We really need to stop buying into the argument that #ClimateActivists are "radical" or "destructive". The opposite is true: the nature of the protests have been peaceful and, on the whole, pretty tame.
The idea that, say, sitting on a road is "radical", "extreme" and "criminal" came from a bunch of #FossilFuel aligned think tanks, parroted by the media.
Reject them.
The framing needs to be: Fossil fuel companies are radical, extreme, criminal.
"#Climate and #EnvironmentalJustice groups report a significant increase in draconian, and often arbitrary, charges for peaceful protesters as part of a playbook of tactics to vilify, discredit, intimidate and silence activists.
The Guardian has also found striking similarities in the way governments from Canada and the US to Guatemala and Chile, from India and Tanzania to the UK, Europe and Australia, are cracking down on activists trying to protect the planet."
"Lane-Rose has become a prominent young climate activist, and the university student, now 19, faces a charge of conspiracy to commit an indictable offence. She's also been slapped with a violence restraining order, had her home raided and possessions seized and been banned from associating with fellow campaigners."
"The documents from the North Dakota security board paint a detailed picture of counterinsurgency-style strategies for defeating opponents of #OilAndGas development, a war-on-terror security firm’s aspirations to replicate its deceptive tactics far beyond the Northern Great Plains, and the cozy relationship between businesses linked to the #FossilFuel industry and one of the largest law enforcement trade associations in the #US"
“TigerSwan Solutions.”
To keep the #FossilFuel industry safe, #TigerSwan used #counterinsurgency tactics including:
drones,
social media monitoring,
HUMINT (spying)
liaising with law enforcement officials and agencies
local community engagement,
counter-protesters,
building a “pipeline narrative,” and partnering with university oil and gas programs.
“Win the populace, and you win the fight,” the presentation stated.
"#NorthCarolina passed the most draconian of the year. It classifies #trespassing on an energy facility as a# felony punishable with up to two years in prison and attempting to “obstruct, impede, or impair the services of transmissions of an energy facility" as felonies that carry up to 19 years in prison and $250,000 in fines. "
The #UK is starting to feel like Russia in its suppression of free speech.
"Government officials have drawn up deeply controversial proposals to broaden the definition of #extremism to include anyone who “undermines” the country’s institutions and its values, according to documents seen by the Observer."
Some good news:
French court annuls ban of #climate movement over ‘eco-terrorism’ claims
"Judges temporarily suspended the government’s disbanding order in August, arguing it restricted the activists’ freedom of assembly and that the interior ministry did not provide enough evidence to back up its claim that the climate movement was inciting violence.
"The activist group, created in 2021, counts more than 150,000 supporters and is made up of close to 200 local groupings. It has no clear leadership structure and isn’t officially registered as an association or nonprofit organization — making it difficult to disband."
"Long sentences handed to two #JustStopOil protesters for scaling the M25 bridge over the Thames are a potential breach of international law and risk silencing public concerns about the environment.
In a strongly worded intervention, Ian Fry, the UN’s rapporteur for #ClimateChange and #HumanRights, said he was “particularly concerned” about the sentences, which were “significantly more severe than previous sentences imposed for this type of offending in the past”."
"After punitive sentences were handed down to #ClimateActivists, the UN’s rapporteur for climate change and human rights suggested in November that the sentences potentially breached international law.
Climate activists suffer coordinated attempts to portray them as dangerous extremists. Take the Atlas Network, an influential global grouping of rightwing thinktanks: it has helped lead campaigns across the world to demonise climate activists as dangerous extremists."
"UN special rapporteur on environmental defenders says he is seriously concerned about ‘regressive new laws’
Forst said that during a two-day visit to the #UK earlier this month he uncovered worrying information on the treatment of peaceful protesters.
At Inner London crown court, peaceful protesters have been forbidden by court order from mentioning the climate crisis, fuel poverty or even the US civil rights movement in their statements to the jury."
In September 2023,
"A UN Special Rapporteur has raised concerns about increasingly draconian laws that restrict citizens’ rights to peaceful protest around Australia. "
Australia, heavily dependent on coal exports, can be thought of as a fossil fuel state.
"National Highways has injunctions covering 4,300 miles of motorways and major A roads. Anyone who breaches this injunction faces imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine. Any corporation can apply for a civil injunction, and individuals can be punished without a trial."
The contrast with the treatment of farmer protesters (and their tractors) can hardly be more stark.
"In many cases, laws are proposed or drafted by corporate-funded lobby groups masquerading as thinktanks, such as Policy Exchange in the UK and the American Legislative Exchange Council in the US. Such groups create legal templates for crushing protest movements, then press for their adoption all over the world. This tactic has been chillingly effective."
"Inequality demands oppression. The more concentrated wealth and power become, the more those who challenge the rich and powerful must be hounded and crushed. In other words, economic inequality is mirrored by inequality before the law. You can dispense with all the other indices of democracy. The best measure of the health of a political system is who gets prosecuted."
The positive spin: the #FossilFuel peeps are scared: The Twilight of Big Oil is coming. #Öldämmerung
Several countries are adopting measures for peaceful demonstrators that are also used against organised criminals. These include early morning raids by counter-terrorism units and the use of undercover police to infiltrate groups."
"The UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders under the #Aarhus Convention, Michel Forst, released a position paper on state repression of environmental protest and #CivilDisobedience: a major threat to human rights and democracy.
The paper concludes with five calls for action to States to make a profound change in how they respond to environmental protest, and also urges the human rights community to coordinate their efforts to support this call for action."
