I was arrested yesterday for blockading Cuadrilla’s fracking site at Preston New Road in Lancashire for more than 12 hours. It was the first day of fracking after a seven-year delay due to earthquakes, powerful local opposition and legal challenges.

As a trained paramedic, I have a good appreciation of emergency situations. Climate change is the biggest emergency of them all. I join more than 350 people who have been arrested for disrupting Cuadrilla’s site in Lancashire over the last two years. People driven to take such action range from local councillors to faith leaders, students to grandparents. In the past fortnight, three people were sentenced to up to 16 months in prison for climbing on top of lorries that carried key fracking equipment.

I put my body on the line and risked arrest at the entrance of Cuadrilla’s site because the Conservative government has shown nothing but disdain for local democracy, climate science and communities at the sharp end of climate breakdown.

Cuadrilla is to start fracking in Lancashire. But we will not give in | Caroline Lucas Read more

More than 200,000 people have signed a petition against fracking. In June 2015, Lancashire county council unanimously rejected Cuadrilla’s application, only to be overruled by Sajid Javid (then the communities secretary) a few months later. The government is currently seeking to fast-track fracking by rewriting local planning rules to make it as easy to build a fracking rig as it is to put up a garden shed.

These are desperate attempts to impose a polluting industry on a public who do not want it. When the government and corporations show such disregard for people and the planet, taking direct action like yesterday’s blockade is a moral obligation.

Claire Perry, the minister for clean growth and energy, has announced that this week is Green Great Britain Week. This is the same Claire Perry who granted Cuadrilla the final consent to frack and has been a key driver behind government attempts to open up this new fossil fuel industry.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘History teaches us that non-violent civil disobedience has a powerful precedent.’ Photograph: Reclaim the Power

It is unconscionable that Perry is persevering with her zealous support of fracking at a time when climate scientists are imploring political leaders to take urgent and unprecedented action to cut greenhouse gas emissions before 2030.

Gas-generated electricity has a carbon footprint 50 times greater than onshore wind, and fracked (shale) gas is even worse. Gas is no “bridge fuel” to a low-carbon economy, as Cuadrilla claims. Locking our economy into extracting and burning more gas will only add to emissions and drive us more rapidly towards dangerous climate impacts.

It’s wrong to argue that fracking mitigates the risk of the lights going out. Production of gas-powered electricity fell by 5% in the year to 2017, while wind and solar grew by 20%.

This year has seen record heat and a series of extreme weather events. While the impacts of floods, hurricanes, heatwaves, droughts and wildfires are beginning to be experienced more frequently in the UK, these events have long been devastating other communities around the globe.

We do not have time to hope in vain for politicians or corporations to catch up with the timeline of climate breakdown. In just 12 years our society must radically decarbonise, whether those profiting from the crisis like it or not. Fossil fuel companies such as Shell and ExxonMobil were able to forecast what their extraction would do to our climate as early as the 1980s. Cuadrilla has no excuse now.

While governments, the police and the courts defend such corporations in their reckless pursuit of profit, we have no choice but to turn to direct action to stop new fossil fuel infrastructure.

This is by no means the end. We still have our friends, our creativity and the determination to blockade a fracking industry that threatens our shared survival. History teaches us that non-violent civil disobedience has a powerful precedent in radically shifting the narrative and bringing about justice. So we will continue, until we win.

• Esme North trained as a paramedic and is working in agroecology