Kingsnorth | ukwatch.net

Life in the Landscape of Hydrocarbons

Ellie Keen — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 19:15:08 +0000

Exit Strategy III

How was it that the marshes of Hoo St Werburgh – so good for grazing cattle and sheep, so rich in birdlife – were turned into a site for Kingsnorth Power Station – with its chimneys and access roads, its spoil fields and loading jetties? How were the oil companies involved in this process? And how might it be turned in a different direction?

Arguably the most important meetings in the development of Kingsnorth took place between 1948 and 1951, between Sir William Fraser and Hugh Gaitskell MP, Minister for Fuel & Power. Fraser was Chairman of the Anglo Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), soon to be renamed British Petroleum. In 1947, the AIOC had purchased a fuel depot site on the southern edge of the Isle of Grain, aiming to develop it as a new refinery. While initial discussions were around a medium sized refinery, events soon transformed the plans into something much larger.

For in those early years of the Cold War, the Labour Government was keen to ensure a secure energy supply. This appeared to be in jeopardy when Iran nationalised its oil and threw out AIOC in October 1951. The AIOC had dominated the Iranian economy for 40 years, and in turn had become utterly dependent on Iran. The loss of these assets was devastating for the company – the refinery at Abadan alone contributed 80% of the company’s refining capacity.

The AIOC weathered this dramatic storm by laying off thousands of staff, by increasing production in Iraq and Kuwait, by rebranding itself as British Petroleum, and by building Britain’s largest oil refinery on the Isle of Grain – with the enthusiastic support of the government. The geopolitics of energy, refracted through a British corporation and the British Government, began to alter the landscape of the Hoo Peninsula.

BP’s Kent Refinery on the Isle of Grain began processing crude in February 1953. For the next 30 years it put out petrol, aviation fuel, diesel, fuel oil, bitumen and a wide range of products from crude oil imported from Kuwait, Iraq, Libya, Venezuela and elsewhere. The first oil from the Niger Delta was refined there after 1958, and the first oil from the North Sea was celebrated in 1975 with a special trip by hydrofoil down the Thames by the then Minister for Energy, Tony Benn MP.

By the time the refinery processed its last load of crude in 1982, its presence had utterly altered the Hoo Peninsula. The refinery expanded to obliterate the settlement of Wallend, while BP constructed workers’ homes across the peninsula. Middle management were housed in High Halstow, at a respectable distance from the refinery. Down the hill in Hoo they built an extensive new housing estate for the manual workers. The BP social club between the two later became the BAE Club – and then police headquarters during the Climate Camp.
Out of the heart of this new landscape rose two new power stations – Kingsnorth and Grain. Kingsnorth was planned in the early 1960s, and began generating in 1973. The plant was designed as a duel-fuel power station, burning coal and oil sourced from the refinery next door.

The Kent Refinery had effectively given birth – and then it died. In August 1982, the BP Kent Refinery began to close. Yet the legacy of the refinery’s operation remains long after. Wilfred Human of Strood’s widow is still trying to get compensation for her husband’s death. Mr Human worked for 22 years at the BP refinery and died of exposure to asbestos. The impact of the refinery remains in the water, soil, air and flesh of the Hoo Peninsula.

In 2003 BP announced its return to the Hoo Peninsula – the construction of a liquid natural gas terminal on the Isle of Grain, together with Sonatrach, the Algerian State Oil Company.
Gas extracted from deep beneath the Sahara Desert is piped 750 miles to the Mediterranean coast where it is pressured until, at -160 degrees, it turns to liquid – liquid natural gas (LNG). From the terminal at Skikda two dedicated LNG ships journey to Grain and back, taking 14 days for the round trip.
Once at Grain the LNG is regasified and passes into the pipelines bound for the National Grid. As the terminal capacity iexpands new pipelines are constructed to cross the peninsula. Gas from the Algerian desert passing silently by.

“There were up to 100 men who came into our village from three directions – they were here for at least three hours. We hid in the house, but they threw bombs through the windows and broke down the door with axes. My baby son Mohammed was five and they cut his throat and threw him out of the upper window. Then they cut the throat of my eldest son Rabeh and then my brother’s throat because he saw them kidnapping his wife and tried to stop them. They took some of the girls.”

This testimony is by one of the survivors of the slaughter of 349 villagers in Rais in Algeria on 29th August 1997. These killings were part of the civil war that raged in Algeria after the army-backed regime cancelled democratic elections in February 1992. Between 75,000 and 120,000 people were killed. The massacre at the village of Rais continued for three hours, only 500 yards from an army barracks.

At precisely the same time, 350 miles south of Rais, BP employees worked at an oil company camp in Hasi Messaoud, Algeria’s main oil installation. They operated behind three sets of electrified fences, patrolled by Doberman dogs and screened by cameras to supplement the army unit stationed outside the camp.

BP began operating at Hasi Messaoud in early 1996, after signing a £2.3 billion deal with Sonatrach at the height of the Algerian civil war. This decision could not have been taken without the agreement of the then Conservative Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind MP, probably following a meeting with BP CEO John Browne. Although by the mid-1990s the British government had sold all its shares in BP, the company still held a pivotal position in the British economy.

On 24th October 2003, seven years later, Ralph Alexander, BP Head of Gas & Power, announced a 20 year contract between BP/Sonatrach and National Grid to import LNG from Algeria to Grain – tying a connection between that distant desert and the Hoo Peninsula until 2025. And the arrival of Algerian gas had an impact on E.ON too – the following year it announced plans to build a new gas-fired power station at Grain.

The 40 generations that have farmed the Hoo Peninsula from the first Saxon settlements until the present day left a profound impact on the landscape, mostly noticeably in the reclaiming of the salt marshes. In the past three decades these marshes have become emblematic of the Peninsula. The spirit of the area is changing, from a place dominated by the hydrocarbon industry to a place of wildlife reserves – the RSPB own five on the Peninsula.

The struggle over Kingsnorth is, in part, a struggle over the future spirit of this place. We live in the shadow of decisions made between energy companies and government ministers – Sir William Fraser and Hugh Gaitskell between 1948 and 1951, the CEGB in the early 1960s and 1970s, John Browne and Malcolm Rifkind in the mid 1990s.

We know that there have been repeated meetings between Paul Golby, Chief Executive of E.ON, and Malcolm Wicks MP, Energy Minister. Once again the justification for a new coal plant at Kingsnorth is ‘energy security’ and worries over Russia and the dependability of the Middle East – just as it was 60 years ago. Will we follow the same tracks again, or can a new course be charted for the Hoo Peninsula and our energy infrastructure?

This essay originally took the form of a workshop given at the Camp for Climate Action in a field near Kingsnorth Power Station in August.

Kingsnorth on Kingsnorth

Alex Doherty — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:32:39 +0000

It’s been an unsettling year to be a Kingsnorth. Blessed with a surname which for most of my life people have found it impossible to spell, I’m suddenly all over the news. But not in a good way.

I keep hearing that Kingsnorth is filthy and destructive and should not, under any circumstances, be allowed to expand. Everywhere I turn, people are talking about fighting Kingsnorth, stopping Kingsnorth or shutting down Kingsnorth (shutting up Kingsnorth I’m more familiar with). Thousands of angry hippies have been converging on wet fields threatening to chain themselves to bits of Kingsnorth. There are even “stop Kingsnorth” T-shirts. Maybe this is how it feels to be Ian Huntley.

Still, even I was impressed when six Greenpeace activists managed to climb up the inside of the main chimney of the Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent last October. Once at the top, they abseiled down the side and began daubing a giant and unequivocal message to the government on it. The message was intended to be “Gordon, bin it!” Unfortunately the police managed to serve an injunction on them by helicopter halfway through the process, so the message ended up as the rather less impressive “Gordon”.

A chimney named Gordon might seem more like a Turner prize contender than one of the obvious turning points in the long, uphill battle to prevent climate change. But a turning point it may turn out to be, for after an expensive and extremely detailed trial at Maidstone crown court, the six climbers were yesterday found not guilty of causing criminal damage, despite the fact that they had openly admitted to doing so.

The reason, unlike the case for the defence, was simple. The jury had decided to accept the climbers’ case that the damage they did was justifiable if it helped prevent the undeniably greater damage that would be done by climate change. This is not the first time that a jury has accepted a “lawful excuse” defence in a criminal damage case – but it is the first time it has happened in relation to climate change. It will doubtless make Gordon (the prime minister, not the chimney) nervous as he contemplates whether or not to go-ahead with a new coal plant at Kingsnorth; a decision which will ultimately decide whether or not the UK has any chance of meeting its targets to reduce its climate-changing emissions, and on which the cabinet apparently remains split.

Whether or not the court decision leads to a rash of similar protests elsewhere remains to be seen. Whether it ultimately helps to stop climate change – if that is even possible given the point we’ve reached and the demands of our resource-greedy global economy – remains to be seen too. But what it maybe could do – and certainly should do – is bring home to the UK, where we still all have our heads stuck firmly in the sand, the connection between action and consequence.

