Members of This Is Rigged covered the Sainsbury’s branch in Glasgow’s Buchanan Street with red paintPhoto: This is Rigged / Twitter
CLIMATE and social justice activists in Scotland have highlighted their opposition to food poverty by staging a series of stunts.
Members of This Is Rigged covered the Sainsbury’s branch in Glasgow’s Buchanan Street with red paint today as they demanded an end to “profiteering” by supermarkets.
The day before, the group entered Edinburgh Castle and smashed the glass case housing the Stone of Destiny, which had recently been returned to Scotland following the coronation of Charles Windsor.
Near the end of a year of high-profile interventions pressing for decisive action on climate change and a fair net-zero transition for workers, the group’s latest stunts are focused on the cost-of-greed crisis, which they argue is indivisible from the climate crisis.
The group warned that it would escalate actions in support of its demands that the Scottish government provide “food hubs” in every community and that supermarkets reverse their 24 per cent increase in baby food prices over the last two years.
[It has been announced that UK prime minister Rishi Sunak will be attending the COP27 summit since this article was published.]
King Charles will host a reception for key COP27 figures at Buckingham Palace on Friday, [today] despite not attending the conference himself.
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The reception will bring together over 200 international business leaders, decision makers and NGOs (non-governmental organisations) to mark the end of the United Kingdom’s presidency of COP26 and look ahead to the COP27 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh.
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The reception has been organised to facilitate discussion of sustainable growth, progress made since COP26 in Glasgow and collective and continued efforts to tackle climate change.
The King has attended the UN climate conference for a number of years and delivered one of the keynote speeches at the opening ceremony for COP26 in Glasgow.
Shortly before sunrise on Tuesday, about 40 supporters of the civil resistance campaign against fossil fuel production blocked the entrance to the Nustar Clydebank terminal, locking themselves together and climbing on tankers.
Fourteen more activists made their way inside, with three scaling a storage silo and the rest climbing into pipework distributing fuel around the site, halting operations.
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Just Stop Oil, which is calling for the government to promise a moratorium on new fossil fuel projects, said the action was prompted by plans for new oil and gas fields in the North Sea, off Scotland’s coast.
Chief Superintendent Lynn Ratcliff said on Tuesday evening protesters were asked to leave and that a “number of people who decided not to cooperate have subsequently been arrested”.
Four people have been charged following climate protests at two motorway service stations on the M25 in Surrey.
On Thursday Just Stop Oil said 35 of its supporters blocked petrol stations at Cobham and Clacket Lane services.
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The two men and two women have been charged with causing criminal damage of more than £5,000. A further four people have been released under police bail.
An additional 27 people are still under investigation, Surrey Police said.
The negotiations carried on late into Saturday evening, as governments squabbled over provisions on phasing out coal, cutting greenhouse gas emissions and providing money to the poor world.
The “Glasgow climate pact” was adopted despite a last-minute intervention by India to water down language on “phasing out” coal to merely “phasing down”.
The pledges on emissions cuts made at the two-week long Cop26 summit in Glasgow fell well short of those required to limit temperatures to 1.5C, according to scientific advice. Instead, all countries have agreed to return to the negotiating table next year, at a conference in Egypt, and re-examine their national plans, with a view to increasing their ambition on cuts.
Carrying blood-red ribbons to represent the crucial red lines already crossed by Cop26 negotiations, hundreds of representatives of global civil society walked out of the convention centre in Glasgow on the final morning of the summit in protest.
The audience at the People’s Plenary in the conference blue zone heard speakers condemn the legitimacy and ambition of the 12-day summit before walking out to join protesters gathered on the streets beyond the security fencing.
“Cop26 is a performance,” the Indigenous activist Ta’Kaiya Blaney of the Tla A’min Nation told the meeting before the walkout. “It is an illusion constructed to save the capitalist economy rooted in resource extraction and colonialism. I didn’t come here to fix the agenda – I came here to disrupt it.”
A recent analysis of the lifestyles of 20 billionaires found that each produced an average of over 8,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide: 3,500 times their fair share in a world committed to no more than 1.5C of heating. The major causes are their jets and yachts. A superyacht alone, kept on permanent standby, as some billionaires’ boats are, generates around 7,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.
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I’ve come to believe that the most important of all environmental measures are wealth taxes. Preventing systemic environmental collapse means driving extreme wealth to extinction. It is not humanity as a whole that the planet cannot afford. It’s the ultra-rich.
The fossil fuel industry benefits from subsidies of $11m every minute, according to analysis by the International Monetary Fund.
The IMF found the production and burning of coal, oil and gas was subsidised by $5.9tn in 2020, with not a single country pricing all its fuels sufficiently to reflect their full supply and environmental costs. Experts said the subsidies were “adding fuel to the fire” of the climate crisis, at a time when rapid reductions in carbon emissions were urgently needed.
