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Greenpeace wins fight

20th September 2008

A jury cleared six Greenpeace activists last week of causing criminal damage to a coal-fired power plant in southeast England

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Protesters in Britain appear to have scored a major legal victory against energy companies and their government.

A jury cleared six Greenpeace activists last week of causing criminal damage to a coal-fired power plant in southeast England. Last October, they scaled one of the plant’s smokestacks and scrawled “GORDON” on it in protest against government plans to build new coal-fired plants. They had intended to write, “Gordon, bin it” – a demand aimed at Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

The graffiti cost $60,000 to remove from the plant, which emits 20,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide each day, as much as the world’s 30 least-polluting countries.

The protesters admitted causing property damage, but mounted a “lawful-excuse defence,” arguing that they acted to prevent even greater property damage from climate change. Among the witnesses were James Hansen, a leading climate-change expert and a scientist with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, who said the Kingsnorth plant alone would wipe out 400 species, and Aqq aluk Lynge, vice-president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, who described the difficulties Inuit communities face because of unpredictable weather and loss of the species they hunt.

This defence “is novel to me,” says Will Amos, a staff lawyer at the uOttawa-Ecojustice Environmental Law Clinic. While there is speculation that many more activists will use the same argument, “it would be hard to predict a floodgate scenario,” he says. “However, as property damages directly related to climate change increases, it would be unreasonable not to expect greater civil disobedience where governments are seen as not acting.”

Published in The Green Report in The Globe and Mail

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• Tags:
• Activism
• Climate Change
• CO2
• Coal
• England
• Greenpeace
• James Hansen
• Political Protest

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