Climate change & climate action

On 4 August, the first day of Climate Camp, Paul Morozzo, 41, was one of five environmental activists to publicly defy bail conditions banning him from attending the camp, knowing this could lead to days, perhaps weeks of imprisonment. Paul was arrested at an entrance to the Camp (the others were able to enter, apparently because of police incompetence) and served a week in prison. He was released by Selby magistrates on 11 August. He is believed to be the first person in Britain to be…

PN: Tell us a bit about yourself: your background and how you got interested in climate change issues?

ML: I've been fascinated by the natural world since I can remember - especially untouched places like mountains. I think the realisation of so much wild beauty being destroyed was my first impetus.

When I was at university I edited an environment page in the student newspaper, and I remember being furious about the M3 [motorway] cutting at Twyford Down at the time -…

Climate activists are collecting funds to cover the E30,000 court costs of Tannie Nyboe and Stine Gry Jonassen, who on 1 June were sentenced by the Danish high court to two months in prison (plus two months suspended) for their involvement in nonviolent civil disobedience on 16 December 2009 during the failed climate negotiations in Copenhagen. The main evidence against Tannie and Stine, Danish spokespeople for the global network Climate Justice Action, was that they allegedly shouted “push…

The trouble with short story anthologies is that you can never quite tell what you’re going to get. Unless you are familiar with all the writers in the collection, you just have to dive in and hope for the best. Welcome to the Greenhouse is a typical anthology in this regard. Since I’m not a sci-fi fan I’d never heard of any of the authors, and so I dipped in not knowing what to expect.

What I got was a mixed bag. Some fine stories, some dull, some too badly written to finish. The…

On 14 April, the high court ruled that police acted illegally when they cordoned (“kettled”) Climate Camp protesters in Bishopsgate, London, at the G20 protest on 1 April 2009. The case was brought by two people who were among 5,000 kettled by police for five hours.

The judgment does not rule the tactic of kettling illegal, but places limits on its use, concluding that: “The police may only take such preventive action as a last resort catering for situations about to descend into…

This book argues that global warming and bulging human waistlines are products of the same global problems. In Western societies, the car and the television have curtailed human physical activity to unprecedented levels, while a rampant food industry pushes more and more energy-dense foods. The developing world follows our oil-addicted lead, whether it wants to or not.

Fatness is not a personal problem: it is a political problem, as is climate change. Effective, essential action on…

In mid-March, activists at the Happendon Wood Action Camp disrupted the South Lanarkshire council planning committee meeting that gave approval to Scottish Coal’s plans to develop Happendon Wood for opencast coal mining.

On 8 March, as the planning committee convened to rubber-stamp the decision, activists set off two stink bombs to show just how much the council stinks. Outside, activists briefly occupied part of the council HQ’s roof, and unfurled a banner reading “South Lanarkshire…

Your interview with Phil Thornhill (PN 2527) on “The capitalism question and climate change” shows a regrettable reluctance on his part to face the facts and a lack of joined up thinking.

Climate change is caused by capitalism. Organisations such as the World Development Movement, which is linked to the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, have made this clear in their publications: eg The UK’s role in forced migration of climate refugees (2008) and The International Politics of Climate…

Over the past couple of months THWAC (The Happendon Wood Action Camp) has been a hive of activity, with direct action and community resistance taking place all over the Douglas Valley in South Lanarkshire and beyond.

In November the camp hosted its second gathering and on Monday 8 November, 11 activists entered Mainshill Opencast Coal Site, stopping work on site for an hour by jumping on dumper trucks and blocking the haulage road.

Two days later, an early morning…

Two separate trials of 26 activists arrested for trying to shut down Ratcliffe on Sour, one of Britain’s most polluting power stations for a week have energised the climate justice movement. The activists were among 114 people arrested in a dawn raid on Easter Monday 2009 in a widely-criticised policing operation that saw officers smashing their way into a school in Nottingham.

In the first trial, at Nottingham Crown Court in late November, 20 people were tried for conspiracy to…

Speaking at a public meeting in May 2008, Green Party leader and MP to be, Caroline Lucas noted that the language of fear and disaster surrounding climate change is both “deeply scary and deeply unhelpful.” According to Lucas “trying to terrify people into action” simply doesn’t work.

Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics at the Australian National University, doesn’t seem to have got the memo because Requiem for a Species is a deeply terrifying read.

According to…

As PN goes to press, 20 climate activists are beginning the most significant trial for climate activism in the UK since the acquittal of the Kingsnorth Six in 2008. Their crime? Planning to shut down the UK’s third-largest source of emissions – E.ON’s Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal-fired station near Nottingham.

They were among 114 activists arrested in a night-time police raid on the eve of the action in April last year. (Another six, who hadn’t decided to participate at the time of arrest,…

The Scottish Resources Group (SRG), an umbrella company that includes Scottish Coal, has submitted an application for a “mixed use development” across a 230 hectare area which would include leisure and industrial expansion. The aim is to achieve “planning in principle” to make the land a more attractive investment to developers. The Happenden Wood Action Camp (THWAC) thinks the application helps to support opencast, for example the Coal Authority has stated that if the industrial development…

Fifteen members of the Welsh Youth Forum on Sustainable Development (WYFSD), Gwerin y Coed (the Woodcraft Folk in Wales) and representatives of other youth organisations spent five days in the saddle, cycling from Machynlleth to Cardiff Bay to hand deliver a petition to Jane Davidson, Minister for the Environment, Sustainability and Housing. Delivered at the Welsh Assembly Government building on Wednesday 22 September, the petition called for better cycling provision in Wales.

…

“This is not a rally, a demo or a march,” read the flier. “This is mass direct action that aims to disrupt the flow of oil into London. Welcome to the Crude Awakening.” Crikey.

Following a prompt early-morning rendezvous at Euston (the website had warned that we would be leaving immediately), half-an-hour of standing around waiting (which my affinity group utilized to staple-on our home-made polar bear masks), and some fun-and-games on the tube (“Like the badger mask mate!”),…