The court in Maidstone heard from James Hansen of Nasa, one of the world’s leading climate experts, that the carbon dioxide emitted daily by Kingsnorth could be responsible for the extinction of up to 400 species. They heard that properties just down the road from Gordon the chimney, on the Kent coast, were already suffering from sea level rises. They heard from Inuit leader Aqqaluk Lynge about how Inuit houses were already sliding into the sea. They decided that such things justified the criminal damage that the climbers had done. In other words, they accepted the connection between powering British homes and the rapidly-altering global climate.

The difficulty with the climate change narrative has always been how big it is. The idea that turning on your kettle helps to drown polar bears has never really sunk in with many people at any level beyond the theoretical. Maybe – just maybe – the Kingsnorth verdict, with the full weight of the law backing it up, will make that link clearer in our minds. If it does, perhaps all that persecution will have been worth it.

Climate Campaigners Acquitted!

tim — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:11:30 +0000

Ministers suffered a blow to their energy plans today as six Greenpeace volunteers were acquitted of criminal damage by a Crown Court jury in a case that centred on the contribution made to climate change by burning coal.

The charges arose after the six attempted to shut down the Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent last year by scaling the chimney and painting the Prime Minister’s name down the side. The defendants pleaded ‘not guilty’ and relied in court on the defence of ‘lawful excuse’ – claiming they shut the power station in order to defend property of a greater value from the global impact of climate change.

Today’s acquittal is a potent challenge to the Government’s plans for new coal-fired power stations from jurors representing ordinary people in Britain who, after hearing the evidence, supported the right to take direct action in order to protect the climate.

Over five days of evidence Maidstone Crown Court heard testimony from the world’s leading climate scientist, an Inuit leader from Greenland and David Cameron’s environment adviser. The jury was told that Kingsnorth emits 20,000 tonnes of CO2 every day – the same amount as the 30 least polluting countries in the world combined – and that the Government has advanced plans to build a new coal-fired power station next to the existing site on the Hoo Peninsula in Kent.

The ‘not guilty’ verdict means the jury believed that shutting down the coal plant was justified in the context of the damage to property caused around the world by CO2 emissions from Kingsnorth.

One of the Kingsnorth 6, Emily Hall, said after her acquittal:

“This is a huge blow for the Government’s plans to build new coal-fired power stations. It’s coal that should have been on trial, not us. After this verdict, the only people left in Britain who think new coal is a good idea are business secretary John Hutton and the energy minister Malcolm Wicks. It’s time the Prime Minister stepped in, showed some leadership, and embraced a clean energy future for Britain.”

Another of the defendants, Ben Stewart, added:

“This verdict marks a tipping point for the climate change movement. If jurors from the heart of Middle England say it’s legitimate for a direct action group to shut down a coal-fired power station because of the harm it does to our planet, then where does that leave government energy policy? We have the clean technologies at hand to power our economy, it’s time we turned to them instead of coal.”

The defence called as a witness Professor James Hansen, a NASA director who advises Al Gore and is known as the world’s leading climate scientist. Hansen told the court that more than a million species would be made extinct because of climate change and calculated that Kingsnorth would proportionally be responsible for 400 of these. “We are in grave peril,” he told the jury. He said he agreed with Al Gore’s statement that more people should be chaining themselves to coal-powered stations. “Somebody needs to step forward and say there has to be a moratorium, draw a line in the sand and say no more coal-fired power stations.”

Asked by Michael Wolkind QC, for the defence, if carbon dioxide damages property, Hansen replied, “Yes, it does.” Asked if stopping emissions of any amount of it therefore protects property, he replied, “Yes it does, in proportion to the amount.” He added that he thought there was an immediate need to protect property at risk from climate change.

Tory green adviser Zac Goldsmith also gave evidence for the defence. He told the court: “By building a coal-power plant in this country, it makes it very much harder in exerting pressure on countries like China and India. I think that’s something that is felt in Government circles.” He later told the jury: “Legalities aside, I suppose if a crime is intended to prevent much larger crimes, I think then a lot of people would consider that as justified and a good thing.”

Some of the property the court was told was in immediate need of protection included parts of Kent at risk from rising sea levels, the Pacific island state of Tuvalu and areas of Greenland. The defendants also cited the Arctic ice sheet, China’s Yellow River region, the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica, coastal areas of Bangladesh and the city of New Orleans.

The acquittal is the first case where preventing property damage from climate change has been used as part of a ‘lawful excuse’ defence in court. The defence has previously been successfully deployed by defendants accused of damaging a military jet bound for Indonesia to be used in the war against East Timor before independence.

The defendants had intended to paint ‘GORDON BIN IT’ down the side of the chimney but were served a High Court injunction by police helicopter, meaning they only got as far as painting the Prime Minister’s first name.

Last month a new report by Poyry – Europe’s leading energy consultants – concluded that Britain could meet its energy demands without new coal. If the UK hit its existing efficiency and renewables targets it would negate the case for a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth and at least seven other proposed sites. An earlier Poyry report, published in June, found at least 16 gigawatts of untapped potential from ‘Combined Heat and Power’ plants – super-efficient power stations that are popular in Scandinavia but little used in the UK.

Climate, Class and Coal

tim — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 10:10:09 +0000

In August, me and Arthur Scargill enter another big field to fight the corner for the miners and coal our industry and cause. Last time it was that field at Orgreave, this time it’s the Climate Camp at Kingsnorth Power Station and instead of thousands of cops there’s thousands of eco-warriors who now believe coal is killing the planet and want to stop all new coal stations.

If truth were known, they want to close down all coal stations per se. This time there is only Arthur, and me, we have no squads of pickets, no marching bands and no flying banners. It is in many respects as daunting a prospect, but it shows the quality of this man, our differences aside, he came into the teeth of opposition with an unpopular and untrendy message, among people who are hardly receptive to his old school brand of Marxist-Leninist socialism but prepared to debate till the cows come home why the NUM and clean coal technology are allies in the struggle for a socialist ecology and a just world.

Arthur is now 70 and I am 60, I think we present a figure of two rather battered and scarred alley cats come for a peace conference with the league of dogs. This is a sad and confusing conjuncture of forces. I have never in my life experienced a situation where the miners and what we do is the unpopular foe except among the ruling class and Tories.

Outside of the Young Conservatives, I have never known young people regard mining and pit heads as their enemy. What is worse is that these are my traditional constituency on the Anarchist left, they have the aura of the hippies, they aspire to the freedoms and love of life, which our 60s/70s generation did. I come across the Newcastle and Scottish camp, and know many of the activists from the Toon scene and demonstrations. Previously we have always held each other in a silent mutual respect, now there is a mutual distance, coolness, a sort of mutual Et tu Brutus. However, I see here also the mortified conviction of my own anti-nuclear youth. The conviction that myself and the world were on the brink of extinction. The certainty that if we delay we are all doomed to a wretched and painful end. Now it is climate change, and the gathering speed with which the earth is crashing toward climatical obliteration ironically for all carbon based creatures and vegetation on the earth as we know it. A change, which will cleanse us all from the surface of the globe for eternity.

The camp like some latter day Woodstock; they are a commonwealth, locked in debate and dedication, little communities with kids romping through the fields, longhaired, dreadlocked, singing and dancing. It is deeply wounding to be the enemy.

This is an anti-Durham gala, everywhere are Workshops on mining, on resistance around the world to mining of all descriptions, pictures of headgear and open cast, industry and miners, and the campaigns against them. It is like a Durham miner’s gala on bad acid. Instead of everywhere a celebration of the miners, our work, our communities, are protests for its end. I am shocked that many left groups are now Groupies to the eco movement and have abandoned all attempts at class analysis.

Arthur’s worst critic in the field is the local secretary of The Socialist Party, who tells him the NUM and miners’ struggle was yesterday’s cause, this was where the struggle was now, that EON and the big generators to facilitate their profits are using us. I argue the opposite that every attack on coal feeds the nuclear agenda, sets the agenda for government policy. I remind them too that they are enthusiastic supporters of EON when it comes to ramming wind turbines down the throats of protesting locals resolved not to have them.

Around the tent, are dotted Trade Union members of the SWP are they now ready to bury him having once been full of his praise? For a month, the Weekly Worker has carried uncritical adverts for the camp while the Morning Star warned me I was underestimating the forthcoming climate holocaust and declined my article criticising the camp.

I have the honour to have wrote the official NUM bulletin The Miners and The Climate Camp, which Ken Capstick the Miner’s editor has managed to reduce from eight sides to four with a bit of clever editing. I’ve humped 2000 of them in a huge bag from Doncaster and have spent the morning spreading them round the field, where they are received with less than enthusiasm. About 150 protesters turn up to the tent, where Arthur and I are speaking from 1500 in the field. Their bottom line argument is we shouldn’t be generating so much power anyway, it should be cut by 50% and we need to get use to not having electricity.

Arthur gets one of the Greens scientific officers to admit she was talking about taking out all nuclear and coal capacity, which would leave Britain virtually without power generation of any sort.

They are non-plussed by the fact that we both accept practical renewables, that we see solar energy as the long-term future for the planet. That many other clean sources, as long as they are not equally environmentally damaging (like land wind turbines) should be deployed along with mass insulation projects and energy saving programmes. But that coal should be the base supply agent and buy the world a breathing space so long as we developed carbon capture systems to burn it cleanly.

