Greta Thunberg was arrested in London on Tuesday during a demonstration on the sidelines of an oil and gas conference. She is a Swedish environmental activist.
The Arrest of Greta Thunberg
Several hundred environmental protesters disrupted the first day of the Energy Intelligence Forum, an event bringing together top executives from the oil and gas industry in the British capital, blocking the entrances to the InterContinental Hotel where it was taking place. The twenty-year-old activist was stopped in the middle of the day by two police officers. The police then placed him in a van. The latter is no stranger to blocking actions, as in Malmö, Sweden, where it was fined a few days ago.
Green demonstration in London
In a press release, the London police, without making any reference to the illustrious environmental activist, merely mentioned 20 arrests for obstructing the public highway.
Greta Thunberg had said earlier, “Behind these closed doors (…) politicians without stature make deals and compromises with lobbyists from the destructive fossil fuel industry.”
Shell CEO Wael Sawan and TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné were among the guests at Tuesday’s three-day Energy Intelligence Forum. To the sound of some fifty drums, the demonstrators had chanted during the morning “stop the oil, stop the gas!” or “nothing can stop us, another world is possible!”.
The stakes of the event
Activists from environmental NGO Greenpeace unfurled a banner. It bears the inscription “Oil trucks must pay”. The activists had scaled the facade of the InterContinental hotel.
For the environmental NGO Fossil Free London, the organizer of the protest, the “overwhelming majority” of the record profits made last year by companies in the sector are being directly reinvested in the expansion of fossil fuels, rather than in the green energy they claim to support”.
Positions of Oil Industry Leaders
The head of Saudi oil company Aramco, Amin Nasser, reaffirmed during the conference that “new investments” in hydrocarbons were needed to counter the decline of aging oil fields. As for Wael Sawan, he argued that Shell was trying to “ensure energy security”. But at the same time, he added, “we want to be a player in the energy transition by investing between $10 and $15 billion over the next three years”. Mr. Sawan was speaking via video link, having been unable to access the InterContinental Park Lane hotel due to the protest. In June, the company backtracked on its commitment to reduce crude oil production by 1 to 2% a year, saying it was now aiming for “stable” production until 2030, drawing the ire of environmentalists.
Call to Action in preparation for COP28
Tuesday’s demonstrators also denounced a fact about the COP28 president. He is none other than the head 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 she believes “cannot lead to a drastic reduction in CO2 emissions”.
