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climate protests
Climate Protesters Are Under Attack; a Trump Win Would Make It Worse
On both sides of the Atlantic, volleys of laws threatening long-term imprisonment for nonviolent dissent are being put on the books to cow the climate movement into silence. Trump promises to go further.
Oct 27, 2024
In August, climate activist and cellist John Mark Rozendaal was arrested and charged with criminal contempt for playing a few minutes of Bach outside Citibank’s headquarters in New York City. Rozendaal, 63, was prominent in the “Summer of Heat on Wall Street” campaign that targeted Citibank for its prolific financing of fossil-fuel projects. He and a co-defendant now face up to seven years imprisonment if convicted.
Meanwhile in Atlanta, more than 50 justice and environmental activists are awaiting trial on domestic terrorism and other charges arising from their years-long defense of the city’s South River Forest against the construction of an 85-acre police training center there. They are being prosecuted under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) law. Any of them found guilty of “racketeering” would have five to 20 years of imprisonment added to their sentences for the alleged underlying crimes.
Such situations are symptomatic of a grim trend in both the United States and Europe. Nonviolent, nondestructive climate protest is increasingly being subjected to criminal prosecution, while punishments are being ratcheted up to levels befitting violent and far more serious crimes.
The state abuses described in this article should be considered a preview of what is almost guaranteed to be even worse to come if Donald Trump does indeed retake the White House and the Republicans win majorities in the House and Senate.
Across the Global South, such environmental protests are all too often being met by corporate and state forces with extreme extrajudicial violence, especially in Indigenous communities. Here in the Global North, however, the clampdown on protest has largely been through legal action, at least so far. But that might—especially in an America with Donald Trump as its president again—only be a prelude to more violent kinds of suppression as global warming accelerates.
For embattled American climate activists, this trend further raises the stakes of the November 5 election. The crackdowns on climate protest are so far being carried out by state and local governments. But the state abuses described in this article should be considered a preview of what is almost guaranteed to be even worse to come if Donald Trump does indeed retake the White House and the Republicans win majorities in the House and Senate. As recently as October 13, in fact, Trump insisted that, once back in the White House, he’d call in the military to quash domestic dissent of any sort.
In addition, a Trumpian Congress would be likely to pass laws gutting federal climate policies and imposing extreme penalties on future climate protesters. Both prospects also feature prominently in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, produced in part by a gaggle of former Trump officials. That now-infamous blueprint for his possible second administration calls explicitly for—as the Center for American Progress describes it—“suppressing dissent and fomenting political violence.” Among other things, Project 2025 suggests that a future President Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which would indeed allow him to use the military to punish lawful nonviolent protest. And count on it, he’s almost certain to exploit that act if he does indeed become president again.
Gas, Oil, and Cars Over People
Since 2016, 21 states have passed a total of 56 laws criminalizing protest or dramatically increasing the penalties for engaging in it. To be sure, John Mark Rozendaal was arrested in New York, a city located in a blue state, but all the states that have adopted new anti-protest laws are governed by Republican-majority legislatures. And the specific activity most frequently targeted for prosecution is protesting the construction or existence of oil and gas pipelines. (Note that all state laws mentioned below are described in detail in a recent report by the International Center for Not-For-Profit Law, or ICNL.)
The state of Alabama, for example, can now punish a person who simply enters an area containing “critical infrastructure,” including such pipelines, with up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $6,000. If you go near a pipeline in Arkansas, you’re at significantly higher risk: imprisonment of up to six years and a $10,000 fine. Impeding access to a pipeline or a pipeline construction site in Mississippi carries a sentence of up to seven years. Do that in North Carolina as a member of a group and you’ve got even bigger problems. As the ICNL reports, “[A] group of people protesting the construction of a fossil fuel pipeline could face more than 15 years in prison and a mandatory $250,000 fine if they impede or impair the construction of a pipeline.”
Even as protest is being criminalized, assaulting protesters by car is, in effect, being decriminalized.
Many such sentences for protesting are wildly disproportionate to the severity of the act committed. In Florida, trespassing on property that contains pipelines can result in up to five years imprisonment, compared to only 60 days for trespassing just about anywhere else. Enter a pipeline facility in Ohio with the intention of tampering with it in any way and face a potential ten-year sentence. Simply spraying graffiti on an Ohio pipeline installation can carry a six-year sentence, while anyone who “conspires” with the person creating such graffiti could be fined an eye-popping $100,000.