There is sympathy for the miners generally accepted as the most exploited people in Britain over the last century, but there has to be losers if we are to save the Planet, and we have been chosen to be it. Few people believe that CO2 capture works, and anyway will not be ready ‘in time’ to stop the climate going into free fall.

At the same time as facing the Climate Camp and linked to it across the left and green movement, more and more people are coming over to the Government programme for nuclear power, and an end to coal mining and coal burning in Britain. I have argued far and wide that clean coal is the alternative to a civil nuclear programme. I am stunned to be told the NUM’s new policy supports both coal and nuclear although I still claim this to be untrue. It needs urgent clarification, because this is a central plank in our defence.

I am asked to give a Workshop on the relevance and importance of the great 84/5 coal strike, nine people come. The relevance clearly isn’t too well established. ‘The Earth’ becomes an abstraction, humanity is some sort of foreign and alien invader and the storm troops, this time not of the TUC but of tidal waves, poverty and death, are the miners.

Of course, Arthur’s arguments are not totally mine, he talks of ‘dirty foreign coal’ and unfair competition, slave labour and child labour, these are not my arguments. Import controls are not a progressive answer, in my view, but I am for a level playing field of subsidies and a ‘fair trade’ standard of terms, conditions and union rights, which would be, for the millions of coal miners abroad as much as for us. We agree though that clean coal technology is an achievable science now, and it is vital that it is applied wholesale across coal generation.

The cops are arseholes as usual I am stopped and searched two sometimes three times a day, against my consent and often with force. Indeed, I am almost arrested, which would have been proved interesting in court. They could hardly argue they had reasonable grounds for suspecting I was going to sabotage the Power Station when I had gone down two thirds of the country with half a tonne of literature in its defence.

They attack the camp on numerous occasions and lay into protesters with truncheons; day after day, they line people against the fence from the very youngest toddlers to very old people, and search and harass them. Arthur makes a very strong Statement to the media at the gate, in defence of the right to protest and welcomes the protesters invitation to him and to debate this vital issue.

It was a privilege to stand with Arthur again, in the teeth of opposition again, though we could have done with thousands more supporters so short sighted ‘greens’ are not allowed to dominate this crucial debate.

I am trying to put together a Labour Movement Conference on Climate, Class and Clean Coal in Newcastle for the end of the year, and very much hope the NUM sponsor it and supply key speakers.

Climate Camp and Class

tim — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:06:34 +0000

Picture the scene. The setting sun is glinting off the visors of the police lined up in front of me. It’s the second or third day of the weeklong Camp for Climate Action – already I’ve lost count – and for the second or third time since I last slept it looks as if the cops are about to invade. I’ve just bolted from the opposite end of the site, where I’ve helped dig a defensive trench at another gate. To my left, atop a red van, a woman who sounds scouser than scouse exhaustedly screeches words of encouragement into a megaphone and somehow dances to Radiohead. To my right, a posher than posh couple casually talk up Cornish nationalism and agree that political correctness means white people suffer more oppression than anyone else on the planet. All the campers care about the environment, but that seems to be the only thing we have in common. That and – by now – a dislike of police.

The first Climate Camp was set up in 2006, by activists who had been heavily involved in organising protests against the G8 summit in Gleneagles the year before. Their immediate target was the Drax coal-fired power station in North Yorkshire, but they sought to demonstrate two things. Firstly, that direct action was an effective way of making changes within society – like shutting down power stations – and secondly, that people could live non-hierarchically, in an environmentally sustainable way. Many of the initial organisers self-identified as anarchists, and they wanted climate camps to be anarchy in action.

At least that was the theory. Now in Climate Camp’s third year, the results are highly questionable. In terms of building a movement for environmental sustainability, the camp experience and how it is perceived by the wider population both need to be considered.

Certainly, to be a climate camper is to participate in anarchy in its original and best sense – running things without bosses. The camp is clustered into regional neighbourhoods, which hold meetings every morning. These assemblies discuss organisation within the neighbourhoods and camp policy as a whole, such as whether to accept the police’s latest ultimatum. Decisions are eventually reached via consensus, and ‘spokes’ are delegated to express the collective’s views to the ‘spokes council’, before reporting back. This can be seem like a long-winded process if you’re used to taking orders, but it works to ensure that everyone feels ownership over decisions, and are therefore usually happy to implement them.

Anarchy can work fast too, and not just when riot police arrive on site at 5.30 in the morning. Perhaps my favourite illustration of this took place on the final Sunday evening, when a trail of wooden boards that snaked through the camp needed to stacked. Someone took the initiative to do this, then someone else joined in next to them. Within a couple of minutes, the idea of stacking had gone along the trail, and about quarter of an hour later it was all done. Quite a strenuous task had quickly been completed, without a single order being given.

However, halfway through the week ‘An open letter to the neighbourhoods’ was circulated, authored by ‘…a large group of anti-authoritarian participants in the climate camp’, and expressing ‘deep concern about the direction that the debates have taken over the past days’. It went on to claim that ‘In more than one workshop we have heard calls from the podium for command-and-control and market-orientated measures to address climate change’, and ‘The responses to these proposals have been far too polite’. Calling for ‘A very clear rejection of capitalism, imperialism and feudalism’, as well as ‘all forms and systems of domination and discrimination’, it emphasises ‘A confrontational attitude, since we do not think that lobbying can have a major impact in such biased and undemocratic organisations’.

The letter hit on one of the central problems facing the camp: how to make it ‘a welcoming and non-sectarian space’ for people new to anarchist ideas, whilst ensuring that career environmentalists like George Monbiot and Mark Lynas (who outraged many by backing the government’s nuclear power plans, the former on BBC’s Newsnight) don’t get an easy ride. This issue is compounded by the inevitable tendency of more militant campaigners being drawn to the barricades and defending camp against police.

Saturday was the climax of the week, and had been declared the day when we would “…go beyond talk and culminate in a spectacular mass action to shut down Kingsnorth. Permanently!”. The camp separated into blue, green, silver and orange blocs, with the plan being that we would take different routes over land, sea and air to get to Kingsnorth, arriving en masse, and E.ON bosses would order a shutdown. The end result was that one person climbed over the second security fence onto company property, and was immediately arrested. One boat made it onto a jetty, and a police charge sheet reveals that one of the four water inlet systems was shut down, but E.ON claimed it was “business as usual”. Fifty arrests were made, about half the total for the week.

So much for what actually happened. How much of the intended message survived the mainstream media’s filters and made it into public consciousness?

At the start of the week, coverage focused on the police attacks. Monday, 4th August saw BBC exposure of the police’s brutal dawn raid, giving details of casualties, showing police in riot gear attacking campers, and quoting camp media team members at length. On Tuesday, they ran with local Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews’ claim that the police had been “provocative and heavy-handed”. On the other hand, none of the other almost daily attacks got any press. This may be partly due to the pressure of the police’s announcement that they’d discovered a stash of knives and other weapons in woodland near the site. Campers immediately denied any connection with the stash, and none has since been found. But it seems likely that for many, this discovery provided retrospective cover for the police’s use of force, potentially dissuading waverers from paying a visit.

For the mainstream media, the camp wasn’t so much an experiment in sustainable living as a collection of oddities. When they discussed on-site conditions at all, they seemed more intrigued that there were people in the 21st century who voluntarily used compost toilets and grey water systems, than by the green implications. That this was part of an ‘eco village’ seems largely to have passed them by, a fact illustrated by a Google News search. Bizarrely, the Custer County Chief in Nebraska, USA picked up on it, as did a New Statesman article (not very encouragingly titled ‘Woolly minded hippies?’). This contrasts with 109 results for “climate camp” “compost toilet”. For their part, The Guardian even produced a tourist-style survival guide, entitled ‘How to go to Climate Camp – and enjoy it’.

As in previous years, the camp got the mainstream media talking about the role that carbon emissions play in manmade climate change. However, outlets overwhelmingly portrayed this as a protest against emissions at Kingsnorth in isolation, rather than the structural need of capital to expand, degrading the environment in the process. One deviation from this was when the Kent News quoted camper Anya Patterson as saying “If we are serious about fighting climate change, we have to tackle the root causes, and those are greed and a commitment to relentless economic growth.” Similarly, the non-hierarchical decision-making process was largely ignored, with the BBC merely describing it as ‘exhaustive’ and ‘somewhat baffling’.

One facet of the week that all mainstream media went big on was the idea of direct action. Unfortunately, it was only covered in the most superficial way, focusing on the supposed dangers that campers would be letting themselves in for. Of course, police attack was not listed amongst these hazards, but electrocution and drowning were. The implicit message in all of this was that once people stepped outside the law, their safety was at risk, and that therefore the state and – by extension – police really are there to serve and protect everyone – batons, riding crops, pepper spray and all.

Though the Climate Camp website is declaring the week a resounding success, it can surely be judged a valiant failure in terms of its stated objectives. E.ON were inconvenienced for a few hours, but Kingsnorth was not shut down. Some campers learned about non-hierarchical organising and strategies for sustainable living, but this made little impact on the wider public. ‘Direct action’ became a media buzzword, but only as something irresponsible and to be feared. Carbon emissions became a hot topic, but in the context of the above, only as ‘footprints’ to feel guilty about.

