More than 1,100 people have been arrested since the start of Extinction Rebellion’s protests this week in London, including 50 who were detained at City airport on Thursday.
Those arrested at the airport included James Brown, a partially-sighted former Paralympian who climbed on top of a British Airways aircraft, while another man, who boarded a flight to Dublin and stood up to speak about the effects of the climate crisis, was held for failing to comply with the orders of a captain. On Thursday night the Metropolitan police said there had been 1,112 arrests in
connection with the protests across London.
While the bulk of activists failed to penetrate security and get inside airport terminals, as they had hoped, protests were staged at the airport’s Docklands Light Railway station, outside its main entrance and on roads leading to the site.
Q&AWhat are Extinction Rebellion's key demands?
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The UK group of Extinction Rebellion has three core demands:
1) Tell the truth
The government must tell the truth about the scale of the ecological crisis by declaring a climate emergency, “working with other groups and institutions to communicate the urgent need for change”.
2) Net zero emissions by 2025
The UK must drastically cut its greenhouse gas emissions, hitting net zero by 2025.
3) Citizens’ assembly
The government must create a citizens’ assembly to hear evidence and devise policy to tackle the climate crisis. Citizens’ assemblies bring together ordinary people to investigate, discuss and make recommendations on how to respond, in this case, to the ecological emergency.
In the US activists have added a further demand: “A just transition that prioritises the most vulnerable and indigenous sovereignty [and] establishes reparations and remediation led by and for black people, indigenous people, people of colour and poor communities for years of environmental injustice.”
Protesters at the exit of the DLR station sat down and superglued themselves to the floor, chanting “fly today, gone tomorrow”, as they were surrounded by police. At about the same time, a second group of protesters who had travelled to the airport by coach staged protests outside the main entrance.
Responding to the arrest figures, a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion said: it was “an astonishing number”. They added: “But also it’s really worrying that it takes this to get the media to notice and pay attention to this as a news story – people are having to put their bodies on the line for this.”
The police were asked to respond to footage on social media showing an officer instructing colleagues to “use pain and compliance” as they grappled with protesters on the ground outside of the airport.
[Warning: violence]
— Netpol (@netpol) October 10, 2019
"Use pain and compliance!"
A bronze commander from the Metropolitan Police issuing instructions to officers at the #ExtinctionRebellion protest at London City Airport this morning pic.twitter.com/cwl0Qkv78j
The Met’s deputy assistant commissioner, Laurence Taylor, said officers would always try to use the least force possible but added: “If that level of resistance then increases to passive resistance – so refusing to be lifted – we would then use what we call pain and compliance, which is not what it might sound.
“It’s using some compliance techniques just to allow us to get control so that we can lift somebody up,” said Taylor, who also revealed that police would now be carrying out a review of the general security situation at the airport.
Speaking outside the airport terminal, the Extinction Rebellion co-founder Gail Bradbrook said: “I think the most important thing is that we are alerting the British people to the crisis that we’re in and the threat to all the forms of business-as-usual.”
Asked whether the remaining protesters should go home, she said: “I don’t know, I think we’ve made our point, but I’m not making that decision for other people.”
Elsewhere in London, Scotland Yard said officers had cleared all Extinction Rebellion sites as early evening approached, apart from a “fairly sizable” number of people in Trafalgar Square and a small number in St James’s Park.
Those activists cleared from the park planned to move their camp across the Thames to Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. In Westminster, protesters said they felt police had become increasingly heavy-handed, and were policing the demonstrations much more aggressively than they had in April.
Commenting on the police move to clear protesters from St James’s Park, the Extinction Rebellion police liaison Paolo Enock said: “I’m deeply frustrated that while police at the chief superintendent level – who we are communicating with on the ground – are interested in compromise, in relation to moving our site at St James’s Park to ensure a safer space for protesters, twice today we’ve had offers ignored or rebuffed at the command team level.
“It is becoming clear that there is no desire from the higher levels to facilitate the right to protest. They have also consistently blocked the introduction of portaloos and waste disposal systems at Trafalgar Square.”
One protester at the airport, Val Saunders, 65, from Stroud in Gloucestershire, said: “We got off the coach today, we looked around, it’s like HG Wells. All this infrastructure, all these airports, they are just spreading out more and more. It’s just encouraging people to fly more. It’s going in the wrong direction, this government.
“I’m so angry. If we keep going with expansions, there is no future. [The protest is] a way of telling people: yeah, this is the right thing to do, this is the way to go, we need more and more. No, we need less, we need to stock-take what we have. We need to reassess. We need to use some of the money, those billions that go into expansions, put that into alternative energy.”
Police attempted to clear journalists from the scene before leading and carrying people away one by one.
