Interviewees:
Andy, science writer & climate activist
Oscar Berglund, political economist & civil disobedience researcher, Bristol University
Dana Fisher, director of the Center for Environment, Community and Equity and a professor in the School of International Service, American University
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Transcript:
Charli: Environmental protest is not new. It's got a long history. The sound of victory for the Standing Rock Sioux and thousands of others gathered to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. This massive Pictures coming in just moments ago. Police moving in right there to make their arrests. The protesters began gathering here last April.
Opposing the construction of the 1200 Mile Dakota Access Pipeline. But in 2018 and 2019, climate protests started to get big. Like really big.
Of course the climate crisis hasn't disappeared, and we have not disappeared. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere hasn't been this high for at least three million years. Then, in 2020 2021, it was harder to protest on a big scale. Remember the pandemic we had? Anyway, while it did slow things down, the message was already out there.
And there was no stopping it. Governments and fossil fuel groups noticed the growing swell of climate conscious citizens. And a lot of them didn't like it.
Around 2022, a chunk of the climate movement started to change their tactics. Governments were still investing in coal, oil and gas, something the overwhelming majority of climate scientists say we need to stop using as quickly as possible to turn the tide on deadly climate change.
Time was of the essence. More attention was needed. So how do you get more attention?
Even before these protests, lawmakers from the US to the UK to Australia had started to criminalise climate and environmental protest.
But human rights groups say they're coming down even harder on these new protests, even though they're non violent. So what's behind it? And what's ahead? This is Living Planet. I'm Charlie Shield.
Andy: It was November, it was grey and cold and It was dark. We started at four o'clock on the dot, so it was getting dark at that time of year and there were lots of people bustling around.
Charli: This is Andy. In November 2023, on Remembrance Day, which is the UK's version of Veterans Day, he was part of a non violent protest, disrupting traffic on one of London's main shopping streets.
Andy: I was with about 40 other Just Stop Oil protesters who'd come from different parts of London and we'd all assembled at this point. We all talked to each other, had a check in, because it's a scary thing. So we all talked to each other. We talked about how we were feeling, reassured each other, you know, we were doing something positive for the world.
Charli: Andy and the group waited for the traffic light to turn red before they stepped out. They were wearing high visibility vests and holding a bright orange banner that read Just Stop Oil. Some protesters stayed on the sidewalk to explain to passers by what the protest was all about.
Andy: So we entered the road at four p. m. and we walked slowly for about 30 minutes. It was a bit like we were a slow moving bus. That's what we're often trained, what we're trained to think of ourselves as, a slow moving bus. And so people could overtake us. Um, so it wasn't a complete obstruction in the road, but it was enough to draw people's attention.
Charli: It was also enough to draw their ire.
Andy: People do get upset at the fact that You are hampering their ability to travel. Um, but we are very careful. We're trained to get out of the way when there are blue lights, specifically ambulances, but other emergency services as well. And then the police arrived. This police van kind of screamed like down the road coming towards us and like pulled across the road in front of us and blocked the road. There had been a much bigger protest earlier in the day at the main war memorial in London, where there were far right protesters of the English Defence League, and there were, there were fights between the English Defence League and the police. And so, we got a real sense that, you know, we had some of the same police and they were hyped up.
Charli: Soon enough, Andy was arrested for willful obstruction of traffic, alongside about 30 other protesters.
Andy: He handcuffed my hands in front of me. He read me, my rights as it were. And at that point, I then started to tell him about why I was there protesting.
Charli: As a science writer, Andy is better acquainted than most with how climate change is warping the planet and breaking down ecosystems that we need for survival. The more he learns, the more motivated he is to do something about it. Lately, he's become a climate activist too, with Extinction Rebellion and Just Up Oil. You've probably heard of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil in the news before. They're climate groups who've become pretty well known for their stunts.
Disrupting traffic is a popular one, as well as scaling buildings and bridges to unfurl their banners, chucking soup at famous paintings, gluing their hands to walls, spray painting their messages across the city, even throwing cornstarch on Stonehenge.
Andy: And so we need to act, um, and that was the reason I was there for the protest was to try and get that message across, to try and tell people how urgent this is, because the message isn't really getting across.
Charli: Andy empathises with people's frustration about their disruptive tactics. Ultimately, he says he's motivated by something that feels bigger than his momentary discomfort.
Andy: Now, you know, obviously that they're frustrated by the fact that we are. Slowing them down and making it harder for them to get to the places that it's going to, but, you know, perhaps that might make them think, well, you know, they think this is serious enough to do this.