Many climate marches or demonstrations involve walking or standing in roadways. Politicians have been exploiting the fact that “automobile supremacy is inscribed in law by every branch of government and at every level of authority” (in the words of law professor Gregory Shill) to pass highly punitive measures against street protests with little fear of having them overturned. In effect, the laws privilege fossil-fueled vehicles over the human beings who speak out against them.
In May, the Tennessee legislature passed a law that mandates a prison sentence of 2 to 12 years for protesters convicted of knowingly obstructing roadways. In Florida, groups of 25 or more protesters impeding traffic can be charged with “rioting” and face up to 15 years imprisonment. Anyone in Louisiana who does no more than help plan a protest that would impede traffic can be charged with conspiracy or with “aiding and abetting,” even if the protest ends up not hindering traffic or not occurring at all.
In Iowa, being on the street or sidewalk during a vociferous but nonviolent protest can cost you five years in prison, yet (believe it or not) a driver who runs into you during a protest, causing injury, is immune from civil liability if that driver can convince authorities that he or she had taken “due care.”
Laws that permit drivers to run into or over pedestrians engaged in protest have been passed in four states. Three of those laws hit the books in 2021 in the midst of a 16-month period during which American drivers deliberately rammed into groups of protesters a whopping 139 times, according to a Boston Globe analysis. Three victims were killed and at least 100 injured. Drivers were criminally charged in fewer than half of the ramming incidents and in only four was a driver actually convicted of a felony. In other words, even as protest is being criminalized, assaulting protesters by car is, in effect, being decriminalized.
Finally, Louisiana can file RICO charges against people who, as part of a “tumultuous” demonstration, block roads or damage oil or gas pipelines. And protesters beware, since that state’s RICO law carries the possibility of 50 years in prison at hard labor and a $1 million fine. (And yes, you read that right!)
Fresh Legislation, Ready in Minutes!
Many laws that impose severe penalties for protest were passed in the wake of the Indigenous-led campaign against the Dakota Access oil pipeline in 2016-2017. Hundreds of people were arrested in that struggle. More than 700 protesters with the Indigenous Environment Network have been criminalized for their untiring efforts to impede or halt pipeline projects across North America.
If the dozens of state anti-protest laws display many suspicious similarities, that’s no coincidence. In response to pipeline protests, oil and gas companies teamed up with the American Legislative Exchange Council, which draws up “model legislation” for Republicans in statehouses across the country to use as templates for bills that push various corporate and hard-right priorities. Once this genre of legislation was directed toward on-site pipeline protests and passed in state after state, it was also seized upon to criminalize street marches and demonstrations, including those against racist violence, fossil fuels, and other ills—all with “traffic safety” as a pretext.
Following the lead of their kindred state legislators, Republicans in Congress have proposed their own raft of bills criminalizing protest. Fortunately, they haven’t succeeded in getting any of them passed—yet. Many of the bills were prompted by campus protests against U.S.-supported genocide in Gaza or over climate policy and against the fossil-fuel industry.
Some of the congressional bills amounted to less-than-serious grandstanding. One, for instance, would have required a person convicted of “unlawful activity” on a university campus at any time since last October 7 to perform six months of “community service” in Gaza. But there were also dead-serious bills like the one prescribing a prison sentence of up to 15 years for inhibiting traffic on an interstate highway. Other proposed bills would have withheld federal funding (in one case, even pandemic aid) from states that refused to prosecute people who took part in protests on public roadways.
Smashing Human Rights in Europe
Punitive measures against climate protest are reaching new extremes in Europe, too. Since the British Parliament passed harsh new anti-protest laws in 2022, more than 3,000 activists associated with the Just Stop Oil movement have been arrested. According to CNN, “Most of those arrests have been for planning or carrying out direct actions, including slow marching,” which impedes traffic.
In response to such repression, Michel Forst, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders, wrote that under the Aarhus Convention (a 1998 agreement most European countries have signed but not the United States), “Whether intended or not, any disruptions that [environmental] actions may cause, such as traffic jams or disturbances to normal economic activity, does not remove the protection for the exercise of fundamental rights during such action under international human rights law.”
In defiance of that principle, the new British laws prescribe a sentence of up to 10 years imprisonment for those convicted of planning protests judged to be a “public nuisance” (which often means disrupting traffic). Such prison terms, noted CNN, are comparable to those for aggravated robbery or rape under British law.