Indeed, some campers were hoping for this. On the Thursday morning, I had a discussion with an activist about his ambitions for what is being dubbed the ‘climate movement’. “To make a lot of people very guilty”, he replied.

This emphasis on guilt as a precursor for individualistic lifestyle change is perhaps the very opposite of what many original organisers hoped for. However, I believe it is fundamental to what is sometimes called ‘green and black’ anarchism. The idea of a class-based transformation of society is rejected – in some cases because of righteous disillusionment with traditional forms of class struggle, in many cases because the individual is from a relatively wealthy background. When such people see impending environmental catastrophe as the number one threat to their lives, their philosophy often becomes more anti-technological than anti-capitalist. Taking this perspective to its logical conclusion, capitalism and the state wouldn’t be much of a problem if they could somehow leave people alone in ecological peace, but since they can’t, both must be overcome. But with international class-based solidarity apparently ruled out, the result is that “setting an example” (as one woman put it) becomes the main method of ideological recruitment.

This sets green and black anarchism up for its own failure. Due to the built-in ideological structures of mainstream media and the state, the example set is of using those compost toilets, getting attacked by police, and putting yourself in mortal danger on your week off. Understandably, this is not an example that many are willing to follow.

The boast that Climate Camp would “shut down Kingsnorth” was always about bravado and bluster, a tendency which people from all strands of activism are vulnerable to in times of unrelenting defeat. But how could Kingsnorth really be shut down?

Medway Council have approved E.ON’s plans, and the final decision rests with the government, who have already indicated they will grant permission. Demolition of the current site and the construction of the new one is scheduled for February next year. On camp, there was a lot of talk about trying to build on current “momentum” and systematically blockading work from then onwards. Clearly, because of the long term commitment to direct action necessary, this would attract a smaller and ever dwindling number of people, unless substantial local support is forthcoming. Even if it is, there are plans for seven more coal-fired stations in the pipeline, plus all the other myriad ways capital is destroying the environment. There simply aren’t enough of us to wage such a struggle.

Any campaign against environmental destruction has to be rooted in a movement against the profit motive and the capitalist system, or it is doomed to symbolic gestures and failure. Industry doesn’t create carbon emissions, working people do, because they are paid to do so and see no viable alternative. While capitalist ideas prevail amongst the working class, invasions of power stations are less direct action and more dramatic lobbying; ultimately impotent appeals to the government to see further than the short term bottom line, something it is organically incapable of doing.

Ironically, this plays into the hands of people like George Monbiot. ‘Climate change is not anarchy’s football’, he patronisingly declared in a post-camp online reply to an article by radical journalist Ewa Jasiewicz, before going on to declare that ‘I don’t know how to solve the problem of capitalism without resorting to totalitarianism’. And every dictatorship needs paid advisors.

No George, climate change is not ‘anarchy’s football’; it’s a matter of life and death. That’s why we need working class revolution, so we can sort it out.

All the Kingsnorth's Men

Ellie Keen — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:23:34 +0000

Reports coming in from the Camp for Climate Action (see SchNEWS 641) Day of Mass Action on Saturday 9th August suggest that the day was more successful than many mainstream media sources made out. Despite coverage claiming E.ON continued their coal-chugging business as usual, arrestee charge sheets tell a different story. One of four people arrested inside Kingsnorth reveals they shut down the plant’s cooling system and disrupted the running of the station.

Activists set about besieging the coal-powered giant by land, sea and air. Four contingents were deployed.

The Blue Group was the highly organised Great Rebel Raft Regatta (GRRR), which set out to sail the high seas (well, the river Medway) and sneak into the power station via the jetty that carries coal to the plant. Members of ‘Operation Ikea’ set sail on rafts made from pallets and oil drums; ‘Operation Treasure Island’ on inflatable dinghies previously stashed away in the woods and located using elaborately hand-drawn treasure maps.

All treasure came with its own paddles, inflating pump and small bottle of rum. Several affinity groups were seen rummaging around in the woods, some having spent the night avoiding the helicopter that circled overhead searching for pirates.

A total of 29 vessels made it onto the water, including 8 kayaks and a currach (made in the woods overnight). Despite police interceptions (termed ‘rescues’ in the press), at least one vessel made it all the way and the crew dropped a banner reading “COAL: Starter Gun For Climate Chaos” – before collapsing from sheer exhaustion having paddled hard for an hour. The other pirates succeeded in tying up plenty of police vessels with cheeky water-bound cat and mouse antics. The Jolly Roger was later seen flying from a police boat and an officer wearing a pirate hat – a convert perhaps?

The green group made their way over land to the coal-powered colossus. They used the outer Harris fence – a temporary extra security measure – as a ladder to scale the tall spiky middle fence, before the cunning use of a warning sign thrown at the final electric fence established that it was in fact turned off. A small number of triumphant activists made it into the plant to be immediately jumped on by riot cops just as the first raft appeared on the horizon.

The silver group aimed to storm Kingsnorth by air using fighter jets, I mean, erm, balloons and kites. At least one parachute was seized by police while making its way onto site – pushing the definition on seizing offensive weapons just a bit!. Unfortunately weather conditions were not quite right and Betsy the helium balloon pig never made her giant leap to the skies. Keep a look out above Kingsnorth for future piggy action.

The orange pod was the fluffy contingent, made up of kids, locals and non-arrestables – and seems to have suffered the largest number of arrests. Having been told by loudspeaker from a police helicopter that if they did not disperse immediately at the agreed finish time then police dogs, horses and long batons would be deployed, a mere 19 protesters decided to stand their ground in defence of the right to protest.

All were promptly arrested.

The camp might be over, but the campaign against Kingsnorth and other polluters continues, with other actions taking place including:

Protesters scaled an electricity pylon and unfurled a ‘Shut Down Kingsnorth’ banner.

Campers occupied the roof of Smithfield Meat Market and dropped a ‘Stop Climate Change: Go Vegan’ banner.

15 campers descended on Mildenhall US Air Based in Suffolk, some dressed as planes to highlight military co2 emissions.

9 campers invaded offices of coal-mining giant BHP Billiton, some gluing themselves to the doors, others scattering coal in the lobby and educating staff.

SEPT 26-28th: The first Post-Climate Camp National Gathering, to be held in Manchester. Crash Space available. More details to be released soon.

Visit www.climatecamp.org.uk

Policing of climate camp a major attack on democratic rights

tim — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:34:55 +0000

A week-long climate protest camp in north Kent has ended, amidst widespread claims of disproportionate and aggressive policing. Around 100 people were arrested over the course of the protest, 46 of whom have been charged, mostly with obstruction offences. The multimillion-pound policing of the camp marked a significant attack on democratic rights and civil liberties.

The camp was held to protest the building of a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth, on the Medway estuary. Energy company E.ON UK is proposing replacing the existing coal power station with a new one. This would be the first new coal power station built in Britain in more than 30 years. The proposal has yet to be agreed by John Hutton, whose portfolio as secretary of state for business, enterprise and regulatory reform includes energy security issues. The proposal has been passed to Hutton’s office following its agreement by the local authority, Medway Council.

Kingsnorth is the first of several new coal-fired power stations proposed for sites across the UK. The government has made these stations a key factor in ensuring energy supplies. Protestors argue that coal power stations, with their high CO2 emissions, are the most polluting means of producing electricity. Between 1,000 and 2,000 protestors came to the camp over the course of the week to protest at the development of Kingsnorth. Aside from their direct protest activities, the camp also staged workshop and discussion events.

Assistant Chief Constable Gary Beautridge of Kent Police acknowledged in a press conference that the police had been planning their response to the camp since April of this year. That response saw 1,400 officers, from 26 different forces across Britain, being brought into the area. They were supported by constant air surveillance. The Medway Ports Authority also authorised the police to “enforce” sections of their bylaws to prevent protestors approaching the power station from the river.

The final cost of the policing operation is not yet known, but has been estimated variously between £1 million and £8 million. It is understood the Kent Police are considering applying to the Home Office for financial support in footing the bill.

There has been a noticeable trend in recent years for the police to underreport numbers of demonstrators and protestors. In the case of Kingsnorth, the police set the attendance at 1,000. According to their own figures, therefore, they had provided a level of policing intended to overwhelm the protestors. The organisers’ own estimate of attendance was 1,500, giving a 1:1 ratio of police to protestors. Even the highest estimate only put attendance at 2,000.

That the police levels were aimed at discouraging protest was reinforced when Beautridge said he regarded “the majority of the protestors” as “law-abiding people there for a legitimate reason.” He justified the policing levels as a response to “a small hard core of people…prepared to use criminal tactics and criminal activity.” According to one report, this “small hard core” was set at just 150 people. As the camp’s legal spokesman Kevin Smith noted, “Every year police use the supposed existence of a hardcore minority as justification for the heavy-handedness and every year this hardcore minority fails to materialise.”

It is quite evident that the policing was aimed at deterring any form of protest. Protestors at the camp have described the constant attention of police helicopters, which served to disrupt meetings and speeches. There are also reports of police impounding vehicles being used by protestors to bring supplies into the camp.

