Borras and Holt community protection camp. Photo: Kelvin Mason
The newly-elected Conservative government is set to follow through on David Cameron’s infamous 2014 pledge to go ‘all out for fracking’. They will also cancel subsidies for new onshore wind turbines. Allowing free-market dogma to dictate ecocide rather than plan a sustainable energy future, this government is contemptuous of the greatest moral challenge of our age, climate change.
So dire is the impact of human…
2008 photo of re-elected Conservative MP, and former Ecologist editor,
Zac Goldsmith, who was at the launch of COIN’s report on the centre-right in 2013. Photo: Annie Mole
The UK election results on 7 May have left many climate activists dejected as they had pinned their hopes on the Labour party championing climate action over the next five years. But what should they do now?
Climate activists have traditionally been radically-minded, focused on the transformations…
Climate Warriors blockade of Newcastle coal port in Australia, on 17 October 2014.
Photo: 350.org
Since international climate negotiations began a quarter of a century ago, annual greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 60 per cent.
As we approach yet another climate summit this November in Paris, the question for the climate protection movement is not just can some kind of agreement be reached, but how can we reverse the continuing climate catastrophe over the…
Time to Act on Climate Change marchers sit down in The Strand, London,
21 March 2015. Photo: Milan Rai.
Two of the most important things the next British government will do are: take part in the Paris climate negotiations in December, and decide on the replacement (or not) of the Trident nuclear weapon system next year.
On both issues, smaller, more progressive parties like the Scottish National Party, the Green Party and Plaid Cymru are likely to have a bigger impact…
On 2 March, after five years of action by Earth Quaker Action Team, PNC bank announced a shift in its policy that will effectively cease its financing of mountaintop-removal coal mining in the Appalachia mountain region in the eastern United States.
This marks a major turnaround for the seventh-largest bank in the US, which for years refused to budge on this issue. After more than 125 actions, their desire to continue business as usual proved no match for Earth Quaker…
Elements of a campaign by Frack Free Wales came together in January when Ceredigion council voted to become the first ‘frack-free’ local authority in Wales.
Fracking is shorthand for ‘hydraulic fracturing’ for oil or gas, underground coal gasification, and coal-bed methane, all of which threaten Wales.
None of these fuels exist in Ceredigion, however. The council’s decision reflected its commitment to moving away from all fossil fuels, which drive climate change.…
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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Coming, as it does, in the wake of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent warning that global warming is on course to inflict ‘severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts’ on the planet, this book couldn’t be more timely or important.
To make the necessary reduction in carbon emissions, Klein explains, the world needs to institute immediate, transformational change on the scale of the American New Deal of the 1930s or the national mobilisations during the Second…
It’s been a symbol of resistance to the third runway at Heathrow for four-and-a-half years, but after a July court ruling, the campaigners behind a community space in Sipson are under threat of eviction.
The ‘Grow Heathrow’ campaign began in 2010, when activists took over a neglected property on the site of the proposed new runway for Heathrow airport. Since then, the group has been fighting a battle in court to remain on the land.
In mid-July, the high court ruled in…
On 17 October, 30 Pacific Climate Warriors from 12 different Pacific islands are arriving in Australia to paddle traditional canoes they have built themselves into the harbour of the world’s largest coal port – Newcastle – to stop coal exports for a day.
Newcastle port shipped 150m tonnes of coal in 2013, and is set to expand its capacity by another 70m tonnes a year. The Pacific Climate Warriors, supported by 350.org, describe the carbon emissions of the coal and gas industries…
Co-ordinated by Friends of the Earth Cymru, 5 July was a ‘Wales Against Fracking’ day of action.
Across Wales, groups mounted events to gather signatures on a petition to the Welsh government for a moratorium on extreme energy. Many communities in Wales are threatened by fracking, underground coal-gasification or coal-bed methane extraction.
Extreme energy keeps us hooked on the fossil fuels that drive climate change, risks contaminating water, and diverts investment…
‘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…
