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Just stop oil protests update

Essex Police make 83 arrests as oil terminals blocked

More than 80 people have been arrested as climate change protesters continued to block oil terminals.

Activists from Just Stop Oil said they had obstructed access to a tanker park and revealed an underground network of tunnels at two oil terminals in Essex.

The protesters are demanding the UK government stops new oil and gas projects.

Essex Police said 83 people were arrested for a variety of offences after protests in the Thurrock area.

The force said 63 were held on Friday following protests in Oliver Road, Grays, London Road, Purfleet, and Askew Farm Lane, Grays.

Twenty people were arrested on Saturday at Oliver Road and Stoneness Road, Grays, with officers “continuing to engage” with protesters at both sites, and at Purfleet.

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https://linktr.ee/JustStopOil

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Conservative MP for South Thanet Craig Mackinlay calls for renewable sources of energy to be abandoned!

Continue ReadingJust stop oil protests update

Protesters continue to block UK oil terminals despite arrests

Environmental protesters have continued to block UK oil terminals as part of a campaign to disrupt the fossil fuel industry despite dozens of arrests across the country.

Supporters of Just Stop Oil began the action in the early hours of Friday morning at refineries near London, Birmingham and Southampton by climbing on to tankers and gluing themselves to roads.

Despite at least 34 arrests, the activists continued to disrupt oil terminals on Saturday morning and said they had gained access to further sites.

The group announced on social media that they had blocked Navigator terminals in Essex, posting photos of protesters in hi-vis jackets on top of a tanker and others blocking a road with a banner reading “Just Stop Oil”.

They said protesters had blocked access to the Titan Truck Park and revealed a secret underground network of tunnels leading to the site. The development means the main and emergency access roads to the critical oil terminals are closed.

“We need the government to stop funding new oil projects and we need it now! Our only means of highlighting this issue is mass civil resistance,” they said in a post on Instagram.

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Conservative MP for South Thanet Craig Mackinlay calls for renewable sources of energy to be abandoned!

Continue ReadingProtesters continue to block UK oil terminals despite arrests

Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion’s oil terminal protests

News articles about the protests at oil terminals that started today.

Inside Just Stop Oil, the youth climate group blocking UK refineries

A band of 20-year-olds have made headlines disrupting football games, the Baftas and now oil facilities across the UK. But what do they want?

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At a recruitment meeting last Thursday in Camden, north London, Larch Maxey, a veteran eco-campaigner, said the aim was “to build a community of civil resistance in response to the climate change science”.

“In 2022 you have got tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers spelling out the climate science,” he said. Authorities such as David Attenborough and David King, the former government chief science officer, were in agreement, he said: there is a narrow window of two to three years in which to act. “We are facing the end of civilisation if we do not act on the climate emergency. We are heading towards societal collapse.

“When your house is on fire, you stop pouring petrol on the flames,” he said. “That’s basically the demand – no new licences. We are in a crisis. Let’s stop digging out new oil and gas.”

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The key shift in Just Stop Oil is what its supporters say is a move from civil disobedience and into civil resistance. What that means, as Jess Causby, 25, a supporter of the campaign, told the Guardian last month, “is stopping pointing out what the government should or shouldn’t be doing [and instead] actively stopping government doing what they shouldn’t be.”

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END FOSSIL FUELS NOW: Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil block oil facilities across the UK

April 01, 2022 by Extinction Rebellion

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The government is making a choice to continue its addiction to fossil fuels as war wages in Ukraine, instead of accelerating the transition to a renewable led future. They could choose not to. Just a few months on from the “last chance” of COP26, Boris Johnson now claims the current crisis demands a “climate change pass”.[6] The Prime Minister says he wants to “remove barriers” to increased extraction of fossil fuels from the North Sea and has now gone begging Saudi Arabia to increase its oil supply.[7][8] The UK is also set to approve licenses for 40 new fossil fuel projects.[9]

The recent IPCC report tells us in no uncertain terms that the window is closing on adaptation, let alone mitigation.[10] The Environment Agency put it bluntly in its October 2021 report: Adapt or Die.[11] Breakdown is happening in a way that isn’t allowing time for adaptation. According to the UN Secretary General, staying on fossil fuels will cause an atlas of human suffering and ‘delay means death’.[12][13]

All of this is taking place despite recent polling showing that the UK public wants climate action now in face of the energy crisis.[14] As fossil fuel multinationals use the war in Ukraine to lobby for new extraction, they are also getting huge tax breaks, while its expected that 1 in 4 people in the UK will not be able to pay their bills by September.[15][16] 

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[6] https://www.netzerowatch.com/boris-johnsons-climate-change-pass-for-natural-gas-welcomed/

[7] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/energy-oil-gas-ukraine-boris-johnson-b2035408.html

[8] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-saudi-oil-executions-b2037442.html