Charli: After his arrest, Andy ended up having to spend a night in jail. Something he's not in a hurry to do again. He was eventually acquitted of the charge. At the time of arrest, he was technically standing on a traffic island, so he wasn't actually obstructing traffic, the judge found. But, recently, other climate activists haven't been so lucky.
In mid 2024, five Just Stop Oil activists in the UK were arrested for taking part in a video call to plan a four day protest on a major motorway in London.
They were eventually found guilty of conspiring to cause public nuisance. Four of them were sentenced to four years in prison. One was sentenced to five years. Those are the longest sentences ever handed down in the UK for nonviolent protest, the UN's special rapporteur for environmental defenders said the sentences were unacceptable in a democracy. Human rights watch described the new powers granted to police and courts in the UK as draconian saying they undermined free speech, peaceful assembly, and democratic rights.
Oscar Berglund: So like it's only really emerging what effect the public order act. in the UK is having on protest or on protesters rather. Um, so the Home Office have just kind of released data, which show that their new powers under the Public Order Act are used, like 95 percent of it is used against environmental protest.
Charli: That's Oskar Berglund, a Swedish Peruvian political economist at Bristol University. He researches climate change activism and civil disobedience. And he's talking about new anti protest laws in the UK. But the crackdown is a global trend. Something that his team recently detailed in a report they published.
Alongside the UK, many other countries like the US, Australia, Brazil, Peru and Germany have also come down hard on climate protesters. One way they're doing this is through legal intimidation tactics. For example, by using existing laws that target organised crime or terrorists to sentence protesters. Or, in the case of the US, by passing critical infrastructure bills that allow them to hand down heftier penalties to protesters who are targeting the oil and gas industry.
There's also more leeway for police to use force, and for judges to hand down longer prison sentences. And even though climate protesters tactics have become more confrontational. The movement is extensively committed to non-violence, and Oskar says it's not like authorities didn't already have the rights to deal with them.
Oscar: The police have had powers to deal with these types of protests. They can, you know, carry people away and, you know, they don't need to have special powers to stop people going to normal protests, to You know, hand down the kind of prison sentences that we are seeing now.
Charli: So, why the repression?
Oscar: Obviously there's always been crackdown on protest and when, you know, a protest gets annoying to the powers that be, then, uh, then they crack down on it. The pandemic came just after a really intense period of climate protest and arguably the time when climate protest has been the biggest around the world. And the most efficient at kind of the most efficient at changing climate politics, at influencing climate politics, at changing the way that climate change is talked about in the media and so on, uh, increasing concern about climate change amongst the population.
Charli: Climate and environmental protests have had a real impact. Direct action has stopped fracking, mining, pipeline and extraction projects around the world. And perhaps most impactfully, more people are aware of it. Between mid 2018, when Greta Thunberg started Fridays for Future, and September 2019, Google searches containing climate change were found to have multiplied tenfold.
For some groups and governments, especially those reliant on exporting fossil fuels, that's a real threat. Investigative journalists have linked the fossil fuel lobby to a wave of anti protest laws in the US and beyond. Lobby groups such as ALEC, Marathon Petroleum, American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers have all pushed anti protest legislation, even drafting some legislation, in multiple states across the US, like Idaho, Ohio and West Virginia. Lawmakers warn that anti protest measures could affect everyone's rights to stand up for anything. But when it comes to implementing those laws, Different causes do tend to be treated differently
Oscar: When you look at it from a European perspective. When the farmers protest, for example, with their tractors in cities, then the police doesn't seem to really do any anything about that.
Charli: Oscar's talking about a type of farmer protest that's become common in European countries like Germany and the Netherlands, where farmers drive their tractors into the city blocking roads and ports.
Charli: Often they're not met with arrests or police violence or negative media coverage, even though some of them have turned violent and become dangerous for bystanders and politicians.
Far right violence has also seen shorter sentences handed out than those given to climate protestors. In August 2024, rioters in the UK were found guilty of assaulting police, setting buildings and police vans alight, and racially aggravated violence. They were sentenced to between one and three years in prison.
Just one month after Just Stop Oil activists were given four and five year sentences. And then, if we take an extreme example of this discrepancy, there's the storming of Capitol Hill, where the average prison sentence for the 550 rioters found guilty of criminal offences was under three years.
