The nation’s top climate scientist writes today:

Good news from the UK: The Kingsnorth Six were acquitted by a Crown Court jury. They were members of a group of 23 Greenpeace volunteers who had attempted to shut down the Kingsnorth coal-fired power plant, specifically the six were the ones painting the smokestack with “Gordon Bin It” when interrupted by the police.

Their defense was ‘lawful excuse’, that they were protecting property of greater value (the Earth!) from the impact of climate change. We will need our Mercedes-driving lawyer friends to tell us if the verdict has greater significance — but the jurors were common people, not politicians. It was an impressive show — judge and lawyers with their white wigs — hopefully it has an impact.

The Guardian account of the acquittal here says “It was the first case where preventing property damage caused by climate change has been used as part of a “lawful excuse” defence in court. It is now expected to be used widely by environment groups.”

Written testimony that I submitted for the case is a bit long. The “Summary Facts” are below. The main point, that the government, the utility, and the fossil fuel industry, were aware of the facts but continued to ignore them are more generally valid worldwide. It raises the question of whether the right people are on trial.

Summary Facts
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Just when you think the two oil-men in the White House can’t top themselves for corruption metaphors:

Government officials handling billions of dollars in oil royalties engaged in illicit sex with employees of energy companies they were dealing with and received numerous gifts from them, federal investigators said Wednesday.

The alleged transgressions involve 13 Interior Department employees in Denver and Washington. Their alleged improprieties include rigging contracts, working part-time as private oil consultants, and having sexual relationships with – and accepting golf and ski trips and dinners from – oil company employees, according to three reports released Wednesday by the Interior Department’s inspector general [Earl Devaney].

And the winner of the best line ever to appear in an Interior Department Inspector General (IG) report:

“These same … marketers also engaged in brief sexual relations with industry contacts,” Devaney wrote. “Sexual relationships with prohibited sources cannot, by definition, be arms-length.”

Guess, the IG never had sex with my ex-wife. Rimshot [technically, a sting].

[It's just a joke, people.]

But wait, there’s more:

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Today brings news of two acts of criminality on either side of the Atlantic Ocean involving coal, the fossil fuel with the highest global warming pollution intensity. In the United Kingdom, activists who shut down a coal plant have been acquitted by a jury of all charges of property damage. In the United States, right-wing coal company Massey Energy is planning to start illegally destroying a mountain to extract its coal. Our two nations are evidently separated by more than an ocean — one is breaking from the destructive dependency on fossil fuels, while the other is digging in deeper.

In the United Kingdom, a jury decided the threat of burning coal was much greater to the planet than the damage caused by six Greenpeace activists who painted a coal chimney with UK prime minister Gordon Brown‘s first name:

Six Greenpeace climate change activists have been cleared of causing criminal damage at a coal-fired power station in a verdict that is expected to embarrass the government and strengthen the anti-coal movement.

The jury of nine men and three women at Maidstone crown court cleared the six, five of whom had scaled a 200m tall chimney at Kingsnorth power station at Hoo, Kent in October 2007.
Kingsnorth chimney Greenpeace activists on the painted chimney.

The activists admitted trying to shut down the station by occupying the smokestack and painting the world “Gordon” down the chimney, but argued that they were legally justified because they were trying to prevent climate change causing greater damage to property around the world.

The defense, who called NASA climate scientist James Hansen, environmentalist Zac Goldsmith, and an Inuit leader from Greenland, cited coastal England, the Pacific island state of Tuvalu, areas of Greenland, the Arctic ice sheet, China’s Yellow river region, the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica, coastal areas of Bangladesh and the city of New Orleans as regions under immediate threat from global warming.

Meanwhile, as Kevin Grandia writes at the Huffington Post, Massey Energy is planning to “begin blowing up the mountains in the Bee Tree Branch area of Coal River Mountain, West Virginia” as early as today. At Grist, David Roberts explains that Gov. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is ignoring his own environmental officers in greenlighting the illegal dynamiting of Coal River Mountain:

Massey wants to start blowing the mountain up as early as today, but according to state Department of Environmental Protection secretary Randy Huffman, “If they blast, they do so illegally in our opinion.” Seems they lack the requisite permits.

