After five Insulate Britain (IB) activists were jailed in February, police forces in three counties brought criminal charges against IB road blockaders in March.
Kent police charged 74 people, all but one for causing a public nuisance, many also for obstruction of the highway. Two were charged with criminal damage to a police car.
The Met in London laid 63 ‘public nuisance’ charges against 56 activists.
Surrey police brought 131 charges. They charged 54 people with…
On 23 March, Animal Rebellion used a lorry to blockade the road leading to the Kedassia (kosher) abbatoir in Hackney, East London.
This was the beginning of ‘Gardens Not Slaughterhouses’, a campaign to shut down what the group says is London’s last remaining slaughterhouse – and turn the site into a community garden.
Two days later, on the day of the global climate strike, students from University College London, King’s College London, and London Metropolitan University dropped…
On 1 March, it was confirmed that ClientEarth, Friends of the Earth and Good Law Project can take the UK government to court over its inadequate net zero strategy.
The government’s own baseline forecasts show that the UK’s projected emissions in 2037 will be more than double the levels the government is legally required to achieve under the 2008 Climate Change Act in order to meet its legally-binding carbon budget.
If we’re to have a chance of keeping global heating at 1.5 ºC, and if we want to avoid putting the burden of the climate transition on poorer (fossil-fuel producer) nations, then rich countries must completely stop producing oil and gas by 2034.
That was the stark message of the UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in a major report released on 22 March.
The report notes that some poorer countries, like South Sudan or Gabon, are so reliant on fossil fuel revenues…
Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Insulate Britain co-founder Roger Hallam has been touring the UK recently, recruiting for his latest nonviolent direct action project: Just Stop Oil. Among other things, he’s been telling audiences that we’re looking at experiencing a 7 ºC temperature rise by 2042 (possibly sooner) – and that solving the climate crisis ‘is not complicated’.
These claims deserve examination. Hallam expressed them, for example, in a talk in Hastings on 10 January. (I’m…
Though he doesn’t mention it in this book, I imagine activist Chris Saltmarsh is a big fan of the Chico Mendes quote that often appears on Twitter: ‘Environmentalism Without Class Struggle is Just Gardening.’
For Saltmarsh, ‘the root cause of climate change is our system of organising the economy and our relationship to nature: capitalism.’ With the ruling class profiting most from the crisis, he notes the resistance of capital is ‘perhaps the biggest barrier to climate justice.’…
All of the UK’s housing stock ‘zero carbon’ by 2050. Everyone living in well-insulated homes heated by clean, green energy – whether they rent a flat or own a castle. A ‘Great Homes Upgrade’.
That’s the goal of an ambitious community-organising initiative recently launched by the New Economics Foundation (NEF).
In the near term, this means getting seven million homes – including all social housing – brought up to a good standard by 2025, and a further 12 million homes brought…
For Peace News, I should say something constructive, something that encourages ongoing political engagement. But there was something about the Pilgrimage for COP26 that encouraged a different sort of engagement; less constructive in a clear-cut way.
After all, the pilgrimage arrived in Glasgow just before COP26 began and, while some of us stayed on to engage with COP26, most of us went home.
First the facts. We walked from Dunbar to Glasgow as a lead-in to the…
Six climate activists from Insulate Britain (IB) were freed from prison on 14 January after serving their sentences (with time off for good behaviour). The only remaining prisoner from that group was Ben Taylor (27), who had one more month to go.
Two IB prisoners had been released earlier, on New Year’s Eve: Louis McKechnie (21) and Ana Heytawin (58).
Louis McKechnie told the Big Issue after his release that the group will be employing different tactics this year: ‘I’m not sure…
If you haven’t been hiding under a rock for the last three years, you’ll probably have heard of ‘net zero’. This is the idea that, in order to address the climate crisis, we must rapidly bring about a balance between human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere and human-caused removals of the same.
The best versions of net zero could be part of the solution and a instrument for climate justice.
However, as Holly Jean Buck argues in this timely work, the…
The vast carbon emissions produced by the military are coming under increasing scrutiny. The UK ministry of defence (MoD) published a strategy on climate change earlier this year, outlining how it will reduce the carbon impact of 'defence' up to 2050.
However, there will still be no external or independent scrutiny of greenhouse gases produced by the military, as COP26 failed to ensure that they will be included in emissions targets.
Emissions are only one issue in terms of the…
Rather than setting somewhat unreal targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in several decades’ time, shouldn’t we be looking at the practicalities and ethics of shutting down the extraction and use of fossil fuels as soon as possible?
That’s the subject of a major report released during COP26 by Civil Society Review, an international coalition of social movements, environmental and development NGOs, trade unions, faith and other civil society groups.
The report is called…
Saleemul Huq, Bangladesh:
As far as I’m concerned, it is a failure. Absolute failure.... It’s a death sentence for the poorest people on the planet.
And not only that, the polluters are saying: ‘To hell with you, we don’t care, we’re not going to give you a penny.’
… We’re not giving up, but we are describing this COP as an abject failure because it hasn’t been able to rise to the occasion of dealing with loss and damage.
It doesn’t matter what else they do. That…
‘Climate change is the crisis of our time. Its intensifying impacts are affecting millions of people around the world, the health of our planet, and it is driving species extinction. It is disproportionately affecting the people and communities globally who have contributed the least to creating this planetary emergency.’
Those are the opening words of ‘the People’s Demands for Climate Justice’, a statement issued in 2018 by the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice. (The Global…
This is a small sample of what happened in Glasgow during the COP26 climate talks! Almost all these events were organised by the COP26 Coalition, a UK-based climate justice coalition bringing together environment and development NGOs, trade unions, grassroots community campaigns, faith groups, youth groups, migrant and racial justice networks and more. Behind the scenes, the coalition also: ran a visa support service; mobilised people across Scotland to open their homes for a Homestay…
