Category: Climate Chaos

Court fined activists… who pledged to shut down coal and stop cli­mate chaos

On the last week of Win­ter exams, I donned a media badge and reporter’s note­book to observe the tri­al of eleven nor­mal peo­ple as they faced Not­ting­ham Bridewell Mag­is­trates Court.

Some say it is beau­ti­ful. Just across the M1 from Sut­ton-Bon­ning­ton research farm lies the 40-year-old pow­er sta­tion. The coal plant is the worst source of car­bon diox­ide pol­lu­tion in the East Mid­lands. To me, its cool­ing tow­ers are a sym­bol of waste.
Did you know that the wast­ed steam released from Rat­cliffe could be piped to pro­vide free hot water for the entire bor­ough of Rush­cliffe?

I agree with those deter­mined to down that machine. Whilst the so-called “Rat­cliffe 11” admit­ted they went into the pow­er sta­tion, they lodged a spe­cial defence of neces­si­ty. One of the activists said “I believe this (attempt­ed) action was a rea­son­able and pro­por­tion­ate response to the threat of cat­a­stroph­ic cli­mate change and that this action was to pre­vent a greater crime occur­ring.” — Accord­ing to an anony­mous report online.

Dat­ing back to the Lud­dite move­ment, so-called “non-vio­lent direct action” (NVDA) is a slight­ly anar­chist set of solu­tions, clash­ing with the pol­i­tics of pub­lic order. Inspired by an inter­na­tion­al con­ver­gence of thou­sands of peo­ple to the first cli­mate camp in Gigawatt Val­ley, the Not­ting­ham neigh­bour­hood con­tin­ued to cook hot cur­ries, skill-share and devel­op prac­ti­cal solu­tions. An edu­ca­tion­al “Spring into Action” week cul­mi­nat­ed on 10th April 2007, with a crammed mini-bus to the pow­er sta­tion.
The pow­er com­pa­ny are respon­si­ble for the safe­ty of those on site, who stopped an esti­mat­ed 5,000 tonnes of coal from get­ting to the bunkers. From there, the coal is burned to boil water from the riv­er Trent to turn tur­bines to gen­er­ate elec­tric­i­ty for the Nation­al Grid. Of the 12, one escaped, one remained silent and used only body-lan­guage, and the remain­ing ten were found guilty of tres­pass.

Meet the cli­mate crim­i­nals.
The eleven activists used their grand­par­ents to illus­trate “duties of care, as they give care to you.” One stopped work­ing in offices, a cog in the cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem, felt so much bet­ter after tak­ing action.
“I realised I was liv­ing in denial.” Tes­ti­fied Sam, an ecol­o­gy grad­u­ate. “Dras­tic action needs to be tak­en, yes­ter­day! In the next ten years… Oth­er­wise it’s too late.”
Tim, 23, tes­ti­fied that their action was direct­ly aimed at dis­rupt­ing coal-burn­ing, but ner­vous­ly expressed thanks to oth­er more pub­lic pro­test­ers. At the gates more peo­ple cov­ered the cor­po­rate sign with “STOP! DON’T BE A FOSSIL FOOL”. To the make the “reclaim pow­er” agen­da clear, props includ­ed a giant ther­mome­ter and gas-masks. Beware of gov­ern­ment-con­trolled TV News rush­ing into mil­lions of homes! Defend­ing eco­nom­ic growth may lead to media state­ments being eco­nom­i­cal with the truth. For the entire day of action, the pow­er com­pa­ny inac­cu­rate­ly claimed that police were on site keep­ing things “ful­ly oper­a­tional”. “Head of Secu­ri­ty” Nicholas was on hol­i­day when 12 peo­ple walked inside. Using ordi­nary house­hold equip­ment, they locked on to a range of rail­ings, fire pro­tec­tion pipes, and “trash screens”. Christo­pher, shift-team-leader, went down to help explain the dan­gers of coal falling on to the lat­ter posi­tion, so they pro­duced the keys and moved to a safer loca­tion, from which they were arrest­ed. One then ran up the coal chute and stayed a while in the rafters, cov­ered in coal dust.

We sus­pect there are cor­po­rate sen­si­tiv­i­ties around ener­gy traders and car­bon emis­sions. The Plant Man­ag­er Roy “for­got to bring” any data. The con­tin­gency plan for “keep­ing the lights on” has not been pub­lished. The E.ON employ­ee refused to con­firm future plans for nuclear.

