A corner of rural South East England might seem an odd place to look for a turning point in the fight against climate change. But Kingsnorth in Kent is being hailed as just the spot, after protests at a power station operated by E.ON landed a group of Greenpeace campaigners in court. On trial was their right to protest at proposals for a new coal burning power station, set to generate CO2 emissions equivalent to those of the thirty smallest countries in the world (according to Greenpeace).

Interesting in itself, but it’s the subtext of the trial – that climate change warrants this kind of protest, that the UK Government still lacks any real purpose on climate change, and that carbon capture and storage technology is still in the realm of wishful thinking – that is now fascinating commentators. One jury, at least, has concluded that the potential damage climate change will bring constitutes a ‘lawful excuse’ for a protest aiming to protect property of greater value (ie the planet) from the impact of climate change by causing £35,000 worth of damage to a chimney belching out CO2.

This is obviously rather annoying for climate change deniers, with blogger Melanie Phillips wondering if the world’s gone mad and deciding that a jury could only possibly have reached such a conclusion by being subjected to “a propaganda barrage by militant manmade global warming fanatics”

Perhaps less predictable is how the Government and E.ON will respond. The new station they want to build to replace Kingsnorth was to be a far more efficient facility than the present one – by about 20% - and would power 1.5 million homes, an important contribution to filling the hole in energy supply coming at us in the next 20 years. The hope for coal is that carbon capture and storage technology will come on stream in the next few years to mitigate its emissions, but Kingsnorth 2 was not set to use CCS, and EON itself acknowledged to BERR as recently as January that CCS technology "obviously... has no current reference for viability at any scale".

In an ironic twist, the verdict on Kingsnorth eclipsed a more minor news story of the same day – the opening of the world's first CCS plant in Spremberg in Germany. Though the UK government is keen to see CCS technology developed in the UK, and E.ON has been researching Oxyfuel CCS at their Nottinghamshire base for the last 18 months, both have admitted that they have fallen behind Vattenfall, the Swedish company behind the German plant. For fans of innovation as a route to sustainability, falling behind in the race for CCS can't be good news for us or the planet.

So, is this the beginning of the end for fossil fuel power generation? The Guardian is holding a vote on whether climate change constitutes a valid defence for this protest. With the vote closing tomorrow, it’s neck and neck with those believing the protesters were right narrowly ahead at 53% of the vote as I write.

It seems unlikely that E.ON will be able to go ahead with Kingsnorth without CCS, adding an estimated £500 million to construction costs, but what's more worrying for advocates of new coal is a growing sense that sceptics in the cabinet - Miliband and Benn particularly - may be gaining the upper hand. And as veteran environmentalist Lester Brown claimed in a recent Green Futures article, investors are already deserting new coal in the US - even with CCS factored in, on simple economic grounds. With both Conservatives and Lib Dems also opposed to new coal generation, its few remaining advocates outside industry - stand up John Hutton and Arthur Scargill - suddenly seem to have a mountain to climb if they are to convince us all.