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Police arrest 29 coal train protesters

by LotusFlower | June 14, 2008 at 06:53 am | 123 views | add comment

Their message was clear "keep it in the ground" and one can have sympathy with the view given that the power station the coal was bound for accounts for a full 4% of Britains total emissions. This said it's probably the method of using the coal rather than the fact that it is coal that's the real problem. Using coal in ultra-clean producers of what used to be called 'coal gas' might offer the energy industry a cleaner way forward and it doesn't require high quality coal either. Hats off to a well organised demonstration.

Police have arrested 29 environmental protesters who occupied a train carrying coal to the nation's biggest coal fired power station, British Transport Police (BTP) said on Saturday.

Disguised as railway workers in yellow warning jackets and waving red flags, 40 Camp for Climate Action protesters stopped the train on Friday at Snaith, just south of the Drax plant in Selby, North Yorkshire.

"The last person was removed from the train shortly after midnight," said British Transport Police in a statement.

Drax supplies 7 percent of the UK's electricity mostly from burning coal, and as a result is one of Europe's top five sources of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2), at 4 percent of Britain's total emissions.