Greta Thunberg is not done demonstrating. The Swedish environmental activist was arrested on Tuesday in London during a demonstration on the sidelines of an oil and gas conference. Several hundred environmental protesters disrupted the first day of the Energy Intelligence Forum on Tuesday, an event bringing together senior leaders of the oil and gas industry in London, blocking the entrances to the InterContinental hotel where it took place.
The activist was arrested in the middle of the day by two police officers and placed in a police van. The police had already announced on the social network X (formerly Twitter) the arrest of five demonstrators “suspected of having obstructed” the public highway. At the start of the morning, during a press conference, Greta Thunberg criticized the fact that “behind these closed doors (…) politicians without stature conclude agreements and compromises with lobbyists from the destructive fossil fuel sector”.
” Another world is possible “
TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné and Shell Managing Director Wael Sawan are due to speak at the three-day Energy Intelligence Forum on Tuesday. To the sound of around fifty drums, the demonstrators chanted during the morning “stop the oil, stop the gas” or “nothing can stop us, another world is possible”. A banner bearing the inscription “oil heavyweights must pay” was displayed by activists from the pro-environmental NGO Greenpeace, who had scaled the facade of the hotel where the conference was being held.
“I have six grandchildren. I have nightmares thinking about the future they will have,” reacted Doro Marden, a 75-year-old retired Londoner. For the environmental NGO Fossil Free London, which is organizing the demonstration, “the overwhelming majority” of the record profits recorded last year by companies in the sector “are directly reinvested in the expansion of fossil fuels, and not in the green energy that they claim to support.”
The president of COP28 denounced
The boss of the Saudi company Aramco, Amin Nasser, reaffirmed during the conference that “new investments” in hydrocarbons were necessary to counter the decline of aging oil fields. The demonstrators also denounce the fact that the president of COP28, the annual United Nations climate conference scheduled for November 30 to December 12 in Dubai, is none other than the boss of the United Arab Emirates oil company, Sultan al-Jaber .
“We know that fossil fuel lobbyists have been corrupting COP procedures for decades,” argued Greta Thunberg before her arrest, for whom the choice of this president “shows very, very clearly” the lack of ambition of summits which cannot, according to her, “lead to a drastic reduction in CO2 emissions”.