One officer said authorities wanted to create a “sterile area”. He said he had the power to order journalists to leave because the area was private property covered by bylaws governing access.
One man appeared in pain as he was moved by officers towards a staircase. Among those carried down the steps was Frank Benatt, 78, from Totnes in Devon. Minutes earlier, asked if he was afraid to be arrested, he said: “I think really this is minimal. I’m approaching 80 and I’m disposable and I’ve had a very good life. Unlike lots of young people, I haven’t got commitments.
Benatt added: “I’ve been campaigning about [the environment] for 30 years and nobody has taken a blind bit of notice. XR is a last-ditch hope to actually take some action.”
Also among those arrested at the City airport protest was 84-year-old Phil Kingston, a veteran of the movement who has been arrested many times, including in April for supergluing himself to a DLR train.
TimelineHalf a century of dither and denial – a climate crisis timeline
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Fossil fuel companies have been aware of their impact on the planet since at least the 1950s
The physicist Edward Teller tells the American Petroleum Institute (API) a 10% increase in CO2 will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. “I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.”
Lyndon Johnson’s President’s Science Advisory Committee states that “pollutants have altered on a global scale the carbon dioxide content of the air”, with effects that “could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings”. Summarising the findings, the head of the API warned the industry: “Time is running out.”
Shell and BP begin funding scientific research in Britain this decade to examine climate impacts from greenhouse gases.
A recently filed lawsuit claims Exxon scientists told management in 1977 there was an “overwhelming” consensus that fossil fuels were responsible for atmospheric carbon dioxide increases.
An internal Exxon memo warns “it is distinctly possible” that CO2 emissions from the company’s 50-year plan “will later produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the Earth’s population)”.
The Nasa scientist James Hansen testifies to the US Senate that “the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now”. In the US presidential campaign, George Bush Sr says: “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect forget about the White House effect … As president, I intend to do something about it.”
A confidential report prepared for Shell’s environmental conservation committee finds CO2 could raise temperatures by 1C to 2C over the next 40 years with changes that may be “the greatest in recorded history”. It urges rapid action by the energy industry. “By the time the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even stabilise the situation,” it states.
Exxon, Shell, BP and other fossil fuel companies establish the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a lobbying group that challenges the science on global warming and delays action to reduce emissions.
Exxon funds two researchers, Dr Fred Seitz and Dr Fred Singer, who dispute the mainstream consensus on climate science. Seitz and Singer were previously paid by the tobacco industry and questioned the hazards of smoking. Singer, who has denied being on the payroll of the tobacco or energy industry, has said his financial relationships do not influence his research.
Shell’s public information film Climate of Concern acknowledges there is a “possibility of change faster than at any time since the end of the ice age, change too fast, perhaps, for life to adapt without severe dislocation”.
At the Rio Earth summit, countries sign up to the world’s first international agreement to stabilise greenhouse gases and prevent dangerous manmade interference with the climate system. This establishes the UN framework convention on climate change. Bush Sr says: “The US fully intends to be the pre-eminent world leader in protecting the global environment.”
Two month’s before the Kyoto climate conference, Mobil (later merged with Exxon) takes out an ad in The New York Times titled Reset the Alarm, which says: “Let’s face it: the science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies into turmoil.”
The US refuses to ratify the Kyoto protocol after intense opposition from oil companies and the GCC.
The US senator Jim Inhofe, whose main donors are in the oil and gas industry, leads the “Climategate” misinformation attack on scientists on the opening day of the crucial UN climate conference in Copenhagen, which ends in disarray.
A study by Richard Heede, published in the journal Climatic Change, reveals 90 companies are responsible for producing two-thirds of the carbon that has entered the atmosphere since the start of the industrial age in the mid-18th century.
The API removes a claim on its website that the human contribution to climate change is “uncertain”, after an outcry.
Exxon, Chevron and BP each donate at least $500,000 for the inauguration of Donald Trump as president.
Mohammed Barkindo, secretary general of Opec, which represents Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Algeria, Iran and several other oil states, says climate campaigners are the biggest threat to the industry and claims they are misleading the public with unscientific warnings about global warming.
“[I’m here] for my grandchildren and all their generation,” he said. “I’m also here for the poorest people who have done the least to cause climate breakdown and are suffering the most and are predicted to suffer dreadfully in the coming year, as eventually we all will, unless we do the most enormous turnaround.”
A spokesperson for London City airport said it remained “fully open and operational”.
Police also revealed that the last person from the Extinction Rebellion protests in London in April had been charged. Nearly 900 charges had now been levelled and 250 people had been convicted at court.
“We will go through the same process with the people who have been arrested on this occasion,” said Taylor.
“It definitely places a burden on the criminal justice system but the system is agile and is able to cope with the volumes that we have seen in April and I think the figures probably speak for themselves.”