Fifteen years ago, on this day, September 10, 2008, Greenpeace who had occupied the Kingsnorth power station were acquitted – a jury found them not guilty.
It’s been a pretty unusual ten days but today has been truly extraordinary. At 3.20pm, the jury came back into court and announced a majority verdict of not guilty! All six defendants – Kevin, Emily, Tim, Will, Ben and Huw – were acquitted of criminal damage.
To recap on how important this verdict is: the
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/climate/kingsnorth-trial-breaking-news-verdict-20080910defendantscampaigners were accused of causing £30,000 of criminal damage to Kingsnorth smokestack from painting. The defence was that they had ‘lawful excuse’ – because they were acting to protect property around the world “in immediate need of protection” from the impacts of climate change, caused in part by burning coal.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 385.4ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Greenpeace activists had been pushing against coal with so-called “CCS ready” status. Climate campers had camped out first at Drax power station in 2006 and then at Kingsnorth in 2008. Just before this acquittal more broadly the Brown government was trying to to get carbon capture and storage technology going partly in order to save the world.
What I think we can learn from this is that for successful social acceptance of new technology you’re probably going to need environmentalists on board. But it’s not clear to me that they will ever be particular fans of CCS.
What happened next
The first CCS competition kind of fizzled out in 2011 the second one was abruptly plug pulled in 2015 and then there was a massive work of re sanctifying CCS in 2016/17/18.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs..