UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders under the Aarhus Convention Michel Forst attended the trial of five Just Stop Oil supporters at Southwark Crown Court. He attended as an observer because of his serious concerns.
Silencing defendants is the courtroom parallel to the wider attack on protest rights by the last government, including the “public nuisance” offence the Just Stop Oil five have been found guilty of and other measures that allow the police to shut down demonstrations before they have even begun, or haul peaceful citizens off marches for carrying placards or wearing imagery they object to.
Both reveal the collapse of ruling-class confidence in the people they rule. Grasping, after the shocks of Brexit and the Corbyn movement, that people are deeply dissatisfied with the system, their only answer is to ban protest and silence dissidents.
We cannot be silenced. The stakes are too high: as the Just Stop Oil cause illustrates, climate change, in the form of erratic weather, increasingly severe droughts and floods and crop failure, is already upon us. British farms saw a 19 per cent income drop in the last year because of mass flooding. The disruption to our lives from upsets to food production and the water supply will outweigh that from halting traffic on a motorway. The five must be freed.
Labour in power has a chance to change course from the crazy authoritarianism of the Tories. It is committed to restoring workers’ strike rights — but it must be made to restore protest rights too. Like the Tolpuddle Martyrs, we must “raise the watchword, liberty,” defying a state that tramples on our freedoms.
An activist puts up a banner reading “Just Stop Oil” atop an electronic traffic sign along M25 on November 10, 2022 in London, United Kingdom. (Photo: Leon Neal/Getty Images)
“Rulings like today’s set a very dangerous precedent, not just for environmental protest but any form of peaceful protest,” a U.N. official said.
In a decision that one United Nations official called “beyond comprehension,” a U.K. judge on Thursday sentenced five Just Stop Oil activists to a combined 21 years in prison over a Zoom call in which they discussed plans to disrupt London’s orbital M25 highway.
The sentences are believed to be the longest on record for nonviolent protest in U.K. history, The Guardian reported.
“The sentences handed to the five Just Stop Oil campaigners are utterly disproportionate,” environmentalist and author George Monbiot wrote on social media. “Four and five years in prison for peaceful protest? This is what you might expect in Russia or Egypt, not in a supposed democracy.”
“Why are we punishing the people trying to prevent disaster while allowing the oil company giants causing it to reap super profits?”
The five activists—Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, and Cressida Gethin—were found guilty last week of conspiring to cause a public nuisance due to a four-day direct action protest on the M25 that Just Stop Oil ultimately held in November 2022. All of the defendants participated in a Zoom call in which they planned to recruit volunteers for the protest, which was intended to pressure the U.K. government to end oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, a policy that the incoming Labour government has now adopted. The Zoom call had been infiltrated by a Sun journalist, who shared its contents with the Metropolitan Police.
On Thursday, Judge Christopher Hehir sentenced Hallam to five years in prison and Shaw, Lancaster, De Abreu, and Gethin to four each.
🧡 The #WholeTruthFive being cheered as they leave court and are taken to prison.
⛓️ They have received 4 and 5 year prison sentences after a zoom call about a nonviolent action being planned in 2022. This is not what a functioning democracy looks like. pic.twitter.com/JKKg2f8gtb
The sentences sparked outrage from humans rights advocates and environmental campaigners.
Michel Forst, U.N. special rapporteur on environmental defenders who also observed part of the trial, said the sentencing “marks a dark day for peaceful environmental protest, the protection of environmental defenders, and indeed anyone concerned with the exercise of their fundamental freedoms in the United Kingdom.”
Forst added: “Rulings like today’s set a very dangerous precedent, not just for environmental protest but any form of peaceful protest that may, at one point or another, not align with the interests of the government of the day.”
Former Green Party leader and Member of Parliament Caroline Lucas called the sentences “obscene.”
“Why are we punishing the people trying to prevent disaster while allowing the oil company giants causing it to reap super profits?” she asked on social media.
Current Deputy Leader of the Green Party Zack Polanski said: “‘Conspiracy to commit a public nuisance’ is a deeply authoritarian description that should send shivers down the spine of all of us who want to live in a free society. Even worse when the real crime is consecutive governments who have played down the climate emergency.”
Campaigners and experts also criticized the trial itself, in which Hehir did not allow the defendants to present evidence about the climate crisis to explain their actions.
