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Gas Rig Occupiers Get Fracked

Frack Off | 18.07.2012 20:12 | Climate Chaos | Ecology | Energy Crisis

After a 5 day trial at Preston Magistrates anti-fracking protestors are found guilty of all charges…

Fracking is sweeping across the world… and so is resistance to it… solidarity to the inspiring residents of a trailer park resisting eviction [1] of their homes in order to make way for a frack water abstraction facility in Pennsylvania, to the residents in Ohio blockading access to a fracking injection well [2] dumping toxic wastewater, to the Earth First! blockaders stopping the destruction of forests and halting drilling [3] at fracking sites in the Moshannon State Forest, Pennsylvania, to the blockader of a site constructing frack water holding ponds [4] near Casino, New South Wales, and the blockaders Cuadrilla’s drilling rig last month [5] whilst it was undergoing maintainance in Chesterfield in the UK.

Industries, governments and financial institutions have got away with pulverizing the planet and many of the people in it for too long. We are in a situation where the earth is warming exponentially and destroying the environments our lives depend on. Without intervention we will see many of the problems we face today exacerbated. We are emitting more greenhouse gases then ever [6], and leading climate scientists are now predicting 6 degrees warming within 100 years [7]. That means for the younger generation, the world will be largely uninhabitable in their life time, certainly in their children’s.

If fracking goes ahead, alongside Underground Coal Gasification [8], Coal Bed Methane [9], Tar Sands [10], Mountain Top Removal [11], expansion of nuclear [12], and expansion of opencast coal [13] alongside continued use of ‘conventional’ oil and gas… there is no doubt that the living world will be pounded by destruction that it cannot repair.

Ok so rig occupiers get fracked…

Three anti-frackers found guilty of aggravated trespass after occupying a fracking drilling rig last November.

The company claim they lost £20,000 for stopping work in one day. Anti-frackers claim extracting fossil fuels using ever more extreme methods, such as fracking, will certainly lock us in to catastrophic climate change, wreck the environment even more and ruin a lot of people’s lives for the indefinite future… and this is more important than a company’s earnings for one day.

The action was timed to coincide with an industry sponsored “Shale Gas Environmental Summit” in London, a farcical event where industry and government regulators meet to collaborate on green washing PR to cover up the damage done by the fossil fuel industry.

One team climbed the derrick (drill) and a second team scaled the pipe handling system, occupying the rig for 11 hours and decorating machinery with anti-fracking banners, such as ’fracking greenwash, frack-off”.

After a lengthy attempt to show unequivocal evidence to the court that fracking will drastically increase emissions and cause immense damage to environments and people’s lives, once again the long arm of the law reinforced government plans that ensure the fossil fuel industry’s profit-making is valued and protected above all else.

All three people were found guilty of all charges: two counts of aggravated trespass each. Two are also (falsely) convicted of assault on a security guard. All have to pay £750 each and the two up the rig got 2 years conditional discharge and one supporting at the bottom of the rig got 1 years conditional discharge… after negotiating themselves out of a curfew and restraining order for the company!

Its clear the courts were much more at ease protecting a company supported by the likes of Lord Browne, former BP exec and government crony investing in the new extractive process (despite him being previously responsible for the deep water horizon spill), than a few protesters concerned about the environment.

Criminalising people who stand up against systems of domination is the status quo the world over.

Judge Ward:“I have had placed before me reports and statements from a range of expert witnesses from both the United Kingdom and the United States. These report and statements deal at length with the specific problems said to relate to the extraction of shale gas and also with the consequences generally of climate change. Parts of them paint a picture of an Armageddon that no-one would wish to contemplate…. There are times where there is civil disobedience and it turns out subsequently to be justified but whether that is the case here is not for me to judge.” … hmm seems quite clear he did make a judgement on it.

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