Sorry, should have mentioned here earlier...

...that we won! EDF are no longer suing us for £5 million. Thanks so much to everyone who supported this part of the campaign.

But it isn't over. Although we've beaten EDF's civil claim, the criminal charges still stand and so I'm going to be sentenced on June 6th, along with my fellow 20 power station invaders. More news on all of this to follow soon...

I'm being sued for £5 million by an energy giant

You may remember that back at the end of October, I was one of sixteen people who occupied a power station chimney for a week, in protest at the Government's proposed massive expansion of gas power. While I was up there, I wrote and performed this poem. There's an awesome video of the action on the Guardian website - check it out.

Last week, the sixteen of us were in court, along with five other people who had entered the power station but not climbed the chimney. All twenty-one of us pleaded guilty to Aggravated Trespass, and are due to be sentenced on March 20th and April 2nd*. However, the company who run the power station - the French energy giant EDF - seem to think that this isn't punishment enough for us, and have started the process of suing us for an estimated £5 million in supposed "lost earnings".

Now, I've done some badly paid gigs in my time, but if EDF win then this one is going to be hard to beat.

Obviously, we don't have £5 million. Despite our glamorous lives as performance poets, community volunteers and charity workers, we're never going to earn that kind of cash. That means that if EDF's (un)civil claim is successful, we stand to lose our homes plus any savings we might have, and then either declare bankruptcy or be in hock to a power company for the rest of our lives.

So we can't let them win. This is about much more than just the 21 of us - it's about the freedom to protest. If campaigners can be slapped with lawsuits every time they take part in civil disobedience, then that will make it much more difficult for people to stand up and be counted on the issues that matter.

Luckily, the backlash against Greedy-F's repressive tactics has already begun - since we announced the lawsuit on Wednesday, we've appeared on Channel 4 News, the Guardian, Radio 2's Jeremy Vine show, the Telegraph, the Independent, and lots of other blogs and magazines. A petition launched on Friday night already has more than 37,000 signatures, and is still rocketing upwards. We've had support from NGOs and big Twitter hitters like Naomi Klein and Richard Dawkins, and George Monbiot wrote a powerful article in support of us. EDF's Facebook page is now a hilarious delight to behold, plastered with sarcastic messages and customers pledging to switch suppliers.

Thanks to Pete Speller for this one...

It's all great, but it probably isn't enough, not yet. We need to make this into such a massive PR disaster for EDF that they drop this like a hot uranium rod (oh yeah, they're big into nuclear as well as coal and gas). If you want to help rescue a performance poet and his friends from financial ruin whilst simultaneously defending the right to protest and giving an unaccountable energy giant a well-deserved headache, here are a few simple things you can do:

IF YOU HAVE 30 SECONDS:

- Sign the petition at www.change.org/edf21
- "Like" our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/pages/No-Dash-for-Gas/301820216584422
- Follow us on Twitter at @nodashforgas, and help us retweet updates about our case

IF YOU HAVE A FEW MINUTES:

- Please share the three things above - the petition, the Facebook and the Twitter
- Watch and share our two videos - this one showing the action itself, and this one explaining how we're being sued.
- Share your favourite media story about us, from the links above
- Leave some messages for EDF on their Facebook page or via Twitter.
- We have reason to believe that EDF's corporate mascot "Zingy" has decided to rebel against its corporate masters in support of us, and so is now being held hostage and forced to dance in EDF's adverts! Show your outrage by joining the "Free Zingy" Facebook page, and demanding Zingy's release here.

IF YOU'RE AN EDF CUSTOMER:

- Please change your supplier (ideally to a green company like Ecotricity or Good Energy) and tell EDF why - preferably in a nice public way on Facebook, Twitter, or at the bottom of the petition. You'll probably be happier for it, because EDF apparently have the worst customer service of all the energy companies.

Thanks everyone - any small thing you can do would be a massive help.

With love and chimney rhymes,

Danny x

* Protesters in these situations often try to run a "necessity" or "justification" defence - i.e., they admit to blockading a piece of polluting infrastructure, but argue that they were preventing a greater crime, such as the damage caused by CO2 emissions. Unfortunately, it wasn't really feasible for us to run such a defence in this case as we were up in front of a District Judge rather than a jury. As a result, we decided that our time and energy was better spent on other aspects of the campaign, and so we pleaded guilty to get the criminal trial out of the way and get on with other stuff.

