Knocking the crown from King Coal's head
The acquittal of our six coal activists in the UK continues to send ripples through the UK press and out into the world. I especially liked this piece from John Vidal in the Guardian, who points out that Greenpeace now has a four-nil record in jury cases against the Crown in which the activists have plead that they acted according to their consciences and that they were trying to prevent a greater crime.
As ecstatic as I am at the decision, one has to ask why it's at all surprising. What's wrong with Civil Society when it's an amazing, news-generating shock that six people don't go punished when, in the absence of action by government or industry to turn our Titanic society away from an iceberg we can all clearly see, they seized the rudder themselves.
This is at the core of why I work for Greenpeace. This is the way civil society is supposed to work.
Here's what Vidal had to say about the upshot of the Kingsnorth six trial:
...the verdict was a real shock for government, the coal industry and Kingsnorth's German owners. John Hutton, the energy secretary, has, with the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBERR), been strongly backing a major expansion of the UK coal industry against fierce opposition from the former environment secretary David Miliband, and the current one, Hilary Benn. Until now, the pendulum has leaned slightly towards Hutton, who has argued that more UK coal is vital if we are to keep the lights on, and that climate change can be dealt with later by others. But the cabinet is split, and Gordon Brown has put off making any firm decision on expansion.The Maidstone verdict has changed all that and could prove a turning point both for the protest movement and industrial policy. It gave the clear political message that 12 people with - one must assume - no great scientific knowledge, had listened to the evidence of one of the best scientists in the world and concluded that climate change is now so serious and so urgent an issue that it is legally justifiable for people to invade a power station and do £30,000 worth of damage.
Out of the blue, the environmentalists say, the legitimacy of the government to pursue an expanding coal policy has been undermined and it may have become impossible for E.ON, the German owners of Kingsnorth, to go ahead with a new plant without fitting a £500m carbon capture and storage plant to collect and dispose of the greenhouse gases.
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