“Defendants should be allowed to explain why they have decided to use nonconventional but yet peaceful forms of action, like civil disobedience, when they engage in environmental protest,” Forst told The Guardian after attending part of the trial.
Bill McGuire, emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London—who Hehir did not allow the defendants to call as a witness—called the trial and verdict a “farce.”
“They mark a low point in British justice, and they were an assault on free speech,” McGuire in a statement said Thursday. “The judge’s characterization of climate breakdown as a matter of opinion and belief is completely nonsensical and demonstrates extraordinary ignorance. Similarly to suggest that the climate emergency is irrelevant in relation to whether the defendants had a reasonable case for action is crass stupidity.”
The verdict and sentencing also come amid an increasing crackdown on climate protest, both globally and in the U.K. The previous longest known civil disobedience sentences in the country were also for Just Stop Oil activists.
“The U.K. is a nightmare for climate activists from this point of view, in the sense that the sentences imposed in other countries are neither that harsh, nor that widespread,” Forst said July 12.
Greenpeace U.K.’s program director Amy Cameron said on Thursday: “These sentences are not a one-off anomaly but the culmination of years of repressive legislation, overblown government rhetoric, and a concerted assault on the right of juries to deliberate according to their conscience. It’s part of the mess the Labour government has inherited from its predecessor, and they must fix it by giving back to people the right to protest that’s been slowly being taken away from them.”
Forst also called on the new government to reverse course.
“Given the gravity of the situation, I urge the new United Kingdom government, with absolute urgency and without undo delay, to take all necessary steps to ensure that Mr. Shaw’s sentence is reduced in line with the United Kingdom’s obligations under the Aarhus Convention,” Forst wrote on Thursday.
Republican National Convention attendees hold signs in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on July 17, 2024. (Photo: Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Vance, Trump, and their Wall Street allies have proven… that their priorities are with corporate polluters, not the people,” an expert said.
The Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate organization, warned on Thursday that former President Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance, who take their place on the Republican presidential ticket this week at the party’s convention in Milwaukee, would cause “catastrophic and irreversible damage” to the climate if elected.
Republicans were not speaking about climate at the convention nor even their plans to “drill, baby, drill,” as per the party’s platform, Stevie O’Hanlon, Sunrise’s communications director, said in a statement issued from Milwaukee. O’Hanlon posited that this is because party leaders know that their approach to the climate is unpopular among Americans.
“The absence is glaring,” O’Hanlon said. “Republicans are dodging talking about the climate because they side with oil and gas billionaires, not the vast majority of Americans who support the U.S. taking steps to reduce climate change.”
Donald Trump was the worst president ever for clean air, clean water, and protecting a livable future. With the selection of JD Vance as his VP pick, that climate-denying legacy would only worsen in a second term.
Other environmental groups have this week also issued warnings about the dangers of a Trump-Vance White House. The Sierra Club drew attention to the fact that one of Vance’s main donors, the private equity firm the Blackstone Group, owns the “deadliest” coal plant in the country. Emissions from the Gavin coal plant in Ohio lead to 244 premature deaths per year, according to one estimate.
Sarah Burton, Sierra Club’s national political director, highlighted Vance’s approach to the dirty coal plant in a statement on Tuesday:
Anyone who wants a sneak preview of a Trump-Vance administration needs to look no further than the Gavin coal plant—a deadly disaster kept afloat to benefit Wall Street billionaires even as it makes everyone else sick. Gavin is the deadliest coal plant in America that has killed hundreds of Americans, but JD Vance spent his time in the Senate attacking safeguards that would clean it up while collecting checks directly from the plant’s owner. Vance, Trump, and their Wall Street allies have proven over and over again that their priorities are with corporate polluters, not the people.
Media outlets have documented Vance’s close ties to the fossil fuel industry—and even outright climate denialism—in the three days since Trump announced his vice presidential pick.
As recently as 2020, Vance acknowledged a “climate problem” caused by human emissions and voiced support for the use of clean energy. But during the Senate race in Ohio in 2022, his climate positions moved dramatically to the right, drawing an endorsement from Trump—and campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry.
As Politico reported on Tuesday: “Vance changed his tune on climate change. Oil cash flowed.”
The Washington Post on Thursday reported that a Republican sweep of the federal elections would “transform” U.S. climate policy by boosting fossil fuel use, rolling back clean air protections, and defunding or dismantling agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency.
