Climate activists in the UK had a day of protests at their week-long Camp for Climate Action, but didn’t meet with the aggressive police tactics seen at last year’s event and at the G20 meeting in May.

On Tuesday, activists stripped off to protest inside the front window of Edelman (a PR company whose clients include energy firm E.ON, which is planning a new coal-fired power station in the country). Others superglued themselves together on the trading floor of the Royal Bank of Scotland, in objection to its investment in fossil fuel projects. Groups also marched towards the head offices of BP and Shell, against the mining of tar sands in Canada – led by indigenous Canadian activists chanting: “When I say ‘BP’, you say ‘criminal’” (BBC).

The government was a target too: on Wednesday, fifteen be-goggled and arm-banded activists sat in kayaks at the headquarters of the UK’s department for energy and climate change, highlighting rising sea levels, they said, and protesting against carbon trading and carbon capture and storage technology (The Guardian).

Media reports characterize the camp in Blackheath, London – where a thousand or so have gathered for the week – as good-natured, chilled-out and, with environmental workshops, quite educational. With the watching police in equally relaxed mode (there has been only one arrest), media attention is turning to the next promised direct action: the ‘great climate swoop’, an attempt to shut down the UK’s second-largest coal-fired power station, Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire, on 17th and 18th October.

Image: The Blackheath camp/SallyB2, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0