When the climate change group Extinction Rebellion announced an action near The Hague in September 2023, more than 10,000 people of all ages showed up. They’d come to protest the more than $40 billion in subsidies that the Netherlands government gives fossil fuel companies annually. The police blasted the crowd with water cannons, then arrested and hauled away 2,400 protesters, including children.
The group Climate Rights International (CRI) reports that “some democratic countries are even taking measures designed to stop peaceful climate protests before they start.” In June 2023, for instance, German police detained an activist before he could even leave his home to join a climate protest. Five months earlier, a Dutch activist was held in custody for two days to keep him from an action by Extinction Rebellion. He ended up being convicted of sedition (yes, sedition!) for encouraging others to attend the protest. None of that sounds like something “democratic countries,” as CRI called them, should be doing.
Protest as Necessity
People charged with nonviolent protest often invoke the “necessity defense,” declaring that they committed a minor law violation to stop a far greater crime. Unfortunately, that defense almost never succeeds and judges often forbid defendants from even explaining their motives during a trial.
That’s what happened to members of the group Insulate Britain who stood trial this year for a climate protest that disrupted traffic by nonviolently occupying streets and climbing onto overpasses along a major London ring road in 2022. The judge presiding over their trials ordered the defendants not to mention climate change in court. Several of the activists defied that order, citing the climate emergency as their motivation, so the judge promptly held them in contempt of court and sent two of them to jail for seven weeks.
One of the protesters cited for contempt, Nick Till, told CRI that, while trying to bar him and the others from explaining the purpose of their actions, the judge allowed the prosecutors to depict the defendants as threats to society. “There’s an attempt to insinuate we’re a ‘cell,’” Till said, “which is language that implies some kind of revolutionary group. They had an expert in counterterrorism testify. They tried to portray us as dangerous extremists.”
Though also being threatened with increasing penalties under state laws, Americans have somewhat stronger protections under the First Amendment.
In July, four people who planned the London protests were convicted and sentenced to a draconian four years in prison. A fifth defendant, Roger Hallam, one of the most prominent British climate activists, was sentenced to five years even though, bizarrely enough, he was neither a planner of the protest nor a participant. He was charged instead for a speech he gave regarding civil disobedience as an effective form of climate action in a Zoom call with that protest’s planners.
In their trial, the five defendants represented themselves. Over the course of four days, with the judge repeatedly trying and failing to silence them, they presented what could be the most extensive and compelling version of the necessity defense ever heard in a courtroom. (Later, in his prison cell, Hallam wrote up an account of the trial. It’s well worth reading.)
On both sides of the Atlantic, volleys of laws threatening long-term imprisonment for nonviolent dissent are being put on the books to cow the climate movement into silence. So far, European protesters who dare to resist are getting hit hardest with convictions and sentences. Though also being threatened with increasing penalties under state laws, Americans have somewhat stronger protections under the First Amendment. But how long will dissent continue to enjoy such protections in this country? That largely depends on how we all vote between now and November 5.
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'Back With a Bang': Climate Marches Kick Off Worldwide as Global South Seeks Reparations
"It is unconscionable that Global North governments have continuously rejected their responsibility to deliver adequate climate finance for the Global South."
Sep 20, 2024
Climate protesters across the world hit the streets on Friday to kick off this year's Global Climate Strike ahead of the opening of high-level United Nations General Assembly meetings next week, where climate finance for the Global South is on the agenda.
Protests for climate justice were planned across 50 countries, with Germany alone seeing more than 100 rallies that together drew some 75,000 people. The protests were spearheaded by the youth-led group Fridays for Future (FFF), started by Greta Thunberg in 2018. The New York chapter of the group marched across the Brooklyn Bridge Friday afternoon aiming to "tear down the pillars of the fossil fuel industry."
One of the main climate items on the international agenda this year regards financing for Global South countries that are disproportionately impacted by climate breakdown. The Climate Action Network International on Friday called for Global North countries—which are responsible for the vast majority of historical emissions—to pay $5 trillion per year to Global South countries in climate reparations.
"It is unconscionable that Global North governments have continuously rejected their responsibility to deliver adequate climate finance for the Global South," Lidy Nacpil, the Philippines-based coordinator of the Asian Peoples Movement on Debt and Development, said in a statement.
"If developed nations are serious about solving the problem of climate change, as they claim to be, they should agree to a climate finance target that covers the costs of mitigation, adaptation, just transition, and loss and damage," she added. "The Global South is owed trillions—not billions."