In particular, protestors drew attention to the aggressive tactics of the riot police, who used batons and shields in making arrests. Several protestors were injured when police baton-charged them as they tried to enter a cornfield. Beautridge maintained that such a response was “proportionate…. Because of the level of resistance, officers were authorised to carry batons during two days of the protest. There are strict legal standards for their use and we gave clear warnings when any specialist team was deployed.”

Green MEP Caroline Lucas, who visited the camp, said she was “horrified that [the] police…have used pepper spray, riot gear, [and] physical intimidation.” The police controlled demonstrators with horses, dogs and trail bikes, as well as with constant helicopter coverage.

To sustain this level of intimidation and intrusion, the police sought extraordinary powers to stop and search protestors. Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act was implemented to authorise this. Initially, the Section 60 provisions were applied only to the immediate area of the camp. They were subsequently extended to cover the whole of the Hoo peninsula. The provision allows police to stop and search a suspect if an officer of superintendent rank or above believes there may be incidents of serious violence.

At Kingsnorth, Section 60 was used to monitor all visitors to the camp. One eyewitness describes joining a queue to be searched. The searching officer did not know who had authorised the searches. Having been frisked and had his bag searched, the witness was then issued with a pink slip. He had to show this to another three officers before he actually reached the camp. He was searched again when he tried to leave the camp. There were also reports of protestors being threatened with strip searches. Elsewhere there were reports of police attempting to use Section 60 to justify destruction of homemade rafts.

Lucas, along with Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker and Labour MP Colin Challen, wrote to Kent Police to express concern about such use of discretionary powers. Lucas warned that this was “undermining our civil liberties.”

Lucas, amongst others, has also drawn attention to a booklet apparently dropped by an officer policing the camp. The booklet, “Policing Protest,” is produced by the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit and offers “tactical advice and guidance on policing single-issue domestic extremism.”

Police mounted a systematic programme of confiscation from the protestors during the searches. The police told press that they had confiscated many knives, although demonstrators described this as a smear tactic. Police also showed journalists a satirical board game (“War on Terror”) they had confiscated. There seems to have been a policy of making life as uncomfortable and awkward as possible for protestors. Other items confiscated included glue, soap, a clown costume, bits of carpet, toilet paper, disabled ramps, marker pens, blackboard paint, nuts and bolts for toilet cubicles, and banners.

They also confiscated demonstrators’ emergency radios and lifejackets. One demonstrator involved in the river-borne protest described a meeting with a local coast guard crew. The coast guards were complimentary about the demonstrators’ attention to safety, but criticised the police confiscations of lifejackets, saying, “It was irresponsible and could have put lives at risk.”

Such tactics were clearly designed to stifle any form of dissent and deter any future protests. Of particular concern in this regard is the complaint by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) that its members were also subject to the same searches, manhandling, and observation. The NUJ is looking at legal challenges against “this unwarranted conduct by the police.” According to the NUJ, journalists were searched as they entered and left the camp. Searches continued after police were shown press cards. Journalists were also “pushed and shoved” by police, and filmed whilst using WiFi facilities at a local McDonalds.

Such developments indicate a determination to clamp down on any form of legitimate protest, and should be taken as a very serious attack on democratic rights.

We Really Did It – And We’ll Be Back

tim — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 21:48:13 +0000

It’s easy to feel powerless in the face of huge institutions such as energy corporations and governments. But the Climate Camp has shown that we don’t have to feel that way. This weekend, we proved our power.

Today, we learned that – despite E.ON’s bluster that the power station had been running normally all weekend – we most definitely succeeded in disrupting its operations. We learned this from a most unlikely source: the police.

On Saturday, four bold rebel rafters got very close to the power station water intake pipe before being boarded and captured. They were arrested and charged with aggravated trespass and, according to their charge sheets, “they did an act, namely disrupting the running of the power station by causing the water inlet cooling system to be shut down.” That doesn’t sound like E.ON’s claim of “business as usual” to us!

Despite the fact that we had publicly announced what we were going to do months in advance; despite E.ON spending millions on extra security, and the Government spending millions on policing; despite the extra fences, the smear campaigns, the scare stories, and the most repressive and heavy-handed policing of peaceful protest for many years; despite all of this, we got over the fences, disrupted the power station, and massively embarrassed an international energy giant. We outsmarted 26 police forces to run the biggest climate camp ever. We covered the river in boats, filled the streets with people, covered the power station gates with banners and hit at least eight other targets with autonomous actions. We flooded the national, local and independent media with our stories and messages. E.ON and the Government threw everything they could at us, and they still couldn’t hold us back.

We’re just ordinary people with a cause. And we proved our power – not just to the outside world, but to ourselves. Now we know what we can do, and our movement is stronger than ever. If the Government gives Kingsnorth the go-ahead, we will be back to stop it.

Why not join us? The Camp for Climate Action is an open and welcoming network with a group near you.

Evidence Uncovered of Political Policing at Climate Camp

tim — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 21:02:24 +0000

Ninety percent of the costs of the heavy-handed policing at the Climate Camp are being paid for by the Government, local council sources have admitted this week [1]. Campers are pointing to this revelation as evidence that the government has been directly involved in the decision to police the camp in this fashion.

“The Government claims to care about climate change, but is pressing ahead with new coal fired power stations” said Jessica Glynn, one of the campers. “Now we discover that the Home Office is paying the police to harass and attack people who are peacefully opposing this decision. It’s not hard to put two and two together.”

Meanwhile, at 8.30 on Friday morning, people from the camp superglued themselves to the Royal Bank of Scotland’s oil and gas offices, in protest at the bank’s financing of the expansion of the fossil fuel industry all over the world. A few hours later, twelve naked campaigners superglued themselves to the offices of BERR (the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform), the Government department colluding with E.ON to give the green light to new coal power stations.

Miniature protestors also struck at Legoland (sponsored by E.ON) in Windsor, where a Lego model of Kingsnorth coal power station was scaled by Lego activists, who dodged the Lego police helicopters to drop a banner reading “STOP CLIMATE CHANGE”. [2]

Cambridge Liberal Democrat Councillor, Neale Upstone announced at the camp today that he is prepared to break the law on Saturday’s day of mass action.

Speaking from the camp, Councillor Upstone said, “It has now become impossible for citizens to assert their views against the money and influence of a wealthy few. The only option left is for us to take personal responsibility for the actions where the government is failing us… For the sake of our children, tomorrow, I am willing to peacefully break the law in order to draw a line in the sand. It’s time more politicians joined me.”

Participants at the camp, who now number more than 2,000, are spending the evening busily preparing for the day of mass action on Saturday.

“This is the clearest expression yet of the widespread public disapproval for E.ON’s plans to build new coal plants,” said Shri Gupta. “Despite the police campaign of intimidation and harassment, thousands have turned out to stop this environmental catastrophe. People across the country are showing they are no longer prepared to sit back and watch politicians andcompanies destroy our future. Today the climate movement has come of age.”

Notes
1.Medway Messenger, 08 August 2008
2.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykkJJWgOu8A

E.ON's defences breached following Olympic efforts by protesters

tim — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 20:58:21 +0000

The main marquee is buzzing with sporadic cheers at the feedback meet-up from the day of action. Celebrations are certainly the order of the day as protesters succeeded in breaching the perimeter fence and inner 10,000 volt electric fence to enter the power station site despite the best efforts of 26 police forces with over 1,500 police.

The day started early with a flotilla of boats – the Blue group – sailing towards Kingsnorth in the sun. Over twenty crafts made their way up the Medway to converge on the coal loading jetty. Three people occupied the ledge above the power station’s water inlet tunnel while a banner proclaiming ‘CO2AL: Starter Gun for Climate Chaos’ was hung from Darnet Fort on an island in the Medway directly opposite the power station.

Kent Police are on form as ever with the lies – claiming that they had to rescue rafters from the Medway. Rafters told quite a different story saying that at no point were they in any danger. “Its a bit cheeky for the police to say that we had to be rescued when for starters we weren’t in any danger, and secondly, they were the ones who had confiscated our safety boat this morning,” said Rebel Rafter Harold Cryer. Interestingly the river police were super professional and courteous, as were the sea-king helicopter search and rescue folks. Pity the land-based cops weren’t more similar.

Talking of unprofessional behaviour, news came in that the number of complaints against Kent police were so many that the Kent Police Professional Standards Authority were out today (yep, a Saturday too), to keep tabs on the police. Talk of the camp is that this year we must fight the police’s unlawful conduct over the coming months, much in the same way that last year we fought sections of the media for their less-than-fair coverage (coverage has been noticeably more accurate this year). So do keep in touch with the camp legal team if you were mis-treated.

Ok, back to the day of action: around 1,000 people from the Orange group headed from the Camp directly to the main gates at Kingsnorth, led by a colourful carnival dragon made by children during the camp. At the gates the Camp’s Christian Cafe crew held a service giving the power station its last rites. The group sat outside the main entrance for an hour, some longer, even after a police helicopter circling above had demanded through a loud-hailer that the marchers disperse, threatening them with ‘horses and dogs’ if they didn’t. Another surreally big-brother moment, and a classic example of the police ‘facilitating lawful protest’, as their mantra says.

