Around midnight three of my colleagues eased themselves off one of the Greenpeace
inflatable speedboats and into the cold water of the river Medway in Kent.
It's
difficult to imagine what must be going through your mind in that
situation -
in the dark, in the cold water, with the looming lights of a large ship
getting closer. But however difficult to imagine it is, it must have
been even more difficult to do, because Cathy, Emma and Hannah knew
that they were swimming out into
the channel to block a coal freighter carrying twenty thousand tonnes
of coal
from docking at the Kingsnorth jetty.
As they
made their swim - on one of the shortest nights of the year - more
Greenpeace volunteers flagged the ship down with flares and banners, pulled alongside and clambering
up the steep metal sides, across the deck, and on up the mast and funnel. They secured themselves in place and waited for the
calls from the morning news shows.
Looking down from the mast of the ship.
The funnel
carries the logo of E.ON, the German energy company who operate the
power
station at Kingsnorth. E.ON would like to build another coal-fired
power station on the site, and the place should be a building site by
now. But the plans have been
opposed by environmental experts and campaigners, met with indecision
from government, and been delayed again and again.
Despite recent
government assurances that any new coal fired power stations will capture the
carbon they release into the atmosphere, the devil in the detail means that a
new plant at Kingsnorth would still pump three quarters of its carbon into the
atmosphere - six million tonnes of CO2 a year, a phenomenal amount.
Does this
explain why someone would voluntarily swim into the path of a coal ship? My
colleague Emma, one of the swimmers who lives in nearby Whitstable, explained what
was going through her mind before the action: "There's no way we can stop
climate change if power companies are allowed to keep on burning so much coal.
I'm terrified by the scale of the problem my children will have to deal with.
We have to give the next generation a chance of beating global warming, and
that's why I'm putting my body in the way of that ship."
In terms of
greenhouse gases, coal is the dirtiest fuel there is. Coal plants lead to
carbon emissions which drive climate change - which threatens people and
property around the world from increased risk of flooding, drought, water shortage
and extreme weather events. We want to see strong government leadership on
energy policy in the run up to the Copenhagen
climate summit in December. All of this is why we intervene to stop dirty coal
power from becoming the future of Britain's energy.
But while this might explain why Greenpeace campaigns on coal, I'm not
sure if it can explain how you put yourself in a place where you're
floating in front of an oncoming ship because you've realise that a
time comes when this is what the reality of coal's role in driving
climate change demands of you.
2:08 PM
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