XRLewes

We’re an ever growing group of people from all walks of life, determined to make a stand on climate breakdown and biodiversity loss.

[Adrian Ramsay MP @AdrianRamsay]

Zane's Law is a vital step towards addressing the contamination problems threatening communities. By creating a national register of contaminated land, we can protect lives and make sure the UK aligns with global best practices. It’s time to act for a safer future.

I'm delighted that @TheGreenParty conference unanimously backed #ZanesLaw, where #GPC24 gave a standing ovation for Zane's parents Kye and Nicole. It was great to meet Kye and thank him for their tireless campaigning.

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 NEW: Liz Truss storms off stage and announces ‘that’s not funny’ after noticing Led By Donkeys’ banner

[Democratic Wins Media @DemocraticWins]

BREAKING: The villages in Florida, typically dominated by MAGA extremists, have been completely taken over by Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign. This is a remarkable turnaround. Retweet so all Americans see this campaign’s energy and enthusiasm.

[Mike Hudema @MikeHudema]

Repeat after me. A habitable planet is more important than the profits of a few fossil fuel companies.

Pass it on.

#ActOnClimate

[Roger Hallam @RogerHallamCS21]

Last week, myself and four others were imprisoned for four to five years.

The conservatives and the liberals have got it all sewn up. The narrative is set: for the conservatives, it's a job well done. For the liberals, it's another chance to go through the motions of an "injustice trial". But this is not about five nice white middle-class people being banged up for "protest" on "the climate." It's about a few million not-so-nice white people deciding to have a few hundred million brown people die. Just for starters.

This is not about "climate change"; we agree with the judge on that. It is about murder. At scale. Forever. And that is a bad thing, a very bad thing, an evil thing. When the United Nations recently said we have two years to save the world, that they are not being "melodramatic," that economies will be "devastated," they mean it. Not in some distant future. In the next 10 to 20 years, that's what 1,000 public statements have said. It's what 10,000 peer-reviewed papers have said. It's coming. It is what it is. At some point, you'll be stepping over body parts on the way to work, going "well, you know."

What do you think David Attenborough means when he said "we face the end of civilization"? A picnic? What do you think 1 billion refugees at 2 degrees Celsius, 20 times the number at the end of World War II, looks like? Really?

Conservatives are the bad guys and liberals are the bad guys who pretend to be good guys, and the latter are the worse, which is why historically they are held in more contempt. They knew but they did nothing. As Martin Luther King said in a letter from a Birmingham jail, it's the moderates that repress, distract, sabotage the resistance to injustice. They are the main problem. Of course, the Carbon State and its functionaries are going to put people in prison for years if they come up with a resistance plan proportionate to the level of criminality we objectively face. If they are willing to have a few hundred million black people starve to death, then why be surprised that they pervert the course of justice?

This trial was not about "the right to protest." It is not about "a cause," "an issue." It's civil resistance against the biggest death project in human history, the greatest ever act of criminality. This trial was an experiment with the truth, as Gandhi called it. We were not trying to win, we were trying to tell the truth as if the truth was real, as if this slaughter, starvation, and rape is real. It was integrity, not expediency. So obviously, we spoke that truth. Obviously, we got interrupted. Obviously, we continue to speak even when the judges shouted at us to stop, had us dragged from the dock, banged up in jail. This is what evil looks like. It's what it does. And it's just the beginning.

Integrity at the present time is resistance, nothing more, nothing less. It's the opposite logic to expediency. Expediency is trying to have your cake and eat it. To maintain your privilege and status while appearing to do good. Expediency is to write an article about the trial but not glue your hands to your editor's desk. Expediency is to call for justice but not to challenge to judge because it will do in your career. Expediency is to lead a march but not have anyone sit down and be arrested. Expediency is doing everything that looks good but does no good. Expediency is betrayal. Betrayal of your family, your country, this world, but also of yourself—that temporary spark of consciousness in the void of eternity. Consciousness is truth, beauty, love. When you're on your deathbed, you will not be thinking about your career, the stuff you had; you'll be thinking about whether you became what you know yourself to be, a soul.

Integrity is a hard path. Your ego has to burn in a fire that destroys its desire to control. Integrity is humiliation, failure, being forgotten. As the greatest soul of the 20th century, Simone Vale, said: when you have an important decision to make, choose the most costly option. We might add, "in the 2020s," because if you don't, the cost will be far greater. In a week or two, all this trial business will be old news. All that will be left for us is the dual brutality of a British prison. Today I had boiled rice with fried rice. Yesterday, boiled rice with pasta. A few days ago, a note came through that cell door: two paragraphs, a guy down the row had killed himself. The new inmates bang on their iron doors all night, yelling, caged and enraged.

As this article wrote itself in my head, I cried. Not tears of self-pity, not of anger, but of determination. I know who I am. I know what I am doing, and that's why I'm Britain's most influential climate campaigner, as they like to call me. Take note: in the end times, integrity trumps expediency.

I'm smiling. Are you?

[Just Stop Oil @JustStop_Oil]

🧡 @labourlewis speaking in support of the #WholeTruthFive yesterday.

