More broken promises and lies as the fight to save Mainshill Wood continues.

The threat from Scot­tish Coal is grow­ing, just as the front line against new coal looks for­ward to its one month birth­day (com­plete with pic­nic). So get down here! Its now or nev­er! The Main­shill Sol­i­dar­i­ty Camp is extreme­ly grate­ful for the con­tin­u­ing sup­port from the local com­mu­ni­ty and will be cel­e­brat­ing its one month birth­day on Sun­day 19th July with a com­mu­ni­ty pic­nic at 3pm to which every­one is wel­come.

Local res­i­dents awoke on Mon­day morn­ing to the news of yet anoth­er appli­ca­tion for an exten­sion at Poniel [1], a Scot­tish Coal mine in the Dou­glas Val­ley, some­thing that com­mu­ni­ties had been assured would not hap­pen, and which new plan­ning pol­i­cy guards against…

Poniel Open Cast Coal site, a few hun­dred metres away from Main­shill, will be extend­ed by 100,000 tonnes over a six month peri­od. This bro­ken promise is yet anoth­er exam­ple of the dis­re­gard shown to com­mu­ni­ties and the envi­ron­ment in the pur­suit of prof­it.

Across the val­ley at Main­shill, envi­ron­men­tal dev­as­ta­tion and dis­as­trous health impacts will result from the open cast­ing of the 350ha site to extract 1.7million tonnes of coal which will cause 4.98million tonnes [2] of car­bon emis­sions when burnt, exclud­ing the huge emis­sions released through the extrac­tion process [3].

Rather than respond­ing to the objec­tions made against these plans, Dou­glas and Angus Estates and its own­er Lord Home (cur­rent­ly being inves­ti­gat­ed for alleged fraud [4]) pre­fer instead to make unfound­ed alle­ga­tions in a recent media state­ment against the Main­shill Sol­i­dar­i­ty Camp [5] and con­tin­ue to deny com­mu­ni­ties, through sham con­sul­ta­tion, of their health, self deter­mi­na­tion and envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice.

At the pub­lic hear­ing attend­ed by sev­er­al mem­bers of the camp who also live in the local com­mu­ni­ty, only two of the 700 peo­ple who object­ed were allowed to speak against the pro­pos­al. To pre­vent the cast­ing aside of these objec­tions and to obstruct the work already begun on site, the occu­pa­tion of Main­shill Woods through direct action has been under­tak­en in sol­i­dar­i­ty with the local com­mu­ni­ty.

Prepara­to­ry work for the mine such as the tree felling and bore sam­ple drilling work under­tak­en by Apex already has been glossed over by the Estate and con­tra­venes 7 con­di­tions of the plan­ning approval regard­ing stud­ies to ascer­tain the pres­ence of cer­tain endan­gered species such as bad­gers and bats, which the occu­piers know to be present on site.

The Estate has mis­re­port­ed the unearthing of an 11KVA under­ground pow­er cable accus­ing the Main­shill Sol­i­dar­i­ty Camp of almost caus­ing a “major dis­as­ter”. It was in fact Apex and Scot­tish Coal who endan­gered the lives of those on site and the local com­mu­ni­ty by dri­ving heavy machin­ery over the shal­low­ly buried and unmarked cable. Any heavy machin­ery could cause death to the occu­piers since the site is now com­pre­hen­sive­ly defend­ed with tree­hous­es and tun­nels.

The Estate and Scot­tish Coal’s per­sis­tent prof­i­teer­ing from coal has been defend­ed with ref­er­ence to car­bon cap­ture and stor­age tech­nol­o­gy, how­ev­er even the indus­try says that CCS is 20 years away. Only a small per­cent­age of emis­sions can be cap­tured using CCS tech­nol­o­gy at present [6]. CCS is a smoke­screen for min­ing new coal, and evades the dra­mat­ic reduc­tion in con­sump­tion inte­grat­ed with localised renew­able solu­tions and col­lec­tive com­mu­ni­ty action which is required giv­en cur­rent sci­en­tif­ic con­sen­sus regard­ing cli­mate change.

The com­mu­nites which would suf­fer the envi­ron­men­tal injus­tice and neg­a­tive health impacts result­ing from coal extrac­tion should have con­trol over their local envi­ron­ment. If the plan­ning sys­tem con­tin­ues to side with the coal indus­try, futher direct action will be the only rea­son­able response.

ENDS

For more infor­ma­tion please see: http://mainshill.noflag.org.uk or phone
the site for inter­views on 07806926040

Notes to Edi­tors
[1]
http://www.douglascommunitycouncil.info/news.asp?intent=viewstory&newsid=18504
[2] Car­bon com­bines with oxy­gen in the atmos­phere dur­ing com­bus­tion,
pro­duc­ing car­bon diox­ide, with an atom­ic weight of (12 + 16 x 2 = 44
kg/kmol). The CO2 released to air for each kilo­gram of incin­er­at­ed coal is
there­fore 2.93kg.
[3] http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19826520.100-capturing-carbon.html
[4]
http://www.nowpublic.com/world/coutts-bank-chairman-lord-home-named-carroll-trust-case‑0
[5] The Main­shill Sol­i­dar­i­ty Camp has been occu­py­ing Main­shill Woods since
18/6/09 in order to resist Scot­tish Coal’s plans to devel­op a new open
cast coal mine.
[6] Cor­po­rate­Watch Tech­nofix­es Report down­load­able at
http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/?lid=3126