Despite the impending lawbreaking, WV governor Joe Manchin has refused to intercede, rejecting a request letter sent yesterday from citizen groups. Manchin, apparently not in touch with his own DEP, says Massey has the permits they need.

Locals have been trying to build a wind farm atop the mountain Massey plans to destroy. Roberts opines: “Massey is already the most evil company in the world, with the most evil CEO in the world. If they pull this off, they will have basically lapped the other evildoers.”

UPDATE: James Hansen spoke today on behalf of the Power Vote campaign to get one million young people to “cast their vote for the presidential candidate with the greenest energy record.” Hansen said:

Even in those places where we thought politicians were the greenest, in many cases it’s a case of green-wash, where they’re saying the right words but their actions don’t correspond.

Check out the Wonk Room’s interview with Jessy Tolkan, the head of Power Vote.

Appearing on the Glenn Beck radio show yesterday, Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) denigrated the science of climate change, saying the human impact on global warming was only “half a percent.” He implied mandatory programs to reduce global warming emissions — like the cap-and-trade programs he has previously called for — would “wreck the economy.” And he said that it’s “understandable” that plans to fix global warming have “faded into the background” because of the “energy crisis”:

But, you know, in my view is this: you can argue that the world, the globe is warming as it always has for natural reasons. But I think the weight of the science indicates that at least some of it — you could argue it’s half a percent or something more substantial — is caused by human behavior. . . But, in the wake of this energy crisis, where people are struggling to pay the bills, that debate on cap and trade has fallen to the background for understandable reasons.

Listen here (and watch the latest global boiling reports):

Gov. Pawlenty has been a “driving force” for a regional cap-and-trade system, so it’s unclear if he’s just pandering to Beck, a notorious global warming denier, or if he’s retreating from principle. This is not the first time an adviser to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has denigrated the prospects for climate change legislation. In July, Steve Forbes told Glenn Beck that cap-and-trade and related proposals are not “going to get very far as people start to examine the details of them.” And in May, Sen. McCain himself agreed with Beck that solutions to climate change can be delayed.

Digg it!

Transcript: Read more

While its conclusions won’t surprise Climate Progress readers, this unusually savvy new intelligence forecast reported in today’s Post ought to serve as a wake-up call for the largely clueless “Establishment” (see “Most opinion leaders just don’t get global warming — Part I“):

An intelligence forecast being prepared for the next president on future global risks envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy.

The report, previewed in a speech by Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst, also concludes that the one key area of continued U.S. superiority — military power — will “be the least significant” asset in the increasingly competitive world of the future, because “nobody is going to attack us with massive conventional force.”

Duh. And yet the federal government spends more than $500 billion a year on military security, and maybe one percent of that on climate or energy security. Fingar is a remarkably broad thinking guy, which may well be why he is our top intelligence analyst. He has the kind of reality-based alarmism that inevitably comes from the genuine understanding of the facts of global warming:

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[JR: The "Bridge to Nowhere" is at its heart an energy story, since it is a transportation infrastructure story, and the country will have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars redesigning its infrastructure by midcentury to deal with peak oil and global warming.]

VP choice Sarah Palin keeps repeating her lie that she said “thanks but no thanks” to the “Bridge to Nowhere” — even in the face of unusually strong and widespread media debunking and strong visual evidence to the contrary. When Fox News’ Chris Wallace debunks your multiple lies, it’s probably time, at the very least, to work up some new lies.

Either Slick Sarah cynically believes that you can fool all the people all the time, much as Bush and McCain do, or Prevaricatin’ Palin has actually come to believe her own lies, much as Bush and McCain do.

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The California Assembly and Senate have passed legislation, SB 375, that would encourage local communities to control sprawl. This is seen as critical to California achieving its AB 32 cap on greenhouse gas emissions (reducing them to 1990 levels by 2020–a 30% cut).

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