🔥 "I will be backing calls for a meeting with the Attorney General. I also think that those laws that have allowed this to happen need to be put in the dustbin of history."

✍️ https://t.co/aBSqN6oQYy

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

It is said dissent is the foundation of liberty. And yet the travesty of justice that took place today at Southwark Crown Court speaks to a democracy that is in danger of forgetting that at its peril.

We must not be numb to how extreme the sentences handed out today to peaceful protesters are, and how this marks an acceleration in Britain’s democratic decline. These are the longest ever sentences handed out for participation in peaceful, non-violent action.

These sentences have been made using the Tories’ new and draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. So extreme is this law and its impact on environmental defenders, that earlier this year UN Special Rapporteur @ForstMichel "seriously question[ed] the necessity and proportionality of such conditions for persons engaging in peaceful protest" and was "distressed to see how environmental defenders are derided by some of the mainstream UK media and in the political sphere".

Following the sentencing today, @Global_Witness has said the UK is "becoming one of the most dangerous countries in the western world to speak up in defence of our planet."

The ability to peacefully protest is integral to a healthy and robust democracy. Its criminalisation speaks to a deeper malaise. One that calls into question the health of some fundamental democratic cornerstones.

The last Conservative government was one of the most authoritarian we have ever seen in this country. It changed the law to deny defendants the right to use as a defence their concern about the climate crisis and in so doing to speak truth to power.

That power is oil corporations and the big business interests that benefit from its continued extraction. Extraction that will cost us all dearly.

It is why I spoke in solidarity with the five climate protestors. And it is why I back their calls for a meeting between campaigners, scientists and the Attorney General to discuss their case and the laws which saw them imprisoned.

These laws in question should be repealed and the five wrongly imprisoned, pardoned. Our current government must not only undo the damage the last one did to our democracy, but it must also strengthen and protection our democracy with new laws and institutions that protect it in the knowledge that authoritarian governments may follow them the years to come.

[Defend Our Juries @DefendOurJuries]

Yesterday, five truth-tellers received long prison sentences for being involved in organising peaceful protest. A combined 21yrs.

Those truth-tellers has been arrested multiple times during the trial for continuing to tell the truth in court, as was the oath they took. 1/5

[Peter Stefanovic @PeterStefanovi2]

These sentences are shocking. We should all be worried people are being jailed for 5 & 4 years because of non-violent protest. It’s a legacy of last Government we urgently need to correct. Locking up 5 peaceful climate protesters for 21 years in a prisons crisis is just insane

[Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall @HughFW]

Today 5 people who care about our planet have been viciously sentenced under laws that remove our right to peaceful protest.
So I came to join those who stand in solidarity. We cannot put people behind bars for urging us to do what we know is right. #WholeTruth5

[Just Stop Oil @JustStop_Oil]

💬 "The non-functioning democracy that we have is one in which oil companies and very wealthy people determine what our laws are."

🧡 Just Stop Oil spokesperson Grahame outside Southwark Crown Court today, in solidarity with the #WholeTruthFive.

[XRLewes @XrLewes]

@JustStop_Oil @ChrisGPackham Thank you Chris for taking a stand.

[Just Stop Oil @JustStop_Oil]

🔥 Chris Packham speaking in solidarity with the #WholeTruthFive at the press conference today.

@ChrisGPackham is demanding a recorded meeting with the new Attorney General to "address this grotesque miscarriage of justice".

➡️ Sign the petition — https://t.co/maL7GZBwEz

[Roger Hallam @RogerHallamCS21]

Thank you Chris.

It's time for public figures to act like everyone's lives are on the line.

Because they are.

[Prof. Eliot Jacobson @EliotJacobson]

And so, as if your heart and soul isn't crushed enough by witnessing the accelerating idiocy of modern industrial civilization, record global sea surface temperatures continue on, with yesterday's record of 20.97°C at 4.56σ above the 1982-2011 mean.

[Roger Hallam @RogerHallamCS21]

I spent twenty years growing vegetables commercially for the good people of this country. 

The weather got exponentially worse, e.g., 7 weeks of rain everyday; 12 weeks with no rain, and so on. I know what is going to happen - not because of these particularly bad years, but because of the speed at which things are getting worse now.

The reason is obvious - we are standing by and letting the elites put carbon into the air between 8 and 30 times faster than at any time in the last four billion years of this planet's history. So what is going to happen to the good people of this country? If you are still asking that question you just haven't yet understood what is going on here.

"If we continue emitting CO2 and methane into the atmosphere and oceans, then we're cooked."
@Sir_David_King, former Chief Scientific Advisor to the British government.

[Peter Stefanovic @PeterStefanovi2]

THE Green Party have submitted a complaint to the BBC after it failed to broadcast the party’s historic election wins during its coverage of the General Election results

https://t.co/Eoydm9aGIo

[Divest East Sussex @DivestEast]

Activists scaled the roof of County Hall, Lewes this morning (9 July) to demand that @EastSussexCC cuts its ties with Big Oil! https://t.co/9dIWGp5exo (Photos: XR SE and Steve Lewis) @UKDivest @XRBrighton @XRHSL @XrSouthEastUK

[Jon Sopel @jonsopel]

Grotesque