Greta Thunberg has been arrested again.
This time it happened in London, on Tuesday morning. Hundreds of demonstrators had gathered at the entrance of the InterContinental Hotel on Park Lane, where the Energy Intelligence Forum (EIF) was under way: a three-day summit that brought together the heads of the world’s oil giants, such as TotalEnergies and Shell.
In the footage released immediately after the event, which soon went viral (it appeared online on all the main British newspapers), the Swedish climate activist is loaded into the back of a van by the police. Thunberg is wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Oily money out’ (‘oily’ has a negative connotation, meaning greasy, slimy, dirty).
Thunberg did, however, have a chance to speak to journalists before being taken away. ‘Behind these closed doors at the oil and money conference,’ she said, ‘spineless politicians are making deals and compromises with lobbyists from destructive industries, the fossil fuel industry.’
And again: ‘The elites at the oil and money conference have no intention of making the transition. Their plan is to continue this destructive pursuit of profit. That is why we must take direct action to stop all this and remove oil money from politics. We have no choice but to put our bodies on the line to physically disrupt this conference.’
