John Vidal asks if this judgment will open the floodgates to protest
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Ten years ago, the idea that the head of Greenpeace could sit down at a banquet for the rainforest with the Prince of Wales and David Attenborough, along with ministers and some of the world's richest people, would have been inconceivable. But John Sauven, the head of the environment group that came close to being proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the US only a few years ago, was at Mansion House in the City of London on Wednesday night, sipping port and chatting about carbon credits and the intricacies of climate change policy with the men who control trillions of dollars.
It is a measure of how far the environment has reached the inner halls of the establishment that Sauven should have been invited at all and was not to be found at a far more raucous celebration party being held a few miles away. Four hours earlier, after an eight-day trial in Maidstone, Kent, a jury of nine men and three women had found two Greenpeace staffers and four volunteers not guilty of criminally damaging the Kingsnorth coal-fired power station, the 200m tall smokestack of which they had scaled in a climate change protest last October.
There was a heady atmosphere of money and power at the banquet, but a far greater drama had been played out in the crown court. The world's leading climate scientist had come from the US to give evidence and if the group had lost, two of them would almost certainly have gone to prison and become the UK's first climate change martyrs. A guilty verdict could have also seriously dented the growing climate change protest movement and it is quite likely that the government would have given permission at the earliest opportunity for a new power station to be built at Kingsnorth.
In fact, the verdict was a real shock for government, the coal industry and Kingsnorth's German owners. John Hutton, the energy secretary, has, with the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBERR), been strongly backing a major expansion of the UK coal industry against fierce opposition from the former environment secretary David Miliband, and the current one, Hilary Benn. Until now, the pendulum has leaned slightly towards Hutton, who has argued that more UK coal is vital if we are to keep the lights on, and that climate change can be dealt with later by others. But the cabinet is split, and Gordon Brown has put off making any firm decision on expansion.
The Maidstone verdict has changed all that and could prove a turning point both for the protest movement and industrial policy. It gave the clear political message that 12 people with - one must assume - no great scientific knowledge, had listened to the evidence of one of the best scientists in the world and concluded that climate change is now so serious and so urgent an issue that it is legally justifiable for people to invade a power station and do £30,000 worth of damage.
Out of the blue, the environmentalists say, the legitimacy of the government to pursue an expanding coal policy has been undermined and it may have become impossible for E.ON, the German owners of Kingsnorth, to go ahead with a new plant without fitting a £500m carbon capture and storage plant to collect and dispose of the greenhouse gases.
What is particularly galling for the backers of coal-fired power stations is that, because of the amount of damage alleged to have been done at Kingsnorth, the case went to a jury rather than a magistrate. The crown prosecution service and many corporations know that campaigners who challenge the law by non-violent action are being regularly acquitted by juries. In the past decade, prosecutions of protesters against GM crops, incinerators, new roads and nuclear, chemical and arms trade companies have all collapsed after defendants argued that they had acted according to their consciences and that they were trying to prevent a greater crime. Greenpeace itself has a four-nil record against the crown using the same defence and was widely known to be seeking a jury trial to present complex arguments about coal and climate change.
"They were pretty confident that a jury would listen to them more than the government," said one lawyer yesterday. "It gives them a platform. I doubt that we will see another climate change jury trial for many years."
"We are seeing a pattern emerging. The public is increasingly speaking through the courts," says Martyn Day, a partner with Leigh Day solicitors, which specialises in environmental cases. "These cases are a good guide to public mood and politicians should take close heed of them. It shows that society is greatly concerned about what is happening with the environment and that it is suspicious of government and business when they say they are acting responsibly.
"We're looking at a society which is far more in tune with the environment than in the past. Politicians and companies have not understood that most people now understand the issues. There's a feeling that government and the authorities have not been paying sufficient heed, and that the courts are righting the balance," he said.
Climate change activists hope now that the floodgates have been opened and that it will be open season on coal and other dirty energy industries. Hundreds of people have already pledged to take direct action against any expansion of the industry and the Maidstone case is expected to inspire copycat actions around the country. History would suggest that the carbon protest movement will gain in confidence like the anti-roads and GM movements, and that coal will be targeted mercilessly.
Some groups could not even wait for yesterday's verdict. Even as the jury was deliberating on Wednesday afternoon in Maidstone, Welsh climate change activists along with angry villagers invaded the Hilton hotel in Cardiff where directors of an open-cast mine were meeting.
It's odds on the Welsh activists will not be given a jury trial, and they certainly won't be invited to the next banquet in Mansion House.
