‘The Home Secretary has side-lined Parliament to sneak in new legislation via the back door, despite not having the powers to do so.’
Home Secretary Suella Braverman is facing legal action over her latest draconian piece of legislation which attacks the right to protest.
Last week, the government launched its most brazen attack on the right to protest yet, with amendments to the Public Order Act 1986 which would significantly lower the threshold for police intervention on protests, and it would empower officers to impose conditions – including changing timings, locations and routes, and imposing noise restrictions – on protests they believe “may” cause “more than minor” disruption.
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Now Liberty, the UK’ s largest civil liberties organisation, is taking legal action against the Home Secretary.
The group says that using secondary legislation to bring the powers into force ‘violates the constitutional principle of the separation of powers because the measures have already been rejected by Parliament’.
“By bringing in these powers, the Government has been accused of breaking the law to give the police ‘almost unlimited’ powers to shut down protests due to the vagueness of the new language”, it adds.
Just Stop Oil protesting in London 6 December 2022.
I am webmaster of https://onaquietday.org. Here I am speculating on the likely outcomes of the current climate crisis. Please regard this post as draft and subject to change, revision or elaboration.
Writing in June 2023, the current situation is that the climate crisis is generally accepted as real, there are very few climate sceptics and instead there are mostly right-wing politicians but also others that campaign to stifle or delay meaningful climate action, the fossil fuel industry who are largely responsible for the climate crisis continuing to destroy the planet and profiteer in the process, scientists and others pleading for climate action. Extreme weather events are experienced worldwide which are expected to continue increasing, the 1.5 degree C goal of the Paris Agreement is likely to be passed within a few years.
There is currently some hostility to climate activists like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. I attribute this to the influence of the right-wing corporate press – GB News, Rupert Murdoch and Viscount Rothermere amoung others. As the climate is further damaged – and there’s only one way it’s going – the influence of these cnuts is likely to diminish as people recognise the shite they spew as exactly that.
People will come to realise that politicians and the tiny ruling elite that they serve have failed them as they experience more and harsher climate impacts actually over the next few years. Who will they turn to then? It’s obvious, isn’t it? We’re either going to end up co-operating to address the climate crisis or with authoritarianism protecting a tiny elite denying it.
Climate protestors take part in a march on April 29, 2023 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
“Regardless of how the White House spins President Biden’s actions, he cannot be a climate leader while continuing to expand fossil fuels.”
More than 500 advocacy groups from six continents urged U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday to declare a climate emergency and halt the further expansion of fossil fuel production ahead of United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres’ September 20 Climate Ambition Summit in New York City.
Such a step, the groups wrote in a letter to Biden and the heads of key U.S. federal agencies, would help make the nation “a first mover in ending the fossil fuel era to right a legacy of historic harms and prevent global climate catastrophe.”
“You cannot claim legitimacy as a domestic or global leader if you continue to speed the destruction of the planet,” reads the letter, which was signed by 350.org, Oil Change International, Climate Action Network Zimbabwe, Fridays For Future South Asia, and hundreds of other groups from more than 60 countries.
“It’s time for the United States to answer the call to protect the future of the planet and use its unparalleled power to show what real climate leadership looks like,” the letter continues, specifically calling on the Biden administration to reject all federal permits for new fossil fuel projects, revoke any “illegally granted” permits for fossil fuel projects, use its authority to limit U.S. oil and gas exports, and declare a climate emergency.
The groups issued their demands shortly after climate campaigners, including signatories of the new letter, announced plans for a global mass mobilization ahead of Guterres’ summit and the subsequent COP28 conference in the United Arab Emirates.
Allie Rosenbluth, U.S. program co-manager at Oil Change International, said Thursday that Biden’s “approach to the climate crisis is nothing short of hypocritical,” noting that the U.S. under his leadership remains “the world’s top oil and gas producer and exporter and is planning the largest expansion in oil and gas production over the next decade.”
To the dismay of climate advocates and scientists, the Biden administration has worked to advance several major oil and gas initiatives in recent weeks, including the Willow Project in Alaska and the Mountain Valley Pipeline in Virginia.
“Every new fossil fuel project is incompatible with a livable future,” said Rosenbluth. “As the world’s biggest historic polluter, the U.S. has a responsibility to lead a global and just transition away from fossil fuels. Voters are not going to ignore Biden’s disastrous climate record unless he starts keeping his climate promises and paves the way for a sustainable future to avert further climate disaster.”
“The world desperately needs Biden to start living up to his rhetoric and address the root cause of the climate crisis.”
The new letter takes key federal agencies to task for failing to act in line with the president’s climate rhetoric, which has deemed runaway planetary warming “an existential threat.”
“Your Department of the Interior should be overseeing a fast and justly managed decline of fossil fuel production. Yet, your administration is actively expanding fossil fuel infrastructure,” the letter states. “It is approving new drilling permits at a faster rate than the previous administration.”
