Tuesday 4 November 2014

Oxon Fracking Protest

I have taken part in a protest against fracking at County Hall in Oxford, the headquarters of Oxfordshire County Council. This morning I joined a group of about twenty people gathered outside the entrance as the officials went into work. Some of them were attending a meeting about possible future fracking operations in Oxfordshire. Fracking is something which I'm very opposed to, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/bbc-horizon-does-fracking.html. The protest was organized by the local Green Party and several other groups turned up such as Friends of the Earth, Grandparents Climate Action and a few other tendencies related to the environment and climate change. I was offered some banners to hold and I choose a blank cardboard placard with the words "FRACK OFF!" embossed on it. Whoever came up with the term "fracking" must wish they'd chosen something different due to all the puns emerging thereof! There were other placards relating to the Green Party and global warming, but I didn't want to hold them because I don't believe in man-made climate change, an unorthodoxy that would make me a pariah in the eyes of some of the people present; however none of them asked me my opinion on the subject, so I never gave it. I was pleased that the man standing next to me was opposed to GMO's. Unfortunately some of the more rabid members of the environmentalist movement are now embracing genetically-modified food and even nuclear power, like Mark "6 Degrees" Lynas, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/rothamsted-update.html. I consider this all a part of Agenda 21 and similar projects, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/anything-to-save-planet.html. As the officials went in to their meeting few of them spoke to us. One or two took a flyer from the people handing them out. One of them, Liz Kearney, a long-term Labour councillor, stopped to tell us that the meeting arranged was not a debate or a decision-making event; it was just a discussion on what officials thought about fracking. A woman in the picket asked her: "Don't you care about the people then?" and Cllr Kearney angrily shouted back that she did. The point was that this is just the first stage of a process that could result in full-on commercial fracking in Oxfordshire, and we wanted them to know we'd be there all the way from the start! The media turned up, TV cameras and newspaper photographers. The leader of the protest was the Green councillor David Williams whom I respect very much for supporting and assisting the People's Supermarket before it sadly shut a few months ago, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/nisa-to-see-you.html. He did an interview in front of the TV cameras and spoke to some more of the reporters. Then several members of the protest did speeches through a megaphone; some of them made the same points that Ian R Crane does, but underlying that was the focus on fossil fuels, Carbon™ emissions and the man-made climate change worldview in general. This is a mistake I think, as I explain in the links above. It was a peaceful and good-natured demonstration and no police even bothered to watch us. At the time of posting the mainstream media has not covered this story at all, at least online. It was given a mention in the BBC Oxford live text feed and I screen-capped it along with a photo, see below. This reporter can be seen in the left-centre with the grey jersey:

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