The few hundred strong Green group made it to the perimeter fence of the power station. Some used a section of fencing to make a ladder to breach both the outer and the inner electric fence. Others climbed a nearby pylon to hang a banner reading ‘Shut Down Kingsnorth’(1).

Spokeswoman Emily Davies said in a press release this afternon, “It shows how serious we are about stopping climate change that people from all walks of life were prepared, despite blatantly intimidatory policing, to take direct action to disrupt E.ON. This Olympic effort certainly deserves a gold medal.” Which nicely sums it up!

Campers have been signing pledges to return to Kingsnorth if Minister for Business John Hutton gives E.ON the go-ahead to build the first coal-fired power station in the UK for 30 years. The promise is to take action against E.ON and other companies until they abandon all such plans.

More from the camps press release: “It’s been a great today, but a real victory for us will be when we have conclusively scuppered E.ON’s coal-fuelled mania. If Hutton gives the green light to this power plant, E.ON can expect to be seeing a lot more of us in the future,” said Ewa Steckel, who has signed one of the pledges to stop the plant.

Outside the camp, and more bizarrely than taking a home-made raft down the Medway, Malcolm Wicks, Energy Minister stated yesterday that we need Kingsnorth to counter catastrophic climate change!

Campers reacted furiously, “Malcolm Wicks’ claim that building an unabated coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth is necessary to save us from climate change shows him to be delusional and dangerously scientifically illiterate. ” said camper Ania Kemp.

Hoo u gonna coal?

JamieSW — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 16:39:49 +0000

AS CLIMATE CAMP FOR ACTION GETS STOKED UP AT KINGSNORTH...

It’s another mediocre summer and we’re back at the Camp for Climate Action. First there was Drax, then Heathrow and now the sequel… Climate Camp III has been set on the east coast of Kent three miles or so from Kingsnorth – already home to a power station that pumps out as much carbon dioxide as the 30 least-polluting countries in the world combined – and proposed site of first new UK coal-fired power station for 30 years.

So SchNEWS reporters have joined the great unwashed throng of around a thousand and a half others, made up of yer usual rabble-rousing regulars – including, according to cops, 150 extremists (only 150? Come on black bloc let’s be aving yer!), plus up-for-it students, ageing hippies and Guardian-carrying liberals (the paper did their own bijoux guide to the camp – getting the day of the mass action wrong. Oops).

Having taken the site – a mile outside Hoo St Weburgh on Wednesday last week (July 30), initially there were not enough people to defend it and riot police carried out a number of heavy-handed raids, beating up campaigners and nicking important infrastructure gear like plumbing etc. Whilst some of this is still impounded, ever-resourceful campers have found ways round it and the actual organisation is once again clockwork. One hard-bitten, over-60 was heard to comment: “How come it’s always the anarchists who provide the best organised, most efficient kitchens”. Couldn’t agree more mate – the SchNEWS chef de resistance has given the vegan food a rating of 8/10 this year!

Police tactics have been the main talking point at the camp so far. A rumoured wholly-proportionate 1,400 cops are involved at a cost of £5m, with forces from Wales, Kent itself and the trusty ‘boot ‘em first pay compensation later’ Met. Unlike the hotels which were laid on for cops last year, it looks like they’re slumming it in their very own super tent (a kind of close encounters white dome structure) up on the hill back down past Hoo. Clearly unhappy at being so completely out-manoeuvred once again by camp organisers – setting up camp under their noses – they are venting their frustrations in a number of ways.

For starters everyone on the main route into the camp (on Dux Court Rd) gets searched, coming in as well as out (one to bear in mind for Saturday’s mass action when green/orange/blue/silver blocks will aim to shut Kingsnorth down for the day). Things which have been so far been confiscated include, er, some glue and a bar of soap. As well as wheeling out a War on Terror board game for Murdoch journo types to slaver over, police claim they found a stash of weapons in the woods nearby including a ‘replica’ ninja throwing star (a plastic toy maybe?) and an assortment of knives including a three bladed affair which could allegedley be used against a police horse (lots of vegan horse killers at the camp this year then?)

Other bullshit to come protesters way include the constant buzzing of police helicopters during the day and night – including low flying for the purposes of thermal imaging or intimidation presumably. It looks like top brass are looking to cause as much discomfort to campers as possible, despite paying lip-service with the softly softly police liaison teams. These have tried to get a police caravan on site – which was turned down – and last year’s arrangements of an escorted police beat every couple of hours is not happening. With the stand-off hardening, each night the camp has been awoken two or three times to deal with the threat of a raid with increased numbers pigging out the front and rear access points.

Vehicles have been impounded – included the camp shuttle bus running from Strood to site on one occasion – and most of the supplies have as a result had to be carried in on bikes/wheelbarrows and Shanks pony.

Still, not to be put off, the camp is proving popular with locals around the Medway area, despite the welcoming local paper A-boards (‘Medway invaded by eco-warriors’ and the like). More families, pensioners, and terrible teens have been turning up than did last year at Heathrow.

With Saturday’s shenanighans to come it’s looking like Kingsnorth could be a timely reminder to Brown and co. that we won’t be taking their greenwash lying down. For more info on the mass action and the reasons behind the No New Coal message go to www.climatecamp.org.uk

The truth is, we're fighting for survival

JamieSW — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 13:47:26 +0000

Up to 4 billion people left without water. Up to 5 billion at risk of flooding. Half a billion left hungry as agricultural yields decline by 15-35% in Africa with entire swaths of the world ceasing food production altogether. More than 80 million exposed to malaria in Africa. The Amazon collapses and 50% of species go extinct. It’s basically the end of the world. And it’s reported in this morning’s Guardian.

There is such a gaping chasm between the matter-of-fact reporting of this nightmarish 4C scenario that government scientists now say we should be planning for, and the total failure of apparently rational people to understand what is happening on the Hoo peninsula this week.

Reports from Kingsnorth, the site of this year’s climate camp, completely fail to scrutinise the pin-striped criminals who are pushing the planet towards the brink. Instead, the Press Association runs stories on apparent conspiracies to attack police with knives without even phoning the accused activists for a reaction to these smears. What other set of people could be accused of conspiracy to commit cop killings without being asked for any reaction? This is a victory for the police and the rightwing media they leak to.

Equally, E.ON UK’s greenwashing PR campaign is run without any question. Every report repeats the myth that the proposed new power station would be a “cleaner coal” plant. No one reports that in fact, this coal plant will pollute as much as more than 30 developing countries combined, that there will be no use of carbon capture and storage (CSS) technology, and that the plant will be so inefficient as to waste half of all the energy it creates. No mention of the fact that Chris Davies, the Lib Dem MEP, who is notoriously pro-CCS coal, has pledged to attend the camp precisely because Kingsnorth won’t be a “cleaner coal” plant.

E.ON UK keeps pumping out the spin that “we need coal to keep the lights on”, even following reports in the Financial Times that independent energy experts, Pöyry, have proven (pdf) that if the UK hit its existing renewables and efficiency targets, no new coal would be required. Even when emails expose close contact between E.ON UK and the business department, they are only reported in the Guardian.

As the prime minister has a last look at a bit of beautiful coastline already succumbing to the sea, the media frenzy focuses on the same old soap opera personality politics. Is so-and-so too remote/young/jaded/damaged to be the next majorette marching us over the cliff? Whoever it is, we know it’ll be one of the same crew who got us into this mess and can’t get us out because the solutions don’t fit the electoral cycle. There is an echo here too of the US media’s response to Iraq. Even now, anyone who opposed the war is on some sort of “radical fringe”, and having supported the war, at least at the time of its inception, is a necessary qualification to be seen as “serious”. With climate change, in order to be “serious” you need to acknowledge that the end of the world is an interesting detail in the broader pattern of economic “progress”, but never succumb to the incredible naivety of the protesters, who fail to realise that the survival of life on earth is a bourgeois luxury which we can ill afford in these times of economic constraint.

The harsh reality is that there is no way we could plan for a 4C rise. No amount of adaptation is going to make that liveable for most of the world’s population, and it’s going to be pretty damn nasty for those lucky few of us living in the north as well. Despite this, we end up with two possible stories – the front page banner “dangerous anarchists threaten chaos”, or, tucked away at the back of the paper, “peaceful protest passes without incident”. And all the time, not even the liberal press is concerned that, even if every single person at the camp arrived with a heavy machine gun, they couldn’t kill half the number of people who will die as a result of the effects of climate change.

Open letter to police on repression at Kingsnorth

JamieSW — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 13:39:20 +0000

In light of events at this week’s Climate Camp in Kingsnorth, Green MEP for the South East Caroline Lucas has joined forces with Norman Baker, Liberal Democrat MP for Lewes, and Colin Challen, Labour MP for Morley and Rothwell, to write a letter to the Gold Commander of Kent Police – please see below.

Dr Lucas MEP is also querying Kent police about emerging reports that legal observers are being restricted from observing searches on individuals.

