Environmental activist Greta Thunberg was arrested on Tuesday, October 17, in London during a demonstration organized on the first day of an event bringing together senior executives from the oil and gas industry, according to a photographer from Agence France-Presse on the spot.
Tuesday morning, a few hundred demonstrators blocked all entrances to the hotel where the Energy Intelligence Forum conference is being organized. The Swedish activist was arrested in the middle of the day by two police officers and placed in a police van. The police had already announced on the social network X (formerly Twitter) the arrest of five demonstrators “suspected of having obstructed” the public highway.
Earlier in the morning, during a press conference, Greta Thunberg deplored that “behind these closed doors (…) politicians without stature conclude agreements and compromises with lobbyists from the destructive fossil fuel sector”. TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné and Shell Managing Director Wael Sawan are due to speak at the three-day Energy Intelligence Forum on Tuesday.
“Lack of ambition”
The demonstrators also denounce the fact that the president of COP28, the annual United Nations climate conference scheduled for November 30 to December 12 in Dubai, is none other than the boss of the United Arab Emirates oil company, Sultan Al-Jaber .
“We know that fossil fuel lobbyists have been corrupting COP procedures for decades,” argued Greta Thunberg before her arrest, for whom the choice of this president “shows very, very clearly” the lack of ambition of summits : according to her, the latter cannot “lead to a drastic reduction in CO2 emissions”.
Greta Thunberg was fined on October 11 by the Malmö court for disobedience to public order, following a civil disobedience action carried out at the end of July in this city in southern Sweden.
