UK campaigner who fronted lawsuit on future impact of fossil fuel projects says she fears for future despite ruling

Sarah Finch considers herself an early adopter of environmentalism, even if she is not quite sure what the initial spark was. “I was only ever interested in the environment,” she says. “That’s all I wanted to do.”

She never expected her name to become part of legal history. Last week, the supreme court handed down a landmark ruling in a lawsuit that Finch fronted, ruling that the climate impact of burning coal, oil and gas must be taken into account when deciding whether to approve projects. It set an important legal precedent and threw doubt on the approval of new fossil fuel projects in the UK.

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© Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images

Green New Deal Rising is backing six of party’s candidates but says leadership cares more about business than climate

• UK election live – latest updates

Rachel Reeves talks to business executives. She met some in December, after a £150,000 donation to Labour from a financial services firm. She met more in January, at capitalism’s annual jamboree in Davos. And just this week she told a meeting of City bankers their “fingerprints are all over” Labour’s manifesto.

But she does not talk so much to young people worried about the climate emergency. Or so 23-year-old Zak found when he tracked Reeves down to a cafe where she was campaigning on Wednesday morning. “I’m a young person with Green New Deal Rising,” he said, approaching her.

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© Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images

[Social media] is terrible at organizing us in the kind of leadership-driven, hierarchical fashion that would be ideal for channelling masses of people into collective, unitary projects. (SLAftermath)

The article is the introductory chapter to the (still on preorder even though it's a few days past its release date) book Log Off: Why Posting and Politics Almost Never Mix by Katherine Cross, which received a mentioned in a recent small press book roundup.