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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