What UK Greenpeace Jury Acquittal Means for Global Anti-Coal & Climate Activists

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The 'Kingsnorth Six' admitted causing £30,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station - yet a jury still refused to find them guilty. The verdict has left the government's energy plans in the balance, says John Vidal, and given a huge boost to climate change protesters

The 'Kingsnorth Six' admitted causing £30,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station - yet a jury still refused to find them guilty. The verdict has left the government's energy plans in the balance, says John Vidal, and given a huge boost to climate change protesters

Ten years ago, the idea that the head of Greenpeace could sit down at a banquet for the rainforest with the Prince of Wales and David Attenborough, along with ministers and some of the world's richest people, would have been inconceivable. But John Sauven, the head of the environment group that came close to being proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the US only a few years ago, was at Mansion House in the City of London on Wednesday night, sipping port and chatting about carbon credits and the intricacies of climate change policy with the men who control trillions of dollars.

It is a measure of how far the environment has reached the inner halls of the establishment that Sauven should have been invited at all and was not to be found at a far more raucous celebration party being held a few miles away. Four hours earlier, after an eight-day trial in Maidstone, Kent, a jury of nine men and three women had found two Greenpeace staffers and four volunteers not guilty of criminally damaging the Kingsnorth coal-fired power station, the 200m tall smokestack of which they had scaled in a climate change protest last October.

There was a heady atmosphere of money and power at the banquet, but a far greater drama had been played out in the crown court. The world's leading climate scientist had come from the US to give evidence and if the group had lost, two of them would almost certainly have gone to prison and become the UK's first climate change martyrs. A guilty verdict could have also seriously dented the growing climate change protest movement and it is quite likely that the government would have given permission at the earliest opportunity for a new power station to be built at Kingsnorth.

In fact, the verdict was a real shock for government, the coal industry and Kingsnorth's German owners...

full story and audio at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/
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