"According to The Ecologist, 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."
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. That's what the police are suppressing. This is what we don't want to hear. This is relevant to us, because with coal and gas exports, we're essentially doing the same thing. We are profiting from the export of a toxic product that will be burned far away from our shores, while it's initial production takes place far away from the capitals, in regional areas, often heavily indigenous, with little money and even less power.
https://nowthenmagazine.com/articles/two-weeks-ago-north-yorkshire-saw-a-massive-police-operation-involving-four-different-forces-why-was-it-targeted-at-climate-protestors-instead-of-the-far-right-drax-reclaim-the-power
#Drax #EUpol #GreenEurope #EnvrionmentalOutsourcing #CarbonColonialism