Divest East Sussex campaigners say “Fossil Fuel ain’t Cool!”

Anti-Fossil Fuel campaign on the home stretch

Last Saturday, Divest East Sussex campaigners took their message to Bexhill as part of the Swinging Sixties event on the seafront. HOT’s Erica Smith donned her glad rags and picked up her protest placard.

We all know that we only have a few years left to combat climate change before global warming becomes a serious threat to all life on earth. Yet there still seems to be inertia about making positive change. For the past three years, East Sussex County Council has been lobbied to divest (stop investing) their pension scheme funds in fossil fuels, and yet they continue to be reluctant to acknowledge the issue.

Divestment campaigner Gabriel Carlyle said: “We now have 4,861 signatures on the Divest East Sussex petition. That means we only need another 139 people to sign order to force East Sussex County Council to debate its continued funding of climate change at the next Full Council meeting on 15 October!

As well as gathering signatures for the petition on Saturday, we asked people to sign a letter to Stewart Drew, the Director of the De La Warr Pavilion because the pension scheme for DLWP workers is the ESCC pension scheme. The East Sussex County Councillor for central Bexhill is Simon Elford who is on the Pension Fund committee.

We encourage artists and regular visitors to the DLWP to send him a letter or an email asking him to put pressure on Simon Elford to divest the pension scheme from fossil fuels. Stewart Drew’s email address is: exec@dlwp.com.

To help Divest East Sussex to gather the remaining signatures, please sign the petition (if you haven’t done it yet) – and share the petition link – https://tinyurl.com/divestescc – on social media.

You can also download your own copies of the petition to print out here. Signatories must be resident in either East Sussex, Brighton or Hove.

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