Edging out fossil fuels and false solutions in the UK

The first action directed at Copenhagen talks in the United Kingdom took place this April. Frustrated by carbon markets being used to justify new fossil-fuel intensive infrastructure, climate activists started to turn their sights to the market itself. On 1 April, as G20 leaders started rolling into London in their limousines, the Camp for Climate Action swooped on the European Climate Exchange, the biggest hub of Europe’s carbon market. Camped under the banner “Nature doesn’t do bailouts”, thousands of activists blocked one of the main roads in the financial district of London until they were violently evicted by police in the early hours of the morning. The Climate Camp legal team have recently secured the right to challenge the legality of the police tactics used on the day in High Court.

The focus on carbon trading has continued right up to the climate summit. For the big NGO-organised march that took place in London last Saturday, 5 December, 50 people dressed up as free-market profiteers and formed the spoof World Association of Carbon Traders (WACT). Later that day, the Climate Camp swooped again, occupying Trafalgar Square, in the centre of town, to highlight the ineffectiveness and unjustness of any deal so heavily based on carbon trading.

The focus on carbon trading by activists has not detracted from other actions against carbon-intensive infrastructure, though. Direct action campaigns against new coal-fired plants, runway expansions at Heathrow airport and opencast coal mining during the course of 2009 have included mass trespass, lock-ons, fence cutting, office occupations, blockades, runway invasions, an armada of homemade rafts laying siege to a power station and many, many people super-gluing themselves to pretty much anything and everything within reach.

Encouragingly, these campaigns started to bear real results as the Copenhagen meeting approached. Energy giant E.ON quietly shelved it’s plans to build the first new coal-fired power station in the UK for over 30 years, while Heathrow’s proposed third runway is looking increasingly unlikely to go ahead. Both of these projects were turned into political hot potatoes after a campaign of sustained direct action.

The climate movement in the UK has tread a fine line between edginess and accessibility, attempting, as someone put it, to show that its “not just about eating hummus and gluing your dreads to the motorway.” It is still predominantly white and middle class, but some interesting links were forged between climate and labour activists during the worker occupation of a Vestas wind turbine factory in the Isle of Wight when it was threatened with closure in August. Further solidarities will surely be forged as the next aviation struggle shapes up: the expansion of City Airport, which threatens communities in a predominantly non-white, working class area of London.

www.climatecamp.org.uk