They have hammered fuel pumps and glued themselves to museum masterpieces and busy streets and highways. They chained themselves to banks. They invaded the track of the Silverstone GP of F-1 this year. They tied themselves to the goal posts, to the boos of tens of thousands of British football fans.
The activists who carried out these disruptive acts over the past 12 months said they were desperate to convey the urgency of the climate crisis and that the most effective way to do so is in public, blocking oil terminals and disrupting normal activities.
The activists also share an unexpected source of financial resources: the heirs of two American families who grew rich from oil.
Two relatively new nonprofits that the oil heirs helped found are funding dozens of protest groups that are dedicated to using civil disobedience to disrupt “business as usual” (business as usual), particularly in the United States. , Canada and Europe.
While volunteers from widely known environmental groups such as Greenpeace International have used disruptive tactics for years to draw attention to ecological threats, the new entities are funding grassroots activists.
The Climate Emergency Fund was founded in 2019 on the premise that civil resistance is imperative to promote the broad and immediate social and political transformations needed to combat the climate crisis.
Margaret Klein Salamon, the fund’s executive director, pointed to past social movements — suffragettes, civil rights activists, gay rights advocates — that achieved their goals after protesters took nonviolent protests to the streets.
“Public action sparks public opinion, influences what the media covers and transforms the field of what is politically possible,” Salamon said. “Normal systems have failed. It’s time for all people to understand that we need to take on this fight.”
So far the fund has distributed a little more than $7 million, she said, with the aim of propelling society into emergency mode of action. Although the United States is on the verge of enacting historic climate legislation, that legislation still allows for the expansion of oil and gas exploration, which scientists say must stop immediately if a planetary catastrophe is to be avoided.
One entity that shares these ideals is the Equation Campaign. Founded in 2020, it provides financial support and legal assistance to people who live near refineries, oil and gas pipelines and who are trying to stop the expansion of fossil fuel exploration, using methods that include civil disobedience.
A notable fact is that both organizations are supported by families who made their fortunes from oil and whose descendants feel a responsibility to reverse the harm caused by fossil fuels. Aileen Getty, whose grandfather created Getty Oil, helped found the Climate Emergency Fund, to which she has donated $1 million so far. The Equation Campaign was created in 2020 with $30 million given by two members of the Rockefeller family, Rebecca Rockefeller Lambert and Peter Gill Case. John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil in 1870 and became America’s first billionaire.
“It’s time to put the genie back in the bottle,” Case wrote in an email. “I feel a moral obligation to do my part. Don’t you?”
Belief in the transformative power of extreme civil disobedience is not universal, and some actions by the groups, especially initiatives supported by the Climate Emergency Fund, have angered the public.
Protesters have been the target of shouts and threats, branded as eco-fanatics and dragged away by angry public transport users. Research from Stanford and Toronto universities has found that while the most disruptive protests attract publicity, they can weaken a movement’s credibility and distance potential supporters.
But Salamon and activists supported by the Climate Emergency Fund said the backlash was inevitable. They pointed to the example of Martin Luther King Jr., who, according to a Gallup poll, had a 63% popular disapproval rating in the years before his death.
“We’re not trying to rally sympathy,” explained Zain Haq, co-founder of Canadian charity Save Old Growth, which erects roadblocks to stop loggers from clearing old-growth forests in British Columbia and which has received $170,000 from the Climate Emergency Fund. “Historically speaking, civil disobedience involves contesting a way of life.”
There is some evidence that more recent climate protest groups are being heard. Researchers have found that the Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise Movement groups have played a very important role in public awareness and climate policy-making. In terms of cost-effectiveness, protest groups often outperform traditional environmental nonprofits known as the “Big Greens” in their effectiveness in helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
For the Equation Campaign, halting the expansion of oil and gas exploration has a quantifiable impact. The cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline extension, after years of resistance by indigenous tribes, local farmers and ranchers, has prevented the release of up to 180 million tonnes of greenhouse gases a year, according to one estimate. The Equation Campaign is funding campaigns against a range of other fossil fuel exploration projects and helping activists who are frequently attacked with what the group’s executive director, Katie Redford, described as unwarranted accusations and unwarranted arrests.
“For the climate to win, for humanity to literally win, we need activists to win and stop the industry from building more things that emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,” said Redford.
Climate activists receive far less funding than large environmental bodies, especially philanthropic organizations, which devote only a fraction of their spending to climate issues around the world. According to the ClimateWorks Foundation, less than 2% of global philanthropic resources in 2020 were used to mitigate climate change (although this percentage is growing). A tiny part of that was devoted to grassroots activity and building the movement.
Both Redford and Salamon said their entities only fund legal activities, such as training, education, travel and recruitment and printing costs. Grant recipients need to confirm that the money was not spent on activities prohibited by law.
They disputed any suggestion that paying activists detracts from the authenticity of their actions, noting that grantees were already working full-time as volunteers, in the process often wiping out their own bank accounts. “This is their passion,” Salamon said.
“It’s not fair to keep asking indigenous, black, brown and poor people who live on the front lines to do this work for free, simply because so far they’ve been doing it in their ‘free time,'” said Redford.
Activists receiving the funds described the money as something that fell from the sky. Some of them had dropped out of their studies to devote themselves full-time to climate activism, driven by a sense of urgency and moral duty. Others worked various jobs to make ends meet.
Miranda Whelehan of Britain’s Just Stop Oil said group members were overworked and stressed until the Climate Emergency Fund gave them nearly $1 million, helping pay salaries to 40 organizers and activists.
“Clearly there’s a limit to what you can do when you volunteer,” Whelehan said. “The big oil companies have millions, if not billions.”
The activists reiterated that they do not want to practice civil disobedience, but that more traditional efforts have yet to avert a widespread climate disaster. “We’ve tried every other alternative,” said Louis McKechnie, a Just Stop Oil member who has been arrested about 20 times.
McKechnie said he was expelled from Bournemouth University because of his climate militancy. In March he undertook his most public action yet, using a plastic-to-metal seal to attach himself to a goal latch during a Premier League football match. He said he felt the “hatred and threats” of everyone present and that he was kicked and nearly punched as he was carried off the field. He was arrested and said he received so many death threats that he deleted his social media accounts.
But he was not shaken. “If just 1% of the crowd present was trying to find out who we are and what we’re doing, that would have been a huge victory,” he said.
Translation by Clara Allain
