Newsletter September 2024
Dear supporter!
It has been quiet around our newsletter for a few weeks, but we’ve been busy with unignorable protests. Today we’ll give you an update on what was going on during this resistance-summer. Can you imagine, we did what governments failed to accomplish for decades: An international coordinated, determined and serious action across several countries. But we’ll get to that later!
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We’re starting off with the news in Sweden and Finland: On Wednesday, 25.09., we joined forces with Elokapina (XR Finland) and sprayed the Finnish Parliament with blood red paint. With this protest, we demand an end to peat mining and fossil subsidies.
We created many heated discussions in Finland and the whole of Europe on whether this action is appropriate to shed light on the fact that the Finnish government owned company Neova mines peat in Sweden like never before, causing more emissions than all of Sweden’s domestic flights.
The action garnered support from Terike Haapoja, the grandchild of the designer of the House of Parliament, J.S. Siren. She defended us on her private social media account: She says we have “a great sense of aesthetics and the ability to draw an artistic parallel between the bourgeois power represented by the building and the life-destroying politics practiced by the Finnish state.”
Bold, unignorable international action on climate collapse – that is the #oilkills campaign with Stay Grounded and we started on July 24th: We took action with 500 people of 19 groups in over 13 countries. With this campaign, we demand from governments to sign a fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty.
In Germany, people glued themselves to runways of several airports such as Munich, Leipzig or Cologne. In Austria, we spilled orange paint in one of the terminal halls at the Vienna Airport. 50 supporters of Students Against EACOP in Uganda were arrested and faced violent repression and horrific conditions in custody.
In the UK, the sole news of future action was enough for police intervention. Just Stop Oil experienced some of the most extreme repression with 15 supporters remanded to prison over the course of the campaign and 14 remaining inside to this day.
We’ve also sparked the public debate in Denmark and increased pressure on the government due to their inadequate reaction to the climate crisis.
With nine highway blockages, we protested the construction of new highways – which is a completely insane idea in the midst of an escalating climate catastrophe. Clotide attempted to extinguish the bonfire to commemorate Saint John’s Eve, the national Midsummer festival in Denmark. Here’s what she says:
“I find it astounding that the Danish government continues to approve extremely climate destructive projects such as our 15 new highways, when we already see mass hunger, conflict and migration driven by heatwaves, forest fires, floods and droughts all across the world. When our elected officials with open eyes continue to pour gasoline on the bonfire that is the climate collapse, we all have a duty to stand up and resist.”
In July, we started a new campaign in Norway! Our name translates to “the people against fossil power” and three of our brave supporters have participated in our first protest on the runway of Oslo’s airport, bringing air traffic to a halt with the international #oilkills campaign. We are now working on our second demand and are preparing our next protest phase that is coming up in october. We want to spotlight Norway’s oil-fund, where the money from the oil and gas industry is collected, and which has a market value of more than 18000 billion NOK (thats more than 1,7 trillion USD). The people are the owners of the fund, and we will not have our pensions invested in the weapons of mass destruction that are wielded against our future.
The Norwegian oil and gas industry has so much power in our society that they control the entire narrative in the debate around climate- and oil policies and sponsor everything. They are able to sell the story of Norwegian oil and gas as “green and democratic” to such an extent that the majority of people believe it, and being in opposition to this story can feel incredibly alienating. We are here to turn the narrative and speak the truth!
In the UK, we’ve won! Five years ago, this was unimaginable, in July this year it became reality: The new government declared that they will stop licensing all new oil and gas projects. We know it’s not the time to stop. We need an end to ALL fossil fuels by 2030 – and that’s why we are calling with #oilkills for the UK government to sign a Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty.
At the moment, 25 Just Stop Oil supporters are imprisoned for taking nonviolent action in the face of climate collapse. The irony? UK prisons face an overcrowding crisis. People taking nonviolent direct action in defense of life are increasingly being smeared and treated as organized criminals. While perpetrators of violence are being released early from prisons, nonviolent supporters of our campaign remain in cells: Phoebe and Anna have been sentenced to 2 years and 20 months respectively for throwing soup over the glass frame of Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’.
That is why we are coming together with sister campaigns Assemble, Youth Demand, and Robin Hood for the Umbrella March on Saturday 2nd November. We will march on Parliament to tell Labour they can #BinTheBudget. Then we’ll decide what should be done with a properly democratic Assembly, and throw a party to seal the deal.
You might have heard the news from our Austrian campaign – we stopped our protests. Before that, we put up pools in front of the Austrian parliament in July – because the water is up to our necks – and it was incredible hot in Vienna, with several days up to 35°C, so a pool is all what you can wish for if the Austrian government is not taking action to tackle the climate catastrophe.
After us joining the #oilkills campaign and also protesting for two days at Vienna airport, we announced the end of Letzte Generation Austria in August. However, the resistance will continue. We will be back, in one form or another. We’ll keep you posted!
In Poland we started the August action phase with a bang. On the 28th, around 2pm, Ola and Andrzej used fire extinguishers to spray the glass facade at the main entrance of a very famous shopping center. A nearly record number of new people registered for our online open meeting, intrigued by the entire action. Read what Ola has to say about it:
“I was extremely scared about the action and worried about the legal consequences, but what terrifies me even more, and still does, is the vision of the world in a few decades: A world where wars over resources are constantly being fought, where people have to leave their homes in large numbers just to survive. The whole event was a really tough experience for me—I felt drained and exhausted. But I believe the action was valuable, and that I contributed, even in a small way, to reducing the worst impacts of the climate crisis.”
With the first days of school in September, we started the next protest phase and asked: “What will we tell our children?”. We also published a letter from supporting parents of Ostatnie Pokolenie to other parents. Among the new supporters of our campaign was the well-known journalist Ewa Siedlecka, who joined us in the streets in an orange vest. “I am here because you are a generation that has been deceived by politicians. Your demands are the absolute minimum needed for this planet to survive.”
In Germany, we’re in the midst of an action phase in Kassel. Here, the state subsidizes every flight ticket from the local Kassel-Calden airport with 130€ – money we need elsewhere: in childcare, our health system or renewable energy sources. We demand a social just transformation with no more state money for a bankrupt airport. On Saturday, several hundred people joined us on the street with 80 arrested and overstretched police.
We’ve also been involved in the international #oilkills campaign. Many of our supporters have taken action by going onto runways of airports, bringing air traffic to a halt for several hours. We shed light on the destruction of the airport industry by continuing our protests for several weeks. Our supporters are facing criminal charges as well as civil lawsuits worth millions, however, we believe taking action and joining the resistance is the only right thing to do at this exact moment.