Two weeks ago North Yorkshire saw a massive police operation involving four different forces. Why was it targeted at climate protestors, not the far-right?

3 comments

1. Because police forces *are* the far right

2. Power only starts to oppress reformers when the reformers are starting to have an effect. Keep it up!

3. >[According to The Ecologist](https://theecologist.org/2024/aug/12/police-nix-drax-climate-camp), these factories – which are often sited near Indigenous and other marginalised communities – “emit large amounts of pollutants, such as PM10, PM2.5 and VOCs which are linked to respiratory and pulmonary health impacts.”

   >What this amounts to is a process of externalisation. The benefits in terms of the power eventually generated are kept within the UK, while the harms – environmental, ecological, and social – are externalised to other countries. Put simply this is an accounting trick: importing biomass from other countries essentially takes the health and carbon costs of Drax off the UK’s ‘balance sheet’.

   This is a very important point. Drax has managed to do with energy what fashion and electronics giants have been doing for years. Greenwashing their credentials at home, aided and abetted by their home governments, who strut around showing how their emissions are – if not lower, perhaps growing slightly less vertically on the graphs – while at the same time outsourcing the pollution, environmental degradation, and emissions to countries like China (or in Drax’s case, the Baltic states), whose people pay the cost, while the overseas governments become a convenient scapegoat (who really don’t care, because, ya know, money).

   Offshoring ecocide doesn’t make it not happen. It doesn’t avoid the repercussions. It just avoids blame and an uncomfortable truth.