Letter in full:

Dear Mr Allyn Thomas,

RE: Climate camp at Kingsnorth

We are writing to express our concern at the developing situation on this site. There has undoubtedly been a steady escalation of friction between the climate change protesters and police. On one morning, we are informed, riot police with dogs entered the site. During the course of this operation a vehicle was damaged and a number of arrests were made. Twenty protesters apparently required medical attention and a number were taken to the A & E Department of Medway Hospital with suspected head injuries.

In the past few days there have been a series of searches and confiscations. No doubt some of these have been justified under the terms of a general search warrant. Others, such as the confiscation of tents, ground sheets, marker pens, mobile phones and protest banners are difficult to justify on any other basis than an attempt to disrupt the protest itself.

Policing of demonstrations and protests is always necessary. However, growing and confirmed anecdotal evidence suggests that this serious and escalating situation has been caused, at least in part, by a disproportionate police response. Norman Baker MP has reinforced this during his visit to the site itself. Despite undertakings to him by DCI Ian Hall (Kent Police) that only regular, uniformed police officers would be employed on patrol duties within the site, he witnessed, immediately afterwards, a charge by full riot police (Metropolitan) and the inappropriate use of batons on two occasions.

We have severally been in contact with police officers charged with this operation and have received various undertakings including the provision of an inventory of seized material and the reason for its retention. This has not been forthcoming but may well have been overtaken by these serious events.

Climate change must be a wholly legitimate subject of protest and demonstration. If it is met (or is perceived to be met) by an arbitrary, destructive and aggressive police response the consequences will undoubtedly be a continued alienation between police and many decent, law abiding people, particularly the young.

In view of the above we would ask you as a matter of urgency to take personal, immediate and direct action to resolve an increasingly threatening confrontation.

We look forward to your very early response.

Yours sincerely,

Caroline Lucas MEP

Norman Baker MP

Colin Challon MP

The stakes could not be higher. Everything hinges on stopping coal

JamieSW — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:56:13 +0000

As soon as I have finished this column I will jump on the train to Kent. Last year Al Gore remarked “I can’t understand why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants.”(1) Like hundreds of honorary young people, I am casting my Zimmer frame aside to answer the call.

Everything now hinges on stopping coal. Whether we prevent runaway climate change largely depends on whether we keep using the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel. Unless we either leave it in the ground or leave the carbon dioxide it produces in the ground, human development will start spiralling backwards. The more coal is burnt, the smaller are our chances of future comfort and prosperity. The industrial revolution has gone into reverse.

It is not because of polar bears that I will be joining the climate camp outside the coal plant at Kingsnorth. It is not because of butterflies or frogs or penguins or rainforests, much as I love them all. It is because everything I have fought for and that all campaigners for social justice have ever fought for – food, clean water, shelter, security – is jeopardised by climate change. Those who claim to identify a conflict between environmentalism and humanitarianism have either failed to read the science or have refused to understand it.

Our government could lead the world in one of two directions. Roughly one third of our power stations will come to the end of their lives by 2020. It could replace them with low-carbon plants or it could repeat – this time in full knowledge of the consequences – the disastrous decisions of the past. E.on’s application to build a new coal-burning power station at Kingsnorth is the first for many years. At least five other such proposals hang on the outcome(2). Between them they would account for 54 million tonnes of carbon emissions a year(3): as much as the entire economy would produce if the UK, in line with current science, were to cut its emissions by 90%(4).

The government seems determined to make the wrong decision. It has inherited the party’s traditional love for coal, but, being New Labour, now supports the bosses not the workers, and has colluded with them to make the case for a new generation of power stations. It has one justification for this policy: that one day dirty coal will be transformed into clean coal by means of carbon capture and storage (CCS). All that is needed to effect this transformation is a sprinkling of alchemical dust, in the form of the future price of carbon. The market, it claims, will automatically ensure that coal plants bury their carbon dioxide, as this will be cheaper than buying pollution permits.

Last month the House of Commons environmental audit committee examined this proposition and found that it was nonsense(5). It cited studies by the UK Energy Research Centre and Climate Change Capital which estimate that capturing carbon emissions from existing coal plants will cost 70-100 or 90-155 euros per tonne of CO2. Yet the government predicts that the likely price of carbon between 2013 to 2020 will be around 39 euros per tonne. Even E.on believes that it won’t rise above 50 euros. “The gap between the carbon price and the cost of CCS”, the committee finds, “is enormous.” The energy minister, Malcolm Wicks, confessed to the MPs “I hope that the strengthening of carbon markets … will bring forward a sufficiently good price for carbon that it will provide some of the financial incentive for CCS. Will it be enough? I do not know.”

This is the sum of government policy: to cross its fingers and hope the market delivers. If it approves a new coal plant at Kingsnorth, it will do so on the grounds that the power station will be “CCS-ready”. CCS-ready seems to mean nothing more than this: that there’s enough space on the site for a carbon capture plant, should the developer deign one day to build it. The committee warns that this meaningless promise could be used “as a fig leaf to give unabated coal-fired power stations an appearance of environmental acceptability.”(6)

The government has already shown us what it wants to do. In January, Gary Mohammed, a civil servant at the business department, emailed E.on to ask whether he should include CCS as a condition for approving its new coal plant. (This gives a fascinating insight into how government works: companies are asked to write their own rules). E.on replied that the government “has no right to withhold approval for conventional plant”. Six minutes later Mr Mohammed answered thus: “Thanks. I won’t include. Hope to get the set of draft conditions out today or tomorrow.”(7)

There is a simple means by which the government could ensure that our future electricity supplies would not commit the UK to stoking runaway climate change. It would do as California has done, and set, by a certain date, a maximum level for carbon pollution per megawatt-hour of electricity production. This would have to be a low one: perhaps 80kg of CO2. Then, in line with the government’s precious principles (or absence thereof), it could leave the rest to the market. I have now reached the point at which I no longer care whether or not the answer is nuclear. Let it happen, as long as its total emissions are taken into account, we know exactly how and where the waste is to be buried, how much this will cost and who will pay, and there is a legal guarantee that no civil nuclear materials will be used by the military. We can no longer afford any rigid principle but one: that the harm done to people living now and in the future must be minimised by the most effective means, whatever they might be.

But I believe the likely response would be more interesting than this. Several recent studies have shown how, through maximising the diversity of renewable generators and by spreading them as far apart as possible, by using new techniques for balancing demand with supply and clever schemes for storing energy, between 80 and 100% of our electricity could be produced by renewables, without any loss in the reliability of power supplies(8,9,10). Unlike CCS, wind, wave, tidal, solar, hydro and geothermal power are proven technologies. Unlike nuclear power, they can be safely decommissioned as soon as they become redundant.

A policy like this requires both courage and vision. So look at the current cabinet – Brown, Straw, Darling, Hutton, Blears, Kelly, Hoon – and weep. Every man and woman with backbone was purged from this government years ago, leaving those who know how to appease the interests that might threaten them. These people won’t stand up to business, even when the future prospects of mankind are at stake.

If fear is the only thing that moves them, we must present them with a greater threat than the companies planning new coal plants. We must show that this issue has become a political flashpoint; that the public revulsion towards new coal could help to eject them from office. You could do no better than joining us at Kingsnorth this week.

References:

1. Quoted by Nicholas Kristof, 16th August 2007. The Big Melt. New York Times.

2. Longannet & Cockenzie (Scottish Power); Ferrybridge (Scottish and Southern Energy); Fiddler’s Ferry (Scottish and Southern Energy); Tilbury (RWE npower); Blyth (RWE npower).

3. Greenpeace makes this calculation as follows: “10.6 GW [the generation capacity of the six plants] x 7884 hours of generation per year, assuming 90% operational = 83.57 TWH/y. 83.57 TWH/y x 0.65 = 54 mt/CO2/y”. See footnote 23: http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200708/cmselect/c…

4. The provisional government estimate for the UK’s CO2 emissions in 2007 is 543.7 million tonnes. Defra, July 2008. UK Climate Change Programme. Annual Report to Parliament, July 2008, p9. http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/uk/ukccp/pdf/ukccp-ann…

5. House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, 22nd July 2008 . Carbon capture and
storage. Ninth Report of Session 2007–08. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmselect/cmenvaud/654/...

6. ibid.

7. You can open the emails on this page:
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/media/press-releases/government-climate-pol…

8. German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Technical Thermodynamics Section Systems Analysis and Technology Assessment, June 2006. Trans-Mediterranean Interconnection for Concentrating Solar Power. Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, Germany. http://www.dlr.de/tt/Portaldata/41/Resources/dokumente/institut/system/p…

9. Mark Barrett, April 2006. A Renewable Electricity System for the UK: A Response to the 2006 Energy Review. UCL Bartlett School Of Graduate Studies – Complex Built Environment Systems Group. http://www.cbes.ucl.ac.uk/projects/energyreview/Bartlett%20Response%20to…

10. Centre for Alternative Technology, 10th July 2007. ZeroCarbonBritain: an alternative energy strategy. This will be made available at www.zerocarbonbritain.com.

Coal in a hole

tim — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 13:53:44 +0000

A smiling child gazes up into lush green foliage ; boats float in a tranquil harbour ; a couple stand by a gate in a misty, magical landscape. These are some of the images that greet you when you visit the website of E On UK, ‘Britain’s leading energy company’. The gentle giant provides energy for homes and schools, and more – scroll down and the issues covered range from community volunteering to E On’s investment in renewable energy.

