"Urgency is where we're at": climate activists occupy Didcot coal-fired power station

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"We're a bunch of fairly ordinary people really. We're not taking this action under any particular name although we met at the Camp for Climate Action so that's our connection."

"We're a mix of ages and we've got a nice gender mix - the age range is from about 19 to 50 in the group of people on the chimney. Climate change is a global issue so regardless of where you live, or what you do or how old you are, you should be taking action on it because it's the biggest threat facing humanity at the moment. Urgency is where we're at."

"We're right on top of the chimney at the moment, I can see down into the cooling towers, I can see the coal pile, I can see the coal conveyer, which is where we currently have thirteen of our activists, and I can see absolutely everything around so it's quite astonishing."

"We arrived at about 4am this morning I believe, we cycled past the barrier into the power station and then split into our two separate groups. We used an angle grinder to get into the chimney through the big gate and then walked all the way up the stairs to the top. We've now barricaded ourselves into the top layer of the inside and into the chimney because we intend to be for as long as we possibly can. We've got food for at least a week. Basically we want to be here as long as possible to be able to tell RWE npower which owns this coal-fired power station that coal cannot be the future for energy in this country."

"Since e-on basically pulled out of developing Kingsnorth, RWE npower has become the forefront of coal in our country, they want to build new coal-fired power stations - about 30 of them across the UK and Europe - they're looking at getting planning permission for one at Hunterston in Scotland within the next couple of weeks I believe, and one in Tilbury. We're just here to tell them that that's flying in the face of everything we know about climate change and also flying in the face of the Government's legally-binding target to cut our carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050. We cannot do that if we're building coal-fired power stations. That's why we're here."

"We haven't yet shut down the power station entirely... it's going to take a while for the people on the coal conveyers to stop the coal feeding into the power station as there was a lot of coal already on the line. At the moment we've got climbers heading further up the chimney in an attempt to get npower to switch it off. That's what we need to be doing. It's not even a question of no new coal. We need to be decommissioning old coal-fired power stations if we're going to cut emissions by 80 percent."

Why Direct Action?

"The government makes all of these noises - it believes it's absolutely pioneering in making the Climate Change Act, but this act is legally binding and they're making almost no movement towards actually fulfilling it in any way. You cannot build new coal-fired power stations and expect to be able to reduce your carbon emissions by 80 percent. We need to be making a just transition to a lower carbon economy and that's just not what is happening. This needs to be changed."

On the risk of arrest

"The consequences of arrest kind of dwindle into insignificance in the face of the consequences of climate change. Three hundred thousand people a year, according to Kofi Annan's Global Humanitarian Forum, die each year as a result of climate change. The more carbon we emit, the more we're accelerating climate change, the more droughts, famines, wars over resources we're going to have - we're looking at having about 200 million climate refugees by the middle of this century - that's within my lifetime - if we continue with business as usual. That's just not good enough."