“Your Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration should be rejecting deepwater port permits for mega-polluting crude oil export facilities,” the letter continues. “Your Department of Energy should be a firewall against a flurry of over 20 gas export terminals proposed by industry across the Gulf coast, which could lead to over 1.1 billion metric tons of new emissions. Agencies like your Army Corps of Engineers continue to approve key permits for fossil fuel mega-projects despite clear legal mandates to protect the public interest.”
When he announced the Climate Ambition Summit late last year, Guterres said there is a “non-negotiable” price of entry for world leaders that wish to attend: “credible, serious, and new climate action and nature-based solutions that will move the needle forward and respond to the urgency of the climate crisis must be presented.”
“It will be a no-nonsense summit. No exceptions. No compromises,” he added at the time. “There will be no room for back-sliders, greenwashers, blame-shifters, or repackaging of announcements of previous years.”
Nicole Ghio, senior fossil fuels program manager at Friends of the Earth, said Thursday that unless Biden quickly changes course, “there should be no place for him” at the summit.
“Regardless of how the White House spins President Biden’s actions, he cannot be a climate leader while continuing to expand fossil fuels,” said Nicole Ghio, senior fossil fuels program manager at Friends of the Earth. “The world desperately needs Biden to start living up to his rhetoric and address the root cause of the climate crisis.”
Just Stop Oil protesting in London 6 December 2022.
“It will always be profit over people and planet for polluters,” said one campaigner. “Shell simply cannot be trusted—with either their own meager targets or our futures.”
Shell announced Wednesday that it is raising payouts to wealthy shareholders and scrapping plans to cut oil production by up to 2% annually, a move that environmental groups said lays bare the futility of relying on fossil fuel corporations to voluntarily curb their climate-destroying activities.
The London-based company, which more than doubled its annual profits last year, said in a press release that it now intends to “achieve cash flow longevity” by keeping oil production stable until 2030 and boosting gas production, even as scientists say a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels is necessary to avert global climate destruction.
“It is unacceptable that Shell is betting on even more short-term returns to appease shareholders,” said Sjoukje van Oosterhout, Climate Case Shell’s lead researcher. “Shell is now throwing in the towel on reducing oil production and even scaling up gas production.”
Shell also announced Wednesday that it is hiking its dividend by 15%, a change that’s set to take effect this quarter. In an additional gift to shareholders, the company said it plans to buy back at least $5 billion of its own stock in the second half of 2023.
“Record profits, off the back of the energy crisis, should be boosting up green investment,” Jonathan Noronha-Gant, a senior campaigner at Global Witness, said in a statement Wednesday. “Instead it’s shareholder pay-outs and a doubling down on climate-wrecking fossil fuels.”
Shell had previously said its oil and gas production would fall by 1-2% each year through 2030. But as Bloombergreported, Shell justified the newly announced shift by claiming it “achieved its initial output-reduction plan—announced in 2021 amid a focus on cutting carbon emissions—faster than anticipated.”
Noronha-Gant called Shell’s announcement a “climate bombshell” that “exposes the hollowness behind the setting of such a target.”
“It will always be profit over people and planet for polluters,” Noronha-Gant said Wednesday. “Shell simply cannot be trusted—with either their own meager targets or our futures.”
Others responded with similar outrage. Climate scientist Bill McGuire wrote on Twitter that Shell CEO Wael Sawan “knows exactly what the consequences of this decision are.”
“People will die—are already dying,” McGuire tweeted. “I want to see him jailed—along with all the other CEOs who have been unequivocally complicit in crimes against humanity. And so should you.”
We can’t rely on oil companies that knowingly caused the #ClimateCrisis to do the right thing voluntarily…
If they have to decide between their economic bottom line and the survival of our communities, their greed will win out every time.https://t.co/3hm25DQugh
— Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) 🌻 (@CJAOurPower) June 14, 2023
Shell’s announcement comes weeks after Carbon Brief released an analysis highlighting the oil giant’s tacit admission that limiting warming to 1.5°C by the end of the century means an “immediate end to fossil fuel growth.”
“Shell had previously claimed that oil and gas production could rise for another decade, even as warming was limited to 1.5°C,” Carbon Brief observed. “The dramatic shift in its new ‘Energy Security Scenarios’ is not explicitly acknowledged, but… is hidden in plain sight.”
“The immediate end to fossil fuel growth in Shell’s new 1.5°C scenario marks a dramatic shift from its earlier work, which had squared the circle between limiting warming to 1.5°C and continuing to expand oil and gas production by invoking implausibly-large forest expansion,” Carbon Brief added.
Shell insisted Wednesday that it is “aiming to achieve near-zero methane emissions by 2030” and “net-zero emissions by 2050,” but research released earlier this week showed that such commitments are often meaningless because companies rarely outline specific steps they plan to take to achieve their stated targets.
Last month, Friends of the Earth Netherlands published a report accusing Shell of overstating its spending on renewable energy solutions by including “the sale of flowers and sandwiches at its gas stations” in the total, along with “biofuels with a high carbon footprint.”
“The company continues to contribute to catastrophic climate change,” the group concluded.
