Ben Pawlowski
FIVE activists linked to the notorious environmental protest group Just Stop Oil were intercepted at Barcelona El-Prat Airport on Wednesday morning after attempting to glue themselves to the runway.
One member of the group was arrested after local police successfully detained the protesters after they entered the airfield of Spain’s second busiest airport, which serves over 50 million passengers a year.
The remaining activists were fined for their involvement.
The protest formed part of a coordinated set of eco-demonstrations across Europe by Oil Kills, which has links to climate group Just Stop Oil who gained notoriety in the UK for their disruptive tactics including blocking roads and disrupting sporting events.
Cologne-Bonn Airport in Germany was forced to halt flights after climate activists glued themselves to the runway, urging the German government to pursue a global agreement to end the use of fossil fuels by 2030.
Elsewhere, nine Just Stop Oil activists were arrested in London for ‘conspiring to disrupt Heathrow Airport’, according to the Metropolitan Police, whilst protestors also targeted airports in Oslo, Helsinki and Zurich.
According to Just Stop Oil, the activists who targeted El-Prat Airport belonged to the climate group Futuro Vegetal (Plant Future).
They say they are a ‘civil disobedience and direct action group that fights against the Climate Crisis by adopting a plant-based food system’.
A video posted on Twitter/X by Futuro Vegetal shows footage of a protestor being led away by a member of the Guardia Civil, followed by a clip of a red-haired woman holding a sign saying El petróleo mata (Oil Kills).
In the video, the protesters say: “The Guardia Civil have just arrested one of our colleagues for alleged criminal damage at Barcelona Airport. We are resisting repression for the second time, both the Guardia Civil and the Mossos d’Esquadra have come to try and disrupt our protest. However we continue here at Barcelona Airport showing that mean pollutes four times as much as commercial aviation. Oil kills and so does meat”.
A spokesperson for Just Stop Oil exclusively told the Olive Press that the coordinated targeting of European airports was simply ‘ordinary people taking matters into their own hands to do what our criminal governments have failed to do’.
They said: “We are putting our bodies on the wheels of the machine of the global fossil economy and saying oil kills; we refuse to die for fossil fuels and we refuse to stand by while hundreds of millions of innocent people are murdered. We are in resistance against our murderous governments and the criminal elites who are threatening the survival of humanity.
“The climate crisis will not end until every single country has phased out fossil fuels, but those who bear the greatest responsibility and have the greatest capacity must do the most.
“As citizens of wealthy countries based in the global north, we demand that our governments stop extracting and burning oil, gas and coal by 2030 and that they support and finance other countries to make a fast, fair and just transition. They must sign a Fossil Fuel Treaty and end the war on humanity before we lose everything”.
The protests come just days after the record for the hottest world temperature was broken twice in a row.
The world average surface temperature reached 17.15C on Monday, beating Sunday’s figure of 17.09C.
Before July last year, the world’s record temperature was 16.8C, set on August 13, 2016, but since then at least 57 days have exceeded that measurement.