[9] https://neweconomics.org/2021/10/40-new-uk-fossil-fuel-projects-emitting-triple-the-uks-annual-emissions-could-be-approved-by-2025

[10] IPCC key takeaways: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/key-takeaways-ipcc-report-climate-impacts-adaptation-2022-02-28/

[11] https://www.cityam.com/adapt-or-die-warns-uk-environment-agency-as-iea-cautions-worlds-coal-reliance/

[12] https://www.politico.eu/article/landmark-climate-report-details-an-atlas-of-human-suffering/

[13] https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/delay-means-death-un-climate-report-urges-immediate-drastic-action-2022-02-28/

Just Stop Oil protests: Terminal operations suspended and arrests made

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Extinction Rebellion spokesman Andy Smith said the group had “held” three locations of strategic importance to the UK’s energy network:

  • Esso West, near Heathrow Airport
  • Esso Hythe, Southampton
  • BP Hamble, also Southampton

Campaigners from the Just Stop Oil group say they are protesting at seven other sites:

  • Inter Terminals UK, Grays, Essex
  • Navigator Terminals Thames, Grays, Essex
  • Buncefield Oil Depot, Hemel Hempstead
  • Esso Birmingham
  • Purfleet Fuels Terminal, Essex
  • Kingsbury Oil Terminal, Warwickshire
  • BP Depot, Tamworth

Operations had been halted at Hythe, Birmingham, Purfleet and West London terminals, said ExxonMobil.

The company said its terminal at Avonmouth, Bristol, was not affected by the demonstrations.

It apologised for any inconvenience.

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and from the right-wing bigots …

Patrick Christys: Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil are domestic terrorists who need locking up

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And yet here we are. These environmental bandits are at it again.

Hundreds of eco activists from Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil have blocked ten major oil terminals across England in a mass protest amid demands that the Government stops new oil and gas projects.

They’re blocking oil tankers from leaving the sites, which, if it continues, would only serve to push up the price of oil more.

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Some bloke who’s never worked a day in his life, doesn’t care about money because he wants us all to live in a vegan hippy commune using moss for mattresses is making the cost of living crisis even worse.

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These eco bandits are a menace.

Conservative MP for South Thanet Craig Mackinlay calls for renewable sources of energy to be abandoned!

Continue ReadingJust Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion’s oil terminal protests

To tackle the cost of living crisis, we must end the Great British Rip Off

A major culprit of the ‘cost of living’ crisis is hiding in plain sight: an extractive economy that redistributes wealth upwards

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Last week the UK energy regulator, Ofgem, announced that the energy price cap will rise by 54% in April, pushing up bills for millions of households by £693 per year. On the same day, fossil fuel company Shell reported that its annual profits had quadrupled, largely due to the very same soaring gas prices that are responsible for fuelling recent spikes in inflation.

In other words: not everyone is feeling the pinch of the ‘cost of living’ crisis. As household budgets are squeezed even further, fossil fuel company shareholders are laughing all the way to the bank.

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Energy is far from the only sector where one person’s pain is another’s gain. In recent decades, many of our most essential services have become engines of extractive redistribution – taking wealth away from workers and funnelling it upwards to asset owners.

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Perhaps the largest expense for many households is housing costs. For much of the past half-century, housing has served two conflicting functions in the economy. On the one hand, housing is a basic need – providing shelter, security and warmth. From this perspective, it is desirable for house prices and rents to stay low to ensure that housing is affordable. On the other hand, housing has become one of the primary vehicles for accumulating wealth. From this perspective, it is desirable for house prices and rents to increase, enabling those who own property to grow their wealth over time. These two roles are in direct conflict with each other: housing can not simultaneously be affordable and lucrative as an investment at the same time, as much as politicians like to pretend otherwise. In recent decades, government policy has sought to promote the latter role at the direct expense of the former – with dire consequences for the millions of households that are locked out of homeownership.

While economists and politicians hail a booming housing market as a sign of wealth creation, in reality it’s one of the most powerful forms of wealth redistribution. When the price of a house goes up, the total productive capacity of the economy is unchanged, because nothing new has been produced: it merely constitutes an increase in the value of an existing asset. While this increases the net wealth of individual homeowners and landlords, for everyone else it often means facing higher rents in the rental market, and having to save for a deposit and pay more interest on larger mortgages. The reality is that the housing ladder is rather like a zero-sum game: the wealth enjoyed by some is mirrored by the deprivation and exclusion of others.

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There can be no doubt that the ‘cost of living crisis’ is a real concern. But it is not new, and it is not simply the result of rising gas prices. For decades, British households have been squeezed by a pincer movement of persistently low incomes on the one hand, and extractive business models on the other. Unless urgent action is taken on both fronts, another ‘lost decade’ looks all but inevitable.

Continue ReadingTo tackle the cost of living crisis, we must end the Great British Rip Off