tar sands

5 February 2013News in Brief

On 19 November dozens of protestors formed a human chain to stop heavy machinery moving around the path of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline through Texas. Four locked themselves to machinery and three suspended themselves from 50-foot pine trees with lifelines anchored to construction equipment.

Cherokee County sheriff’s deputies were reported to have used ‘pain compliance’ measures, including pepper spray, to remove the locked-on protestors, who were dragged away ‘very…

1 October 2011News

1252 arrested at US tar sands protests.

There were 1,252 arrests during a fortnight’s protests in Washington DC against a proposed 1,700-mile pipeline designed to ship more than 830,000 barrels a day of oil from tar sands in Alberta, Canada, to Texas, USA.

Sit-ins were held outside the White House in Washington DC from 20 August to 3 September, leading to the arrest of top climate scientists, Texan and Nebraskan landowners, Canadian First Nation leaders, former White House official Gus Speth, NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen…

3 September 2010Feature

“Give me the directions. There’s loads of people here”, the kilted figure said into his mobile phone, turning to us to make an announcement: “They’ve taken the site and need as many people there as quickly as possible. I’ll take you.” At 10pm it was still 14 hours before activists were scheduled to take the site for the 2010 Climate Camp, but after a gruelling 12-hour journey on the Megabus we had finally made it to Edinburgh’s Forest Café.

Unfortunately, our guide had overestimated…

16 July 2010Feature

“Give me the directions. There’s loads of people here”, the kilted figure said into his mobile phone, turning to us to make an announcement: “They’ve taken the site and need as many people there as quickly as possible. I’ll take you.” At 10pm it was still 14 hours before activists were scheduled to take the site for the 2010 Climate Camp, but after a gruelling 12-hour journey on the Megabus we had finally made it to Edinburgh’s Forest Café.

Unfortunately, our guide had…

1 June 2010News

Public shareholders of RBS put the case for sustainable investment at the bank’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Edinburgh on 28 April. Since the bank bailout in 2008 the UK government owns 84% of RBS shares, effectively taking the bank into public ownership.

However, the public who amassed outside Edinburgh International Conference Centre, many suited and booted for the occasion, held their meeting from behind police barriers.

The meeting was supported by the World…