and elsewhere) show CO2 concentrations…
