As the Climate Heats Up, the State Is Cracking Down
Climate activists are becoming today’s political prisoners
Despite the increasingly dire warnings from the world’s foremost scientists, more and more governments are turning towards authoritarian tactics to suppress environmental protest and avoid the necessary changes they have a responsibility to take on.
In the United Kingdom, unprecedented laws have and are being passed, criminalising many forms of protest and increasing sentences for, as an activist-friend recently stated, the ‘crime of caring’. These protesters, who sometimes remain incarcerated for six months before trial, now face up to ten years in prison—a sentence both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party agree on. The protesters are not violent, and they have rarely caused permanent damage. Rather they are ‘disrupters’, engaged in non-violent direct action. The crimes they are committing under new legislation is, for example, glueing themselves to pavement, cuffing themselves to infrastructure, delaying ‘the delivery of a time-sensitive product to consumers of that product’. Their targets are the engines—the highways, the power plants, the refineries, the mines, the cities—of today’s economic system lying at the heart of the crisis.
In reality, their biggest crime is their relentlessness. As the crisis worsens, the protests continue, leaving the UK government no way to stop the protests beyond more draconian sentencing or actual climate action. They've chosen the former. And in this sense, these protesters are quickly becoming political prisoners who should be considered no different than their Russian counterparts refusing to participate in other crimes against humanity.
Likewise, in Egypt, this year’s host of COP27, any protesters demonstrating outside a defined protest zone are also at risk of imprisonment (and indeed, this has already begun). However, given the 60,000 protesters already in jail for crimes of conscience, it would be a rather brave person who decided to enter that area. Nonetheless, Egyptians, too, face catastrophic climate scenarios: 90% of their water is dependent on the Nile River, which is under threat by the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. The northern coast, including the city of Alexandria and its 5.2 million inhabitants, is expected to be consumed by the Mediterranean this century. Despite this, Sisi is using COP27 to promote the country’s position as a natural gas exporter that can help strike a balance between climate action and European energy security in the hopes of gaining permanent investment in its gas projects.
That both the United Kingdom and Egypt are the two most recent COP hosts despite their crackdowns on democratic rights and freedoms should not be lost on anyone. COP itself, while incredibly important, also seems to act as a green-washing event. The world’s leaders seem willing to meet, make vague commitments year after year, appear as active on climate, only to go home, do little and now jail people who have the tenacity to demand their elected officials meet the recommendations of scientists (and this after COVID!!).
Of course activists are now resorting to more direct action. How could they not? Hundreds of thousands of people on the streets in 2001, 2005, 2009, 2014, 2017, 2018 and 2019 have yielded little in terms of results. Emissions continue to rise despite the empty promises of their governments. Oil and gas profits are at all-time highs. Biodiversity is at an all-time low. And now expansion due to war. The list goes on. This is clearly not a crisis that our governments are responding to.
The fact that climate activists are now facing jail time does not come as a surprise, however. For years now, activists have understood that the arrests would come, that prison was likely necessary, perhaps even long sentences, even the possibility of death (including self-immolation). The activists have faith that they will prevail if for no reason other than the science is so clearly on their side. But history has shown that governments tend to double down and deny the need to respond until a population will no longer allow it. It was the case with the suffragettes, it was the case in apartheid South Africa, and it was the case under communism in the Eastern Bloc countries.
Governments are good at reform but not so at revolution. It is not their domain. But the climate and environmental crises are forcing upon our economic system a revolutionary need. Reform, as we’ve now seen through twenty-seven COPs, will not suffice. This implies a governmental crisis because our governments currently represent a system that no longer functions in the interests of the populace. The warmer the climate gets, the more this becomes apparent.
Like political prisoners of conscience before, today’s climate dissidents know that their day of redemption will come. They know they are on the right side of history. But victory will be bittersweet. Because, like all resistance movements, it is not just dissidents who suffer, but all of us. We are all destined to a much degraded environmental future of constant crisis, and the longer our governments resist the needed changes, the more we will all suffer the consequences.
How long that resistance will take is up to us. It will not be governments that change, but we who must demand they change. The question then is, at what point will we join these activists? How many of our friends and colleagues, sons and daughters, are we willing to have sent to jail or succumb to climate-related events before we’ve had enough?
Sadly, I believe there will need to be many more political prisoners before we demand change, many more people who will die because of catastrophic climate events. But like any revolutionary time, change is coming, whether we or the powers that be, like it or not.
In their own words, below is a letter from a leading Czech climate activist to their prison guards in the UK:
To the Governor of HMP Birmingham
Dear Madam/Sir,
I am writing to you as one of the prisoners under your care and as one whose request to speak to you in a short conversation was—not surprisingly—denied by staff and the CM on wing P.
Since last Thursday, September 15, 2022, there have been 51 ordinary citizens remanded to prison following their peaceful protest at Kingsbury Oil Depot breaking a High Court injunction dated/issued earlier this year. Nine of these 51 prisoners were put under your care in HMP Birmingham, We stand accused of the crime of caring, we are prisoners of conscience / political prisoners because we cannot help but see the larger picture and connections between an oil company legally going about its business and the consequences this has for millions across the globe. Our adversary is not the law per se that we—in this case—willingly and knowingly disrupt but the government and corporations that abuse the law to subdue the voice of our protest, voices of ordinary citizens for the voiceless in the Global South, against a multibillion pound profit-making machine causing indirectly but knowingly the suffering, destruction of livelihoods and deaths (even now already) of millions elsewhere on our planet (in Pakistan one-third of the country is under water with 1,200 deaths; there are famines in Somalia and Madagascar; heat waves and wild fires across the globe—all in 2022). This all is a worsening trend, not an outlier in the data, so we will see and pain through more of this in the years to come. Sir David King, the chief scientific advisor to the governments of Blair and Brown has said just yesterday that the current government’s plans are “completely at odds with net-zero, and it beggars belief. What it seems to show is that the leadership in the government does not understand the nature of the climate crisis.”
Dear Madam/Sir, I am communicating all this to you not because I believe that you have the power to turn the situation around (although you do have the choice at least to bring this to the attention of your superiors at the Home Office, or your family and friends) BUT because I want you to be aware that we were here, following our consciences, under your care at HMP Birmingham.
With love and concern,
(name withheld for privacy)