Today in Berlin! This is big. It’s not easy being a climate activist these days yet hope is all around. #climatestrike #nowforfuture pic.twitter.com/A9jze0yts7
— Luisa Neubauer (@Luisamneubauer) September 20, 2024
The UNGA meetings will set the stage for negotiations at the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in November.
Advocates criticized rich countries for their unwillingness to provide meaningful levels of finance to the Global South following preliminary talks in Bonn, Germany in June.
A study published in Nature last year found that even if all countries decarbonize by 2050, Global North countries would by that time collectively owe Global South countries $192 trillion in climate reparations. This analysis is the basis for the $5 trillion annual payout sought by campaigners.
The New York marchers on Friday chanted climate protest favorites such as "What do we want? Climate justice. When do we want it? Now" and "The people, united, will never be defeated" as they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. They carried banners with messages such as "Tear Down Fossil Fuels" and "We Strike for the Future."
The most specific demand issued by the New York protesters on Friday was for Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, to sign the Climate Change Superfund Act, which would require polluting companies in the state to pay into a fund that could be used for extreme weather resiliency and preparation projects. The state Legislature has already passed the bill, and it awaits only the governor's signature. Democrats have also proposed a similar measure at the federal level.
There's some diversity in the political makeup of the global FFF protests, which, even just in New York, include people from a wide array of organizations. The German chapter has distanced itself from comments Thunberg made about Israel's war on Gaza, which she called a genocide. She was arrested at a pro-Palestine rally in Stockholm earlier this month.
FFF Germany did take a swipe at the far-right, which has been ascendant in the country in recent years, running on an anti-immigrant platform, and the national government, led by the center-left Social Democratic Party.
"The climate crisis is the greatest challenge of our time, not right-wing debates about migration," the group wrote on social media on Friday. "If the climate targets were a border, the government would have closed it long ago. We remain loud for climate protection!"
FFF and other climate activist groups have not been able to sustain the numbers they reached in 2019, when coordinated strikes across the world reached record numbers.
Though Friday's actions were smaller, they gave hope to movement veterans. Writer and climate organizer Bill McKibben, remarking on the large number of protesters in Germany, wrote on social media that school strikes were "back with a bang."
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Citibank Staffer Punches Climate Activist During Protest
"Citi keeps proving their violent business is rooted in violent people," said the Planet Over Profit campaign.
Aug 14, 2024
A climate protester was taken to a hospital bleeding on Wednesday, according to organizers, after a security guard at Citibank's global headquarters in New York punched him in the face as campaigners assembled in the lobby of the building.
The climate advocate, Eren Can Illeri, was taking part in an action organized by Summer of Heat, which is supported by a coalition including New York Communities for Change, Planet Over Profit, and Stop the Money Pipeline.
Illeri was joining other campaigners in calling on Citibank executives to meet with them to discuss the bank's funding of fossil fuel projects. Citibank has invested $396.3 billion into coal, gas, and oil infrastructure projects since the Paris climate agreement was finalized in 2015, and Summer of Heat has made the bank its top target this summer as it demands Wall Street divest from the climate emergency.
"We have been asking Citi to meet with us for weeks to talk about what it can do to tackle the climate emergency," said Alicé Nascimento, a spokesperson for the Summer of Heat campaign. "But rather than meet with us, they have sent their security guards to physically attack peaceful climate activists after weeks of intimidation and threats."
Illeri appeared to be filming with a cellphone when the security staff member approached him and tried to grab the phone out of his hands, according to a video of the incident. The guard then punched Illeri in the face while holding the phone, and pushed him to the ground.
BREAKING: Citibank staff punches peaceful climate activist in the face for taking video. He was taken to the hospital bleeding.@Citi keeps proving their violent business is rooted in violent people. This can't go on. pic.twitter.com/E1KCwQ1dCY
— Planet Over Profit (@pop4climate) August 14, 2024
The violence displayed mirrors "the violence of fossil fuels and climate chaos," said Alice Hu, a climate campaigner for New York Communities for Change.
"Citi backs violence and it's sickening," she said.
Summer of Heat began on June 10, and since then more than 4,000 campaigners have joined protests to demand Citibank end its financing of fossil fuel projects.
More than 475 people have been arrested for protesting the bank's investments—including a cello-playing grandfather last week—and protesters last month reported being shoved by one of the bank's top lawyers.
"Citi keeps proving their violent business is rooted in violent people," said Planet Over Profit. "This can't go on."
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