A bright white living nightmare

Walking down the street yesterday, I felt a thump on my shoulder.

I spun round to see a couple of giggling kids wielding snowballs. Immediately, I ducked behind a car, scooped up some snow and fired one back. It soared away to the right, way off target. I pulled a face, the kids grinned back, and so began several hilarious minutes of snow-flinging in which I did eventually manage to get a few shots on target (though the youngsters were way better). Then suddenly I realised: what on Earth were we doing? How DARE we enjoy the snow when, as all the media is telling us today, it's costing the economy MILLIONS OF POUNDS?!

Here's a two-minute poetic explanation, filmed in the snow yesterday, with the text below (some of you may have heard this before; it was great to finally get to film it in the appropriate weather!):

A billion pounds so far, apparently

Today I awoke into a bright, white, living nightmare.

I stared, horrified, as the fat flakes settled gently

On my driveway and lawn

Topping each gatepost with a fluffy white fez

Transforming the hedgerow into an indigestible

But beautiful

Christmas cake,

And I cried “Oh my God!

What about the economy?”

As I walked to the park I stared with mounting panic

At the parked cars adorning the street

Each coated three inches deep

Or with patches swept clean

Arsenals for snowball fights

I almost wept to think of the petrol not being burned

Of the mindless tasks not being performed

In offices thirty miles away.

In the park, it only got worse.

Children and adults were laughing together

Whole streets united in play

Great snowy constructions were rising from the ground

As the treacherous flakes continued to fall

Ramps, forts and igloos,

A menagerie of assorted snow-beings

Icy sculptures of ethereal beauty

Or lumpy majesty

My head went light and I struggled not to faint

At the thought of all that creativity

Hard work and productivity

Not being spent on the tedious administrative tasks

And the learning of pointless facts by rote

So vital to the functioning of a modern economy.

A newly fostered sense of community

Of shared experience and humanity

And the kind of childlike wonder

That reminds us that it’s good to be alive

Is all very well

But it’s not going to revive the flagging FTSE 100 share index now, is it?

I went back home to get my snowplough

They’ll thank me for this one day.

Making BP history

I was honoured to be one of 200 people who took part in an anti-BP version of Macbeth, in yesterday's flashmob outside the BP-sponsored Shakespeare Exhibition at the British Museum:

Chorus: "Double, double, oil is trouble / tar sands burn as greenwash bubbles"

First BP Executive: "When shall BP meet again? / In oil spills, tar sands, toxic rain?"

Second BP Executive: "When the sponsorship is done / PR battle fought and won."

Here's a rather delightful little film of the action, featuring me with a beard I grew especially for the occasion...


This comes at the end of seven months of pop-up theatrical protests at BP-sponsored Shakespeare plays. The campaign seems to have been successful: the Royal Shakespeare Company last week stated that: “We have no further sponsorship [with BP] confirmed”. Next year’s programme of plays has been announced, and none are sponsored by BP.

Poem up a power station chimney

So while we were occupying the West Burton power station chimney, while the rest of the crew put their amazing climbing, filming, solar-panel-building, daredevil rope-dangling and media skills to work, I sat down and wrote a poem. Hmmm. Here's a video of me performing it under our windswept tarpaulins, 80 metres up a chimney, in front of my action companions - possibly the most captive audience I've ever had...




For more info on why we were up there and what happened next, see the No Dash For Gas website, Twitter feed or Facebook page...

Why we don’t need to leave the gas on

This week, we learned from an ICM poll on energy sources that two-thirds of people would rather have a wind turbine near their house than a shale gas well. Overall, 64% of people would prefer their energy to come from renewable sources, with only 7% preferring fossil fuels.

That’s all very well, say the fossil fuel proponents, and of course we all want clean energy eventually, but for now we need coal, oil and gas because renewables just can’t fill the energy gap. Burning carbon is just a necessary evil, right? Right?

Wrong. The “necessary evil” argument is, in fact, a bucket of pure distilled cobblertosh. Here is my attempt to debunk a few myths about gas power vs. renewable energy.