Dana Fisher: And it's worth noting here that a lot of the, um, sentences for climate activists who were engaging in non violent civil disobedience that involved very minimal property destruction, the sentences were substantially higher than those who were convicted of participating in the January 6th insurrection against the US government, which involved violence where people died and extensive property damage happened at the US Capitol. I mean, these were people who literally built guillotines on the US Capitol grounds with the express intention of murdering elected members of the US government. And those people were sentenced to lower times in jail. I mean, and they've now been pardoned by our new president. Donald Trump pardoned more than 1, 500 people convicted over the storming of the US Capitol.
Hi, I'm Dana R. Fisher. I am the director of the Center for Environment, Community and Equity and a professor in the School of International Service at American University. I'm also the author of Saving Ourselves, From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.
Charli: Dana is based in Washington. She's been studying protest movements for 20 years.
And that's long enough to notice some trends among them. One major one being when parts of a movement start to escalate their tactics.
Charli: This phenomenon has a name. It's called the radical flank effect.
Dana: Research shows that as this what we call radical flank spills off and people become more confrontational, that it actually helps drive support for the broader movement, including the more moderate component of the movement that is not being confrontational.
Charli: We've seen it many times in movements gone before. The civil rights movement, the suffragettes fight for women to vote, anti-apartheid in South Africa, Martin Luther King Jr. himself was wildly unpopular while he was alive.
Dana: People who are not supportive of the movement are not going to change their minds because people decided that they're going to sit in a restaurant or they're going to sit in and block traffic. That is not going to change hearts and minds. What it does do is it is very effective at getting more media attention for the cause. And through that media attention, it creates what we call issue salience, because the media talks about the issue more.
Charli: And that, Dana says, actually attracts people. People who feel like they need to do something, but they haven't gotten involved yet. So the radical flank is a familiar feature of social movements. And so too, it turns out, are punitive responses.
Dana: When the state starts to feel threatened by a movement, it tends to be more aggressive and repressive. But we also see violence in some cases. I mean, certainly we saw that during the civil rights movement, and I expect we're going to be seeing that sooner, or, you know, in the near future, let me say it that way.
Charli: Dana means violence from law enforcement against protesters, non-violent protesters. If that happens and it's witnessed by a wide public audience, she says that often that tends to attract more support for the cause. This is one of the reasons that climate activists are so committed to nonviolent civil disobedience.
Dana: The nonviolence is key because they very much have been trained and schooled in the ways that this process works. But if there's violence against them and repression against them, it actually draws out many sympathizers who had not yet.
Charli: And so, what Dana is saying is, although this path of resistance is, in a way, a well trodden one, It might get worse before it gets better.
Oscar Balland is not convinced the confrontational tactics of climate activists and necessarily helpful for the climate movement, but he is convinced by the motivations behind them,
Oscar: I don’t necessarily think that it's a good approach to throw soup at paintings or to glue yourself to a motorway unless what your protest is directly linked to that motorway.
But I don't think that that's necessarily useful protest because the aim there is to attract media attention and that media attention in its majority is not very positive toward for the protesters and protesters don't to be heard. So even if the protest is written about it's much less focused on the cause of the protest. I mean, ultimately.
The people that have been sent to prison for four or five years, they might engage in a type of protest that, that, you know, many people, most people find, you know, inconvenient and a bit stupid and silly, but they do so from a place of caring immensely for Humanity and the planet, and they do not do so in self interest.
They absolutely do not do so in self interest. So, to send people like that to prison for four or five years, um, is, I think, not in, not in the public interest. I mean, what I think is really important is to acknowledge that this is part of climate politics. The real villains in climate politics, they're not being sent to prison.
The countries that are allowing this to happen, and more specifically, you know, the fossil fuel industry, they're not facing consequences and the crimes that they are committing are a lot, lot worse than gluing yourself to a motorway.
Charli: Six months after Andy's arrest for disrupting traffic on a London road, the Labor Party were voted in in the UK. They announced that they would not be issuing any new coal, oil and gas licences. Andy's convinced protests played a part in helping make that decision. There's still a long way to go to phase out fossil fuels and bring down emissions, he says.
And for now, he's still figuring out the best way to help, but he doesn't have any regrets.
Andy: What I've found in the protest movement, actually, is that there are really some truly wonderful people, and there's actually a lot of joy. The people who do these protests, they really, really care. This is a big thing. It's really, really scary to step out into the road. There are people shouting at you, there are people honking their horns, that takes an awful lot of courage, and then, to risk arrest? And jail as well. You have to be brave. As scary as things are, I'm really proud to be a part of that.
Charli: This episode of Living Planet was produced by me, Charlie Shield. It was edited by Kathleen Schuster.