"The legal response to protest in the #UK has been transformed at an astonishing pace. Actions have been newly criminalised; locking on, walking slowly in the road. Crippling fines [are now in place] for, say, blocking certain roads or sitting down at oil terminals.
Existing crimes have been escalated, so that what once might have attracted a small fine, such as sitting down in a road, can now lead quickly to prison. Long custodial sentences are becoming normalised."
"The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will not hear #Mckesson v. Doe, [leaving] in place a lower court decision that effectively eliminated the right to organize a mass protest in the states of #Louisiana, #Mississippi, and #Texas.
Under that lower court decision, a protest organizer faces potentially ruinous financial consequences if a single attendee at a mass protest commits an illegal act."
This ^^ case illustrates why intersectionality is so important, and why climate activists need to support all those who fight for equality and justice in all the spaces. Because the causes are all connected. In this case, a deeply racist court, in its attempt to crush a Black leader, has made protest impossible for anyone.
"Nearly 300 #AntiProtest bills introduced in state legislatures since 2017, 41 of which passed.
Many of those laws seemed like direct responses to specific protest campaigns.
New York’s bill, introduced by Democratic lawmakers, is perhaps the most extreme, declaring that blocking public roads, bridges or transportation facilities — or even “act[ing] with the intent” to do so — is a form of domestic terrorism."
"The language of extremism came to permeate the federal government’s characterization of the anti-pipeline movement and has dogged subsequent social justice campaigns.
North Dakota introduced and later passed two laws expanding the definition of criminal trespass and dramatically heightening penalties for so-called riot offenses — an unmistakable response to what had unfolded at Standing Rock.
A Standing Rock-style protest in North Dakota, or many other states, is virtually impossible today."
This article contains the litany of crackdowns on activists of
– Stop Cop City, Atlanta GA:
– Keystone XL;
– Dakota Access pipeline;
– the Women's March, January 2017;
– Black Lives Matter;
– Palestine;
And connects the next dot:
“The movement opposing U.S. policy toward Israel is attracting “hundreds of thousands” of new supporters, says Fox, but that’s also coming at “a time where the Right is really experimenting and trying to build new tactics and legislative tools of repression.”
"The recent history of environmental activism in the U.S. shows that the repressive policies being advanced now will have repercussions far beyond a single social movement — and that they’re likely to hit climate and land defenders particularly hard.
Now, just as happened after the [#BLM and #DAPL] protests, bills are being considered in six states to enhance penalties for blocking roads, with most of them explicitly framed as a response to pro-Palestine protests."
"An assortment of conservative and far-right politicians started using words like "criminal" and "terrorist" to describe the activists, seeking to spark a debate about the line between activism and extremism."
It's effective:
"It was just so smartly all put together that (the crackdown) just slowly suffocated us and didn't punch us off the street.
So we kind of reached a maximum amount of people that are ready to take that risk upon themselves."
"Five members of #LetzteGeneration have been charged with “forming a criminal organisation”, ... under section 129 of the German criminal code. It is believed to be the first time the law has been applied to a non-violent protest group.
“This charge is meant for mafia and organised crime. This charge criminalises every act of support towards the group Letzte Generation. This creates an immense chilling effect on all #climate protests in #Germany.”
"#CopCity is the harbinger of a dark future. Since 2020, similar police-training complexes all reflect a similar attitude toward the protests of 2020. In the wake of that summer’s unprecedented challenge to state brutality, the American political class has declined introspection and instead chosen to rearm itself against the citizenry, including pro-Palestinian student protesters who one day might similarly find themselves being accused of conspiracy and worse."
A reminder that the pre-crime public order legislation introduced by the Tories and the primary focus of this article applies to England & Wales only. Scotland and NI have their own public order provisions as separate judicial jurisdictions within the UK.
As usual, The Guardian conflates England (and Wales in this case) with "the UK"; as I understand it folk from Scotland and NI would be subject to the English & Welsh law while in that jurisdiction.
Just to put some context, among other outcomes, the oil companies climate denial lies and the manipulation described here, burned 30 billion trees this year in Canada's climate wildfire catastrophe. Pakistan was smashed by 1 climate storm a year ago, and is not recovered.
The climate crisis is an assault.
Its time to build, build all the sun and wind needed to make carbon fuels unneeded.
@CelloMomOnCars yep, met my fair share of people who believe sitting in the road is a terror attack on our civil liberties, can't wait to find out what they think about the local river running through their front room...
@CelloMomOnCars I'd prefer cynical to radical as a descriptive for fossil fuel co.s . There's very little radical thinking there, in the sense of emerging from the root, unless you think making money by drowning people and burning others is a worthy goal
@CelloMomOnCars this is a who’s who of all the conservative names associated with the destruction of democratic institutions. Pretty much a shadow government owned by billionaires across the world. No doubt that the media owners want to see them protected from scrutiny. #climatecorruption#FossilFuelLobby
Exactly.
Corporate. media engages in a whole lot of self-censure, related to their advertising revenue.
That's why I pay subscriptions to news outlets like the Guardian and ProPublica. The latter does excellent investigative journalism of the old fashioned kind.
If you were delayed by car traffic congestion, would you think it radical?
If you're wondering where your child will live, as your home is flooded or wildfired from the map, who would you think is the radical one: fossil fuel companies insisting on keeping on making a profit, or the people fighting them?
They are on the streets because they have tried all the other ways, and found that didn't work.
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