1) There is enough renewable energy to power the world. This can be demonstrated by a simple calculation. According to figures from the Centre for Alternative Technology's Zero Carbon Britain report, it’s perfectly possible to power a good, “Northern-style” quality of life with around 16,800 KWh per person per year[1]. This assumes that we live less wastefully – with good public transport and car-sharing schemes, efficient and comfortable homes, more local food and manufacturing, less throwaway consumerism, less frequent flying, and so on – but that we also continue to have stuff like fridges, TVs, good public services, hospitals, sports stadiums, cinemas etc.

Meanwhile, according to Government energy advisor Professor David Mackay, there is enough wind, solar, tidal, wave, hydro and geothermal energy out there to provide 22,000 KWh/person/year, even on a world of 9 billion people. This assumes that we use existing generation technology only, on a realistic scale, and is still more than enough to give everyone on the planet a good quality of life.

2) We already know how to solve the variability problem. The wind doesn’t always blow, the sun doesn’t always shine (well, it does, but you know what I mean). Renewables don’t always give us power exactly when we want them. There are at least five solutions to this: energy storage, demand management (e.g. using smart appliances that only draw power when energy is abundant), a good source mix (sun plus wind plus hydro plus tidal), energy sharing between countries/regions, and using wood, grass or waste gas in back-up generators. According to the Zero Carbon Britain Report, the combination of these five options is already good enough to allow us a zero-carbon electricity grid. The best of the five options is probably storage, and so as this technology improves we’ll be able to rely less on the others (especially wood/grass/biogas-burning generators, which come with sustainability risks of their own).

  

3) There are perfectly good heating alternatives. Buildings and/or water can be heated by solar power, ground and air source heat pumps, and a limited amount of sustainable wood fuel, with electric heating to fill the gaps.

4) The technologies will improve as we go along. We need to get to zero carbon as fast as possible, to have a decent chance of avoiding runaway climate change. For example, leading climate scientist James Hansen states in his recent book Storms of my Grandchildren that we can only afford to burn the conventional oil and gas we have already found, and should immediately stop drilling for any more; we must also immediately pull out of "unconventional" fuel sources like shale gas and tar sands, and halt global coal use by 2030. The technologies we have are already good enough for this transition, but will almost certainly improve as we go along – allowing us to minimise the riskier options like bioenergy. The important thing is to get started, and begin moving in the right direction by shutting down fossil fuel extraction and consumption infrastructure, and replacing them with efficiency and renewables.

The main problem with the Government’s proposed new “dash for gas” is that it takes us in exactly the wrong direction. Yes, we probably want to shut down the coal plants and coal mines first, and leave existing gas-fired power stations running for a little longer; but building new ones would lock us into decades of new carbon-burning infrastructure and shut out the clean solutions that we desperately need. These solutions already exist, and – if fairly shared - are already good enough to give everyone on the planet a good quality of life. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Much of the research in this article is based on a not-yet-released project I’ve been working on with the UK Tar Sands Network and a graphic design team. This will show how the world can be powered without fossil fuels, in the form of an infographic and accompanying briefing. Watch this space for updates...

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[1] The final page of the Zero Carbon Britain report shows a total consumption of 804 Tera-Watt hours (TWh) per year plus exports of 174.4 TWh per year. When this total of 978.4 TWh/year is divided by the predicted 2035 UK population of 71 million, it comes to just under 13,800 KWh/person/year. However, according to a recent study, the UK’s CO₂ emissions (and therefore energy use) should be counted at about a third higher than is usually reported, because of all the energy used to manufacture goods overseas that are then imported into the UK. In Zero Carbon Britain 2030, this “overseas factories” figure should be significantly lower, as many more things are produced locally and more efficiently; however, to ensure that I am being absolutely fair and as cautious as possible, I’ve added 25% to the amount of energy needed for a good quality of life, to make sure it definitely includes all the manufacturing required. This brings the total to around 16,800 KWh per person per year.

New poetry video!

One year on from the UK riots, and the looting continues. I mean, of course, the looting of our public services by the Conservative government and their corporate allies.

Here's my new poetry video all about it, featuring me prancing about on the streets of London, fighting back with the power of dubious rhymes. If you like it, please share and help me get this message out there!


smash and grab from rikki indymedia on Vimeo.


Thanks so much to the wonderful Rikki for filming and editing this.