As Europe criminalizes environmental protest, some activists turn to sabotage

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It was raining and the sparkling lights of the City of London shone back from the cold, wet pavement as two young men made their way through streets deserted save for a few police and private security. In the sleeping heart of the global financial system, they felt eyes on them from the city’s network of surveillance cameras, but hoped their disguise of high-vis vests and hoods hiding their faces would conceal them.

Reaching Lime Street, they stopped by a maintenance hole and looked around to make sure no one was watching. One took off the cover, located a bundle of black cables and started hacking away. Hours later, an email was circulated to news desks: “Internet cut off to hundreds of insurers in climate-motivated sabotage.”

Five years ago, climate activists from Extinction Rebellion (XR) and the school strikes movement believed getting huge numbers of people on the streets could persuade the powerful to change course on the climate crisis. Then protesters from groups such as Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil (JSO) put their bodies and freedom on the line to disrupt business as usual, in an effort to concentrate minds.

Now, with climate breakdown worsening and fossil fuel emissions showing no signs of peaking, let alone abating, some of them say it is time to escalate the campaign of disruption, by carrying out clandestine acts of sabotage against the corporations they see as responsible for the destruction of the climate.

In a manifesto published on the WordPress blogging platform, Shut the System (STS), the group that claimed credit for London action that took place in January, says it is “kickstart[ing] a new phase of the climate activist movement, aiming to shut down key actors in the fossil fuel economy.”

“We vow to wage a campaign of sabotage targeting the tools, property and machinery of those most responsible for global warming, escalating until they accept our demands for an end to all support for fossil fuel expansion.”

The Guardian spoke over the Signal encrypted messaging service to an activist from STS. He did not reveal his identity and the Guardian was unable to verify his claims.

He said new laws further criminalizing disruptive protests had made traditional, accountable methods of activism increasingly unsustainable, and a clandestine approach increasingly attractive. He pointed to the case of activists from JSO who received sentences of four and five years—reduced last week after an appeal—for organizing road blocks on the M25.

“If you want to do anything that is disruptive, the penalty is pretty massive now, and so these draconian laws mean it is hard to get very much pressure…by following the kind of things that [Extinction Rebellion] and JSO have done in the past, because people will be arrested and put away for a long time,” he said.

“You can’t just keep doing that,” he said. “The actual number of people who are committed to risk jail time to do this are pretty small in number.”

STS is not the first group to take clandestine direct action against fossil fuel targets. In 2022, unknown activists targeted a pipeline being built to funnel jet fuel from Southampton to west London, cutting holes in the pipe and severing hydraulic cables on a construction vehicle.

This month, another group claimed responsibility for drilling holes in the tires of more than 100 SUVs parked at Land Rover dealerships in Cornwall—a repeat of an action carried out last year. And the Tyre Extinguishers, a campaign group that urges people to take autonomous clandestine action against SUVs in cities by deflating their tires, have targeted hundreds of vehicles through activists heeding their call.

In the City of London, the action of STS, though carefully planned, had minimal impact. “We did our research, as best as we could and we planned about what sort of cables to be looking for, how they might be laid out, and we taught ourselves about opening up these manholes,” the activist said. “We did everything we could to maximize safety for everyone, and then in my small group we found targets and divvied them up.”

A cybersecurity expert said there had been “significant slowdown of internet speed” in the area, but the network continued to function.

“We had varying success throughout the UK,” the activist admitted. STS also claimed actions in Birmingham, Sheffield and Leeds. “I am aware of people in other areas that did this…where they then called up the next day and the phone lines were down. There is obviously a learning curve to these things.”

But actions such as this pale in comparison with the scale of those taken by climate activists abroad. In Germany, activists last year staged attacks against gas pipelines, while others escalated a campaign against concrete with two arson attacks on a Cemex plant in Berlin.

But it is in France where the tactic has been most widely used, with actions ranging from activists filling the holes in golf courses with cement to a full-scale riot when a crowd descended on the construction site of an agricultural reservoir in the country’s drought-stricken south, intent on dismantling it.

Andreas Malm, an associate professor of human ecology at Lund University, said, “France really is the one case in recent years…where you’ve had a radical mass movement that has actually been quite successful—and this is the only movement that has also deployed sabotage consistently as a tactic.”

Four years ago Malm, a Swedish social ecologist, penned How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a polemic on the future of effective climate action and an exploration of the tactic of sabotage. It has become a set text in the movement, and even spawned a movie adaptation.

Malm says that, with issues such as Israel’s wanton destruction of Gaza taking up activist energy, and the energy crisis precipitated by Russia’s war in Ukraine potentially discrediting those targeting fossil fuels as “stooges of Putin,” militant action for the climate has been on a downswing.

Nevertheless, he still sees it as the only sustainable route for climate activists increasingly facing a severe pushback against non-violent disruptive protest.

“One mistake made by the offshoots of XR [such as Just Stop Oil]—they started escalating a little bit and doing slightly more radical stuff…while still sticking to the protocol to wait until the cops come and arrest them,” he said. “If you want to actually escalate and do real material damage to fossil fuel property you cannot stick to this idea. You have to do this without offering yourself as a kind of virtue sacrifice.”

The STS activist who spoke to the Guardian did not see the group’s actions as more extreme than the kinds of things already carried out by other groups. “The only difference is that they stayed around to be arrested,” he said.