Background

Campaign background

Allowing the extraction of new oil and gas resources in the UK is an obscene and genocidal policy that will kill our children and condemn humanity to oblivion. It just has to stop.

If we continue down our current path it will destroy families and communities. We will face the starvation and the slaughter of billions of the poor – and the utter betrayal of our children and their future.

Does our government get this? They are actively enabling the fossil fuel industry through obscene subsidies and tax breaks for new fossil fuel extraction. They are wasting billions supporting unicorn technologies such as carbon capture and storage projects which provide a fig leaf for business as usual to continue. There has been no rapid and sweeping social change, no widespread adoption of low carbon technology, no war-style mobilisation.

In eight years we need to end our reliance on fossil fuels completely. The transition will require massive investment in clean technology, renewables and energy storage but it cannot be done at current levels of energy consumption. We need to cut energy demand by insulating Britain and rethinking how we travel including providing free public transport everywhere. This starts by switching government subsidies from dirty fossil fuels towards clean energy, transport and insulation. Killer fact: In recent years government subsidies for the production and consumption of fossil fuels amounted to £12 billion a year, that’s equivalent to £230 million every week.

The choice: rapid transition to a low energy and low carbon world, or social collapse. We can do it now, in an orderly manner – creating millions of proper skilled jobs and protecting the rights of workers in sunset industries – or we wait for the unavoidable collapse.

Climate collapse will mean the end of workers’ rights, women’s rights, all human rights. It is already the greatest injustice visited on the global south in human history. If you are not in resistance you are appeasing evil. If you continue to stand by you are betraying 200 years of struggle and the sacrifice of those that came before us. It is time to put everything aside, we are going into resistance with or without you. Are you bystander or are you going to rise up?