As Heat Waves Spread, So Too Do Unruly Climate Protests

Under cover of darkness, several climate protesters made their way onto a golf green in southern Spain earlier this month and filmed themselves pouring cement into a hole.

They targeted 10 golf courses in all, notoriously large consumers of water in the arid climate. Some protesters planted flowers and vegetables. Others unfurled signs reading “Golf closed for climate justice” or “Water is a common good.”

After years of petitions and rallies, rising numbers of climate activists are turning to direct action, sometimes flouting laws or sparking safety concerns as they put across their message that governments need to do more to cut emissions as temperatures creep up toward record highs this summer. Many risk jail.

In England, they have disrupted sports events such as Wimbledon and the snooker world championships by leaping onto courts or tables to fling orange confetti or powder, disrupting play. Two women threw cans of Heinz tomato soup across Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” at the National Gallery in London. (It was protected by a layer of glass.) At the Open championship on Friday, American golfer Billy Horschel helped remove a protester at the 17^th hole of the Royal Liverpool course.

Greta Thunberg was detained protesting a coal mine in Germany earlier this year, while climate activists in the U.S. have turned off the valves on gas pipelines from Canada and climbed the smoke stacks of coal-fired power plants in New England to shut them down. 

This week, an heir to the Disney fortune, Abigail Disney, was arrested in the Hamptons with several other activists for blockading an airfield used by private jets. “The last thing this planet needs is billionaires spewing greenhouse gases to get to their palatial beach homes,” she tweeted.  

Among the more unusual groups is the Tyre Extinguishers, who have made it their mission to sneak up on fuel-hungry SUVs around Europe and let the air out of their tires to discourage people from buying them. More than 10,000 vehicles have been disabled in this way, at least temporarily.

These vigilante tactics have triggered a debate among environmentalists over whether such protests might be doing more harm than good by antagonizing the people they need to bring on board—something academics call the activist’s dilemma.

Swedish university professor Andreas Malm, whose book “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” was recently adapted into a movie, first began deflating SUV tires with other activists in 2007. He thinks the trend is clearly toward bolder, brasher stunts in a bid to shock people out of their complacency, and that in many instances acts of sabotage are justified.

“Among younger climate activists there is a feeling that what we’ve done so far isn’t enough,” he said by telephone from Stockholm.

There is a fine line to tread, however. Blocking roads and other indiscriminate action irritates people who simply need to get to work or home, Malm said.

When activists blocked the M25 motorway that circles London two years ago, causing huge traffic delays, a poll conducted by the U.K.’s YouGov found 59% of respondents opposed the protest. Larger campaign groups such as Extinction Rebellion have mostly turned their focus away from direct action toward mobilizing large demonstrations as groups such as Just Stop Oil and the Tyre Extinguishers come to the fore with their commando-style tactics.

Heather Alberro, a lecturer at Nottingham Trent University in England, argues that history shows that sometimes radical movements can help advance more-moderate protest campaigns. Militant suffragettes, by destroying property, made the suffragists’ campaign to grant women the vote seem less alarming in comparison.

Now any event could be a target, from concerts to movie premieres to a day out golfing.

“Pain in the arse is what it is, but they have to make their point somehow,” said Dave Griswald as he helped his friend reinflate the tires on a midnight-blue Audi SUV along the seafront in Broughty Ferry, Scotland, recently, hoping to make a tee time at a nearby golf course.

“It’s the third time they’ve hit me,” the friend said.

Locals in the area, an affluent suburb of Dundee, worry about the safety issues involved. Craig Duncan, a lawmaker on the town council, said he recognizes the activists’ right to protest but raised the question of what might happen if someone doesn’t realize that their tires have been deflated until they’re already on a busy road.

Elsewhere, there is less patience.

Tabloid newspapers in London have taken to describing Just Stop Oil protesters as “eco-yobs,” or hooligans, for blocking roads as part of their campaign to wean people off private transport and encourage them to switch to mass transit. A cricketer who physically removed a protester from the field during an England-Australia match was lauded in much of the media as a hero.

French polling company Odoxa, meanwhile, found in a survey published in Le Figaro this week that 73% of respondents wanted the authorities to track and arrest activists planning to sabotage sensitive sites.

Protesters, for their part, increasingly risk jail time to make their point.

In April, an English court sentenced Morgan Trowland, a civil engineer, to three years in prison and activist Marcus Decker to two years and seven months for climbing 200 feet up the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge spanning the River Thames to unfurl a “Just Stop Oil” banner.

Before sentencing, Trowland said he and Decker were taking a stand against any new oil or gas wells being drilled. “I will not be complicit in that,” he said.

The two people who flung tomato soup over the Van Gogh painting are set to go on trial for criminal damage in July next year and have pleaded not guilty.

New laws restricting protests in England, described by Home Secretary Suella Braverman as a necessary measure to counter what she called the “tofu-eating wokerati,” suggest more protesters could end up in prison.

In Germany, meanwhile, climate activists calling themselves Last Generation last week blocked flights at Hamburg and Düsseldorf airports for several hours by gluing themselves to the runways as part of their demands for the government to do more to cut emissions, including ending tax exemptions for kerosene, the fuel used by airlines.

Officials were outraged. The transport minister said the protesters were engaged in criminal action while the justice minister, Marco Buschmann, said they were polarizing society by preventing people from flying off on well-earned vacations.

Which, the organizers said, was precisely the point.

Write to James Hookway at [email protected]