In his first term, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris agreement and The New York Times called “climate damage” possibly his “most profound legacy.”
A recent analysis by Carbon Brief, a science publication, estimated that a second Trump term would add about 4 billion metric tons of carbon emissions to the atmosphere by 2030.
Little of this has been mentioned in Milwaukee this week. Prime-time Republican speeches haven’t so far highlighted climate or energy policy, according to O’Hanlon, who argued that this is because the party’s platform is so out of step with public opinion. O’Hanlon cited a CBSpoll from April showing that a large majority of Americans favor taking climate action, with just over half supporting action “right now” and another 17% favoring action in the next few years.
Sunrise has also expressed discontent with the Democratic presidential ticket. Last week, the organization called for President Joe Biden to step aside, arguing it would improve the party’s chances of defeating Trump in November.
The UK’s new Labour government must urgently reinstate the net-zero plans shelved by its predecessor in order to “limit the damage” caused by Conservative policy rollbacks, according to official advisers at the Climate Change Committee (CCC).
In its latest annual progress report, the CCC issues some frank words about the “confusing and inconsistent” behaviour of the previous government.
The Conservatives only brought in “credible” policies to cover one-third of the emissions cuts required to hit the UK’s 2030 climate target, the committee finds.
Despite being “insufficient”, the CCC notes that this is a slight improvement on last year. Since then, a requirement for carmakers to sell electric models and a deal to help decarbonise heavy industry both boosted the credibility of the UK’s climate strategy, it says.
Nevertheless, the committee criticises former prime minister Rishi Sunak’s decision to roll back key net-zero policies, notably delaying bans on the sale of new gas boilers and non-electric cars. It says that, contrary to his claims, there was “no evidence” the delays would save people money.
The committee points to a general need to scale up emissions cuts across the economy. It says almost none of the UK government efforts to scale up low-carbon technologies or invest in nature-based solutions are on track.
With this in mind, the progress report lays out a selection of “priority” actions that the new Labour government should take to “make up lost ground” so the UK can achieve its climate goals.
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In the new report, the committee says a priority for the Labour government should be pausing any new airport expansions until there is a UK-wide “capacity management framework” in place.
This would assess aviation emissions and ensure there is no overall expansion “unless the carbon intensity of aviation is outperforming the government’s emissions reduction pathway”.
A Guardian collage of images from industry 1970s industry periodical Marathon World published by a corporate predecessor of Marathon Petroleum Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images/Marathon Oil Company
Marathon Petroleum predecessor warned of potential for ‘social and economic calamities’ in decades-old publication
The corporate predecessor to America’s largest refiner of oil, Marathon Petroleum, explained in a company periodical nearly 50 years ago that global temperature rise potentially linked to “industrial expansion” could one day cause “widespread starvation and other social and economic calamities”.
This decades-old description of climate breakdown is from a 1977 issue of the magazine Marathon World and is attributed in the article by an unnamed author to several experts including a scientist working for a top US agency.
“Although climatologists disagree on the underlying reasons, many see a future climate of greater variability, bringing with it areas of extreme drought,” said the magazine, previously published by Marathon Oil Company, which later split into Marathon Petroleum as well as the exploration and production company Marathon Oil.
Marathon Petroleum is among several oil and gas companies – including Exxon, Shell and BP – currently being sued by the city of Honolulu for allegedly engaging in a coordinated communications effort “to conceal and deny their own knowledge” of catastrophic climate impacts caused by burning their products.
That lawsuit alleges that Marathon knew of the dangers of global temperature rise long before the general public due to its membership in the American Petroleum Institute, which began studying the link between fossil fuels and global heating decades ago.
This newly surfaced article shows the company was undertaking efforts on its own to stay up to date on the latest climate science and the threats a more volatile climate could pose to humankind.
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The current Honolulu lawsuit alleges that Marathon contributed to climate obstruction by belonging to industry associations that spent decades trying to convince the public that science linking coal, oil and gas to climate change was shaky and unreliable.
“Pestilence, starvation, drought. To know one’s product may bring that about, and bury the evidence, is unspeakable,” Timmons Roberts, a professor of environment and sociology at Brown University, who’s an expert in climate disinformation, wrote in an email to the Guardian after viewing the 1977 article.
Marathon and other companies named in the litigation are currently petitioning the US supreme court to throw out the case.
