An activist from Axe Drax has interrupted a keynote speech from Ed Miliband to highlight Labour’s funding of the controversial ‘biomass’ company:
View this post on Instagram
Axe Drax Miliband!
Drax Power Station in North Yorkshire was once the UK’s largest coal-fired power plant. Starting in 2003, it was gradually converted to run on biomass, and it now burns millions of tonnes of imported wood pellets every year.
This was sold as a green alternative to fossil fuels, and Drax has already pocketed billions in government subsidies on that basis.
But in reality, Drax’s green credentials are based on dodgy accounting – burning biomass for power in this way creates as much carbon pollution as coal or gas.
In the video at the top, the activist stands on her chair and begins shouting the following about Drax:
You are still handing one million pounds a day to Drax who is the single largest carbon emitter in the country.
Handing money to Drax is causing destruction of vital forests, suffocating communities in the US, and it is pumping carbon into our atmosphere when we’ve already reached 1.5 degrees.
This government gives One million pounds a day of bill payer money to Drax who is the UK’s single largest carbon emitter?
Axe Drax!
Axe Drax!
Drax kills!
For most of the above, large men are dragging her out of the building.
Axe Drax described the action as follows:
BREAKING: We disrupted Ed Milliband’s keynote speech to reject a new AI DATA CENTRE powered by TREE BURNING.
The subsidies given to Drax were slightly reduced when it was previously renewed, and it seems like Drax took that to heart. They have now bid for a new AI data centre powered by their power plant in Yorkshire which currently burns 27,000,000 trees worth of wood annually. This
could become environmental vandalism on so many levels.All the while, they’re being sued by their own workers in the US and still raking in billions in green energy subsidies taken from our energy bills.
Join us to take the fight directly to those in power,
UK funding
As reported by the Canary on 18 December 2025:
Drax has received over £7bn in green subsidies since 2012 and the UK government recently announced plans to extend subsidies for the power station by another £2bn by the end of the decade despite the fact that Drax is the UK’s single largest emitter of carbon dioxide with a history of misreporting the sustainability of its wood pellet sourcing.
Additionally:
As Drax celebrates its 10 year anniversary of operating its Gloster, Mississippi pellet plant, residents of Gloster are suing the company over air pollution and the associated severe health issues caused by wood pellet production.
Over the last 10 years Drax has paid nearly $3m in fines since the facility opened and racked up nearly $6m in violations for its operations in Mississippi and Louisiana over the past four years.
The company has been repeatedly accused of driving environmental racism by siting its pellet mills next to majority-Black communities with high poverty rates in Louisiana and Mississippi, where they have exceeded the legal emission limits for air pollutants linked to cancer, breathing difficulties, and other health effects.
Featured image via Axe Drax
By Willem Moore
This post was originally published on Canary.