Guilty?
It was ruled that the defence of neces­si­ty may be used on a case by case basis. Dis­trict Judge Coop­er decid­ed that cat­a­stroph­ic cli­mate change should be tack­led by demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­ern­ment, not autonomous indi­vid­u­als. The defence lawyer Mr Thom­lin­son researched case law and explained that if Anne Frank had escaped the holo­caust on a stolen bicy­cle, she would­n’t have to wait for the Gestapo to knock at her door, under Eng­lish law. But is cli­mate change com­pa­ra­ble? Alan Simp­son MP explains that you have to get a lot of peo­ple to break bad laws in order to repeal them. A spokesper­son from e.on said the ten … had act­ed irre­spon­si­bly by break­ing the law.

“This is not jus­tice!” I declared. I read the judg­ment ful­ly. The legal and his­tor­i­cal impor­tance of this tri­al in terms of envi­ron­men­tal issues high­lights what is a step too far. I’m not say­ing the guilty ver­dict was wrong, but if I were the judge, I would have found the activists inno­cent.

Sci­ence was cen­tral to their case.
Scari­er than “Gore’s Law” as I call it, that CO2 warms the plan­et, is what I like to call “Cli­mate Chaos”. Pre­vi­ous­ly regard­ed as a sta­ble atmos­phere, the bios­phere mod­eled by the “Gaia the­o­ry” could be thrown into a state of cat­a­stroph­ic cli­mate change.
The defen­dants called an expert wit­ness, Dr Simon Lewis, Roy­al Soci­ety Research Fel­low at the Earth & Bios­phere Insti­tute of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Leeds. He is the author of many peer-reviewed tech­ni­cal papers in the world’s lead­ing jour­nals, sev­er­al of which are cit­ed by the Unit­ed Nation’s Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Pan­el on Cli­mate Change. He is a mem­ber of the Roy­al Society’s Cli­mate Change Advi­so­ry Net­work and the Unit­ed Nations ad hoc Expert Work­ing Group on Bio­di­ver­si­ty and Cli­mate Change. He advised the Gov­ern­ment of the Unit­ed King­dom dur­ing prepa­ra­tions for the G8 and UN meet­ings dis­cussing cli­mate change.
“I solemn­ly, sin­cere­ly, and tru­ly swear and affirm that the evi­dence I shall give is the truth, the whole truth, and noth­ing but the truth”.
Dr Lewis used the term non­lin­ear­i­ties: points at which glob­al warm­ing feeds back to gen­er­ate more glob­al warm­ing. Actu­al­ly ecosys­tems like the Ama­zon or oceans could have sep­a­rate thresh­olds. Every cli­mate sci­en­tist with an aca­d­e­m­ic posi­tion agreed that the gov­ern­men­t’s 2‑degree tar­get is already 50% like­ly to tip the sys­tem over the edge.
In oth­er words, it is not like grad­u­al­ly pol­lut­ing a lake and it gets grad­u­al­ly mud­di­er and mud­di­er, it is more like push­ing a car over the top of a hill.
A grim­ly fun­ny ques­tion about the envi­ron­men­tal prob­lems of palm plan­ta­tions, cer­tain­ly raised a few laughs amongst the audi­ence. “Why are you ask­ing me about ille­gal log­ging in Indone­sia? Of course by def­i­n­i­tion, loss of trees…”
How many deaths can be attrib­uted to cli­mate change? The court heard Dr Lewis state in a low tone that in 2005, in Mum­bai a record-break­ing 1 metre of rain fell on a sin­gle day. 1000 peo­ple died. There are exten­sive stud­ies on every con­ti­nent, which can be com­pared with cli­mate mod­els. Cli­mate change threat­ens to affect us all. And the UK? “We live in an increas­ing­ly glob­alised world.” An arti­cle in the Guardian called for more research attribut­ing deaths to cli­mate change “It’s time for a body-count”.

A defen­dant from Not­ting­ham has degrees in biol­o­gy and epi­demi­ol­o­gy. Her cal­cu­la­tions, not peer-reviewed but based on George Mar­shall of coinet.org, esti­mate the amount to kill a per­son is in the region of 200,000 tonnes of CO2 emis­sions. (nice sci­ence reviews the cur­rent eco-sit­u­a­tion on page 49)

Did you know that the Uni­ver­si­ty of Not­ting­ham’s grow­ing rate of car­bon emis­sions could fill three hot-air bal­loons for every stu­dent?!

Ideas for Eco-wor­ri­ers
— Dig up the dirt on ener­gy and car­bon mar­kets.
— D.I.Y off­set­ting by pro­vid­ing con­sumers with con­tra­cep­tion, solv­ing the pop­u­la­tion prob­lem too.
— End the blood­shed for oil.
— Take “direct action” to fix your bike!
— Choose your own career path.
— Fan­cy dress as an endan­gered polar bear.
— Do you know any­one who died from cli­mate change? Report it to the Envi­ron­ment Agency.
— Get the facts
— Reprint this arti­cle!
http://sen.blog-city.com/finally_the_judgement.htm