Climate change & climate action

8 March 2013News

There has been a furious response to the news that transnational power company EDF is suing 21 anti-climate change activists for £5m for shutting down an EDF power station in Nottinghamshire for a week.

A petition by the parents of one of the activists gained 50,000 signatures online in its first week, and a call has gone out to shut down the annual EDF Talk Power Conference on 1 May.

Two chimneys at the West Burton gas-fired power station were occupied last October by 16 ‘No Dash for Gas’ campaigners to protest at the government’s plan to build up to 40 new gas-fired power stations (see PN 2552-2553).

On 20 February, 21 ‘No Dash for Gas’ activists…

4 February 2013Feature

PN’s Gabriel Carlyle reports on the sometimes shambolic, always peaceful and often heroic resistance to the tree-felling in Combe Haven for the Hastings-Bexhill Link Road, and the lessons learned.

‘I think we may be about to get steamrollered.’

Fellow activist Emily Johns and I had just returned from a packed public meeting in Crowhurst, the small village northwest of Hastings that would be severely affected by the planned Bexhill-Hastings Link Road (BHLR). In the final evaluation the participants had been near-unanimous in saying how energised they felt by the meeting. One man even said that he’d never felt more optimistic about our prospects for stopping the road.

1 December 2012News

Tories resuscitate long-dead road schemes.

Zombie roads hungry for public money gather outside the office of Hastings MP Amber Rudd, 30 October. Photo: Milan Rai

On 30 October, campaigners against the Bexhill-Hastings Link Road (BHLR) staged a battle between ‘road busters’ and ‘zombie roads’ outside the office of Hastings MP Amber Rudd.

Combe Haven Defenders wanted to highlight her role – and that of the chancellor, George Osborne, to whom she is parliamentary private…

1 December 2012Feature

Claire Fauset spent a week occupying a chimney

I’ve protested against coal: helping to organise the Climate Camps at Kingsnorth and at Drax; debunking the hype about ‘clean coal’ for Corporate Watch; and taking part in a Coal Caravan visiting open cast sites across the North East. And, in a lot of ways, we have won on coal: Kingsnorth has been shelved, and existing coal power stations are coming to the end of their lifespans with new plans stuck at the starting blocks. But the answer hasn’t been the clean green future we’ve all been…

17 October 2012Feature

Cameron commits £2bn to drones while chopping disability benefits

The Conservative-led government is committing billions to military spending while forcing through massive cuts in jobs and services, and reducing support for badly-needed green technologies.

The government has already spent £2bn on developing and deploying pilotless drone aircraft over the past five years, using some of them to kill an unknown number of Afghan civilians…

17 October 2012Review

Peter McManners, Fly and be Damned: What Now For Aviation and Climate Change (Zed, 2012; 168pp; £14.99

Fly and be Damned is nothing if not ambitious. It outlines what the author, Peter McManners, believes are measures which could usher in 'the third golden age of aviation'. An era where we could enjoy all the advantages flying brings without destroying the climate. He argues that the technology to make this possible could be developed if the aviation industry was incentivised to do so.

The key to facilitating change, McManners argues, is to make the necessary resources available to the…

17 October 2012Comment

There are converging agendas for different movements - anti-cuts, climate, disarmament, labour movement...

It is not enough for the anti-cuts movement to be a defensive, responsive movement. It is not enough to point out the flaws in the arguments for austerity (as the False Economy website does so brilliantly).
If we are going to have a world worth living in, we are going to have to merge together the agendas of the anti-cuts movement, the green movement, the labour movement and the peace movement.

We are already arguing for…

17 October 2012Feature

A Hastings Alliance speech at the Combe Haven Defenders' camp.

For those who know the valley – and the smaller valleys that feed into it – you will already appreciate the peacefulness of the places, and a sense of remoteness that is utterly amazing considering that just over the hill is a population of 140,000 people.


You'll also know that the valley contains records of human habitation going back 4,000 years, with evidence of bronze age settlements, Roman pottery and Saxon trackways. The valley was certainly part of the theatre of…

17 October 2012Feature

A warning of things to come: a temporary anti-road camp on the South Coast

At the end of September, a new local campaigning group calling itself 'Combe Haven Defenders' staged a weekend camp on the site of the proposed Bexhill-Hastings Link Road on England's South Coast. The temporary camp brought together 200 people with a shared concern for saving the valley and a willingness to explore the possibilities for action.


It also attracted a lot of media attention, including the Sunday…

17 October 2012Feature

A new climate-labour coalition.

Let us agree about climate change. It is happening fast, potentially spiralling out of control. The latest messages from scientists who have been measuring the shrinking arctic ice cap demonstrate that the situation is dire.

However, our problem is that very few people are heeding the climate threat. 

It has been said that the environmental and climate movement is the 'largest mass movement ever' (Paul Hawken in Blessed Unrest, Penguin 2007). Maybe. But the movement is…

16 October 2012Feature

One of Britain's most effective environmentalists explains how the government's roads programme could be stopped in its tracks at the very beginning.

Road building is back on the national agenda. Courtesy of the chancellor, George Osborne. It had been assumed that major new roads were a thing of the past, killed off by the 'anti-roads' protests of the 1990s. But, in an attempt to pull the country out of recession, the treasury has been looking to invest in infrastructure projects, including new roads.

The first major scheme to come on-stream could be the £100 million, 5.6 km Bexhill to Hastings Link Road. It would cut straight…

25 September 2012News in Brief

On 7 September, two Bristol-based anti-fracking protesters were found not guilty of aggravated trespass, but a third was convicted of failing to leave as soon as practicable, at the Cuadrilla Resource’s test drilling rig beside the Ribble estuary in Lancashire. The three had shut down the gas-extraction operation for 13 hours on 1 December 2011.

During the trial it was established that Cuadrilla had been drilling for two months longer than allowed at the time of arrests.

28 August 2012News in Brief

On 17 July, four members of “Frack Off”, which campaigns against fracking for shale gas, were found guilty by Preston magistrates’ court of ‘disrupting lawful activity’, and sentenced to two years’ conditional discharges with £750 costs each.

During the four-day trial, expert witnesses testified to the threat to the global climate and human health posed by the expansion of fracking.

The four had occupied the Cuadrilla Resources drilling rig off Lancashire for 11 hours last…

28 August 2012News

Coal site shutdown

On 14 July, 45 people invaded Scottish Coal’s Mainshill open-cast coal site near Douglas, South Lanarkshire, and shut it down for the day. Machines including a ‘prime mover’ were occupied and all work was stopped completely.

The occupation was part of an action camp held in Douglas Valley in the Southern Uplands from 12-18 July. Other actions included blockading the entrance of Broken Cross open-cast coal site and ‘open-casting’ the lawn belonging to Lord Home, who makes…

2 July 2012News

Ignored by the mainstream media (who preferred to concentrate on the Queen's Jubilee), scientists are warning that the Earth could be approaching a catastophic "state shift" leading to mass extinctions.

On 23 June, Climate Siren activists hung banners on the gates of Buckingham palace. PHOTO: Peter Marshall

The human race may be pushing the Earth towards a rapid, catastrophic and irreversible ‘state shift’ leading to mass extinctions, according to a paper by 22 leading scientists published in the world’s top scientific journal, ­Nature, in the run-up to the failed Rio+20 environment conference. The Nature paper set out possible measures for avoiding or limiting the state shift, which may…