This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience while browsing it. By clicking 'Got It' you're accepting these terms.
Most recent
Trending
Top Videos
The best of EcoWatch, right in your inbox. Sign up for our email newsletter!
Judge Allows First UK Fracking in 7 Years to Proceed
An anti-fracking campaigner has lost a last-ditch legal effort to stop the first fracking in the UK in seven years, The Guardian reported Friday.
Lancashire resident Robert Dennett had won a temporary injunction last week to stop shale natural gas company Cuadrilla from fracking in a well near Blackpool in northwest England. At a hearing Thursday, his lawyers argued that Lancashire County Council had not adequately planned for an emergency at the site on Preston New Road. But on Friday, a high court judge ruled that the council's planning was adequate and that fracking could go ahead.
The decision comes the same week as a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that says we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent below 2010 levels by 2030 in order to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures.
"Cuadrilla can now carry on regardless, ignoring the urgent warning issued this week by the IPCC about the need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, but all of the fracking companies need to know that fracking will never get a foothold in the UK because they will meet resistance at every stage of their projects," a spokesperson for Frack Free Lancashire told The Guardian.
The Guardian said the ruling meant that Cuadrilla could begin fracking within hours, but Cuadrilla lawyer Nathalie Lieven told the judge at Thursday's hearing that the timing of the hearing meant they were planning to begin Saturday instead, BBC News reported.
"[E]very day, it costs Cuadrilla £94,000 to keep all that kit and equipment on site," she told the judge.
Fracking was set to restart after the conservative UK government approved two new wells in July and September. It had been halted at the Blackpool site in 2011 because of earthquakes, but the government has issued more stringent regulations and wants to try again, citing a need for energy independence.
Opponents, meanwhile, pledged to continue fighting.
"[I'm] obviously disappointed," Dennett told The Guardian after Friday's ruling. "We will continue to be defiant and fight this. We will never give up. We've put too much effort in to throw the towel in."
Green Party co-leader Jonathan Bartley called the verdict a "real blow" in the wake of the IPCC report and pledged direct action against fracking companies.
A climate change protest is planned at a farm near the Cuadrilla site later in the month. The protest will also call for the release of four anti-fracking activists who were jailed last month for an action blocking trucks from entering the Cuadrilla site, making them the first environmental protestors to be jailed in the UK in 86 years.
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
Pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson recalled 33,000 bottles of baby powder on Friday after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found trace amounts of asbestos in one of its bottles.
An international group of scientists released a report today detailing how the fossil fuel industry actively campaigned to sow doubt about the climate crisis and what steps need to be taken to undo the damage, as the Los Angeles Times reported.
By Chloe Farand for Climate Home News
Canadians are voting on Monday in an election observers say will define the country's climate future.
By Jessica Taft
Fifteen kids from a dozen countries, including Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, recently brought a formal complaint to the United Nations. They're arguing that climate change violates children's rights as guaranteed by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a global agreement.
Trending
Susan Vineyard / iStock / Getty Images Plus
By Justin Mikulka
Increasingly, U.S. shale firms appear unable to pay back investors for the money borrowed to fuel the last decade of the fracking boom. In a similar vein, those companies also seem poised to stiff the public on cleanup costs for abandoned oil and gas wells once the producers have moved on.
Top officials at the Department of Housing and Urban Development confirmed to lawmakers last week that they knowingly — and illegally — stalled hurricane aid to Puerto Rico.
Trending
It appears Jane Fonda is good for her word. The actress and political activist said she would hold demonstrations on Capitol Hill every Friday through January to demand action on the climate crisis. Sure enough, Fonda was arrested for demonstrating a second Friday in a row Oct. 18, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Only this time, her Grace and Frankie co-star Sam Waterston joined her.
Switzerland's two Green parties made historic gains in the country's parliamentary elections Sunday, according to projections based on preliminary results reported by The New York Times.