Huck Reports: Saying No To Coal

Paris played host to the largest climate summit in history last year, with world leaders from 195 nations coming together to try and halt global warming. Despite the rhetoric and the headlines, Cop 21 has been condemned as an abject failure: the agreement isn’t legally binding, the goals have been labelled insufficient, and the proposals don’t come into effect until 2020. Unsurprisingly campaigners are worried, as we all should be. 

With governments and corporations failing to take a stand, people are taking matters into their own hands, taking the fight against climate change global.

In May 2016 thousands of activists from across Europe and beyond descended on the small German village of Proschim for Ende Gelände (Here and No Further), a climate camp now in its second year.

Last year 1,500 people tried to shut down Europe’s largest mine, and this year they headed back to Germany in bigger numbers for another go.

“As global temperatures continue to rise, so are the people”, says Payal Parekh, a Programme Director at 350.org, an NGO involved in organising the action. “Across continents people are challenging the status quo by pushing the boundaries of conventional protest to demand fossil fuels are kept in the ground.”

Coal fired power plants are the biggest source of man made CO2 emissions on the planet, accounting for a third of the dangerous gas being pumped out into the atmosphere. It makes coal the single greatest threat facing our climate.

“Ordinary people are joining the fight for our collective survival as communities worldwide are experiencing first hand the consequences of climate change and the damage inflicted by the fossil fuel industry,” Parekh continues.

Huck’s Michael Segalov headed down to the Ende Gelände camp in Lusaita, to meet the activists putting their bodies on the line to take the fight against climate change to its very heart.

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