Moreover, E On is taking the threat of climate change seriously, as the main sponsor of the Guardian’s ‘climate change summit’, where it will convene a session examining ‘the role of energy companies in finding effective ways to deliver the transition to secure, affordable and low-carbon energy’.

More specifically, the website describes E On’s new ‘clean coal’ power station at Kingsnorth in Kent, which will replace existing plant and employ ‘supercritical technology’ to make it 20 per cent more efficient. To top it all, it will be built with the capacity to retrofit carbon capture and storage (CCS), a new technology designed to reduce emissions still further.

E On, it seems, is trying very hard. So hard that it has recently hired Edelman, a world leader in the public relations field and the self-proclaimed inventor of ‘environmental PR’. The threat ? The Camp for Climate Action, which will be coming to Kingsnorth this August. E On says it respects the right to protest, and just wants to be able to operate and provide power for its customers’ homes and businesses.

Seems reasonable enough ? Let’s look beyond the greenwash.

Kingsnorth is a coal-fired power station. Coal may pose ‘the greatest threat to the climate’, according to James Hansen, NASA scientist, but as a source of power generation it is very cheap. And there’s plenty of it, at least for the time being. So, as E On is firmly committed to maximising profits for its shareholders, it is firmly committed to coal. Which doesn’t really square with a ‘low-carbon’ goal.

E On UK is part of the German-based E On group, which has at least eight new coal-fired power stations planned in Europe and one in the US in the next five years. This energy giant prides itself on working towards ‘vertical integration’ – gaining control of the entire supply chain – and its portfolio covers coal, oil, gas, nuclear and renewable energy.

E On generates around 10 per cent of our electricity in the UK. Of that, for all the talk, renewables weigh in at a paltry 2 per cent, while coal accounts for a massive 61 per cent. E On has three coal-fired power stations including Kingsnorth, and their combined generation is greater than any other UK company’s.

Since the winding down of the UK coal industry in the 1980s, the coal-fired stations built in the 1960s and 1970s have been ticking over. However, EU legislation limiting emissions means that most will have to close. It is this, rather than any aspiration to be environmentally responsible, that is driving the wave of seven proposed new coal-fired power stations in the UK. These will ensure that coal is burned for the next 50 years at least. The new plant at Kingsnorth will produce eight million tonnes of CO2 per year. ‘Clean coal’ is a contradiction in terms.

Then we come to the big red herring that is CCS – an as yet unproven technology whereby CO2 is sequestered and stored away. Even if it turns out to be technically feasible, it will be costly and, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is unlikely to be commercially viable for decades – far too late to have any impact on climate change. But this hasn’t stopped E On and companies like it from using CCS as a justification for new coal-fired power power stations such as at Kingsnorth.

The alternatives are clear. If, as the government states, the UK is set to become a world-leader in technologies such as wind and wave power, the coal industry is ripe for what is known as a ‘just transition’ to green-collar jobs. The German environmental engineering sector has generated some 250,000 jobs in the past four years, a figure that dwarfs the 5,600 in UK coal.

The revitalisation of the coal industry is a path the government and energy companies shouldn’t even be thinking of treading in the face of climate change. It is up to us to stand squarely in the way.

Caroline Lucas at Climate Camp

tim — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 11:56:43 +0000

South East MEP and Green activist Dr Caroline Lucas will be joining protesters at Climate Camp 2008 this weekend at Kingsnorth in Kent to rally against the Government’s continued commitment to unsustainable fossil fuels and its failure to adapt to tough environmental and economic conditions.

Speaking ahead of the Camp, which was held last year at Heathrow and attracted in excess of 1500 people, Dr Lucas said:

“I am delighted to be taking part in Climate Camp this year, and where better to highlight the Government’s failure to provide leadership on climate change than Kingsnorth, the proposed location for the first coal fired power station in Britain for 30 years.

“A new coal facility at Kingsnorth would emit up to 8 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each year – and potentially keep doing so for 50 years. That annual emissions figure is as much C02 as the world’s 24 lowest emitting countries combined.

“Despite all its climate rhetoric, greenhouse gas emissions have risen under this Labour adminstration. Any government which commits to more coal fired power stations – and Kingsnorth is only the start – then claims to be aiming for a massive reduction in carbon emissions by 2020 is quite simply living in a fantasy land.”

On Sunday (3 August), Dr Lucas will take part in a rally on incineration and climate change. Then on Monday (4 August), she will address fellow Climate Campers on the triple crisis of food price rises, economic downturn and climate change facing governments the world over, and what lies ahead for conventional capitalist economics.

She continued: “Our political leaders seem unable to grasp a more radical social and environmental agenda. They can no longer commit to endless free market economic growth, which has played a huge part in the rapid generation of damaging climate emissions, and then wring their hands about climate change.

“The Government should be showing real leadership in this debate, with measures to tackle rising energy costs and fuel poverty, as well as initiating major investment in energy efficiency, renewables and decentralised energy. According to its own figures, we could achieve a 30% reduction in energy use in the UK through existing efficiency measures alone.

“Instead, ministers stick with their business-as-usual approach, further enabling the fossil fuel industry to profit and pollute, while paying scant regard to the average citizen or the environment.”

A Dangerous Untruth

Ellie Keen — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 12:55:04 +0000

Imagine the impact of the second world war. This, according to former World Bank chief economist Nicolas Stern, captures the scale of the economic impact of climate change, left unchecked. The social and environmental effects are predicted to be similarly catastrophic. Given the widely accepted need for rapid and deep cuts in CO2 emissions, the response to E.ON’s application to build the UK’s first coal-fired power station in 30 years, at Kingsnorth in Kent, and news that business secretary John Hutton seems minded to give it the go-ahead, has been bewilderment and anger.

A new high point of opposition starts this weekend as the Camp for Climate Action embarks on an eight-day protest to press the government and E.ON to abandon the scheme. This is no fringe issue: they will be taking action to stop a proposal potentially so destructive that increasing numbers of scientists are speaking out against it.

Over recent years scientists have become increasingly vocal about the need to take action to cut CO2 emissions. In 2005, the science academies of the G8 countries along with Brazil, China and India – three of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the developing world – signed a joint statement to push political leaders to tackle climate change as an urgent priority. By 2008, this group was calling for a rapid, planned transition to a low-carbon economy.

Opposing plans for new coal-fired power plants in developed countries has become an international frontline of climate change politics. Jim Hanson, senior climate change scientist at Nasa, wrote to Gordon Brown last year calling for a ban on new coal, stating that Brown’s decision on Kingsnorth has “the potential to influence the future of the planet”. This is because coal is one of the most polluting and carbon-intensive forms of fossil fuels – producing twice the carbon emissions per unit of electricity as gas. Coal is the cause of fully half of the fossil fuel-caused increase of CO2 in the air today, and there is plenty left to burn. If we don’t limit the use of coal, avoiding catastrophic climate change will become impossible.

However, Paul Golby of E.ON, in these pages yesterday, dismissed anyone opposed to his company’s plans to annually emit at least 6m tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere – more than the total emissions of Costa Rica or Cameroon – as naively ignorant of power generation realities. He has tried to scare the public into thinking that new coal is necessary to keep the lights on.

Yet the independent energy consultancy Pöyry, in a report out today (ilexenergy.com), gives the hard numbers showing projected demand can be met, while respecting strict emissions limits and energy security concerns, using renewables and not resorting to new coal. Meanwhile Cambridge professor of physics David MacKay’s book Without Hot Air presents five different plans of how we can meet the UK’s energy needs and radically reduce emissions. Of course there are no easy answers, but for Golby to deny that there are no answers other than business as usual is dangerously untrue.

Let’s be clear. Either coal usage must stop, or the CO2 released from any coal burned must be kept out of the atmosphere, by burying it under the sea, using an unproven technique known as carbon capture and storage. The Royal Society has made a clear proposal that all new coal plants must capture 90% of their CO2 emissions by 2020, or have their operating permits revoked. If agreed, this would send a clear signal that if carbon capture and storage works, coal use is acceptable, otherwise it is not. However, last month, when E.ON and energy minister Malcolm Wicks were before parliament’s environmental audit committee, both evaded accepting the Royal Society proposals’ impeccable logic.

E.ON’s preference is to use the carbon market to reduce emissions. This won’t deliver real cuts, as its own business case shows: Golby believes E.ON can participate in the European scheme, provide competitively priced electricity and turn in a good profit for 20-40 years by burning the dirtiest fuel. Such delusions must be exposed: it is not possible to keep releasing large quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere and avoid the social, environmental and economic consequences of climate change.

The Climate Camp is creating space for serious debate about the kind of world we want to live in. More than that, the campers give shape to a force that can perhaps override the profits-now catastrophe-later logic of the government and E.ON: they form a broad-based movement of people committed to a socially just transition to a low-carbon society. I certainly don’t want to live in E.ON’s world, where business as usual trumps avoiding dangerous climate change. So I’ll be joining the campers in Kent. Anyone else with concerns about the future should do the same.

Simon Lewis is a Royal Society research fellow at the Earth & Biosphere Institute, University of Leeds