There was a peaceful protest at Eversheds Sutherland on November 21 with a white elephant representing High Speed 2, drummers and fake oil.
This is because there is an urgent need to stop them from supporting the developers, fossil fuel giants and government departments who are paying no heed to the climate catastrophe that is engulfing people all over the planet.
Children routinely starve to death in the famine in Sun-Saharan Africa where the crops have failed for a fifth year running. Fire and floods take their toll as the disruption to the climate continues, fuelled by companies putting profit before people and planet, with government subsidies, and the law firm enables this.
On their website, Eversheds Sutherland proudly display their Carbon Trust Standard and RoSPA Gold Medals. They claim to be committed to preserving our natural environment, but these claims cannot be squared with facilitating HS2: The construction of HS2 track and stations actively prevents us from reaching net-zero emissions, let alone reversing the harm.
We must keep the promises we made at the Paris Agreement and subsequent COPs. Building HS2 requires vast amounts of deforestation, tunneling, drilling, and concrete pouring which can never be “earth friendly” and has caused toxic leachate to permanently poison the water in the chalk aquifer in the Colne Valley which Affinity Water previously supplied to over three million Londoners.
Eversheds facilitates unjust injunctions that seek to criminalise peaceful protesters, whose sole aim is to get real action to halt and reverse the climate and ecological disaster that threatens the future of our grandchildren.
A young protester called Jellitot is imprisoned for many months purely due to a High Speed 2 injunction and another has just served a month due to Exxon’s injunction for their pipeline from Southampton to Heathrow allowing more jet flights from a third runway.
HS2 is destroying woodland that should be preserved to help limit global warming. HS2 emissions from demolishing and constructing are causing a carbon footprint that will take 120 years to pay back even if enough electricity can be generated to run their trains and there are enough passengers.
Chris Packham has Tweeted Lord Berkeley’s recent calculations showing HS2 will cost £155Billion to complete, yet only £8B to cancel. We shouldn’t waste money on motorways, incinerators, tunnels and HS2. It is urgent that these projects are stopped now to slow the destruction of the planet.
Even back before the bill that enabled HS2 was passed in 2017, when we were making these arguments in our petitions to parliament, Eversheds was being paid £5K per day to oppose residents. As Jo Hurford, Euston resident, says: in Duncan Pickstock’s film Whose Line Is It Anyway? (vimeo.com/438156566) - made when we were younger and hopeful, and Frank Dobson was alive: “Just because he (the Eversheds lawyer) says it slower and posher doesn’t make it true.”
The protesters call on Eversheds Sutherland to come out of the shadows and stop supporting the race to oblivion: cut the ties!
Dorothea Hackman is chair of the Camden Civic Society.
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