In the summer of 2023, climate scientists looked at what was happening in the world and published an article that starts by saying “We are now in an uncharted territory.” In the summer of 2023, Climáximo stepped into that uncharted territory with a declaration of state of climate emergency within the collective. Then some serious transformation happened.
We want tell you the story so far. The actual transformation is a complex choreography of structural formatting of the collective, alliance building, international work, trainings, changes in the organizational culture, and actions. Since you haven’t seen the hundreds of meetings and we don’t have visible references to them, we will tell the story from the perspective of the actions – which will be a simpler (and simplifying) exercise. It will still include 46 actions and 80-120 detentions in nine months, so hold your breath.
The Trailer
In September, two actions (one directed at the fossil fuel industry and the other at the aviation industry) brought up the climate crisis into the forefront and asked the question: Every year, thousands are dying and millions are being displaced; who is killing and evicting these people?
The Opening Act: The Statement
Then, in the beginning of October, we sat down in Segunda Circular, the main peripheral boulevard around Lisbon, and announced: The governments and corporations declared war against the people and the planet.
This is the main statement we are introducing. The climate crisis is not a mere ecological emergency, it is a deliberate and coordinated act of violence by people who have known for decaded what they are doing and who are profiting from it. The governments and the corporations are killing us, their weapons of mass destruction are the floods, wildfires, droughts and storms. These weapons are being launched on a daily basis at fossil fuel power plants, airports, cement factories, and they are being decided upon, financed and executed in conference halls.
This statement means we are all alone in this and we are billions of people, and we are at a state of war. This war cannot be stopped by those who profit from it, so we need a popular resistance movement for disarmament and peace.
If it’s only us who can stop this state of war, then ordinary people like us must take the matter at their hands. For that, we need ordinary people like us have to drop everything else and start an honest conversation: Knowing what we know about the state of war in which we are, what will we do?
Consecutive road blockades in early October insisted in opening up a public debate, with tens of detentions. (in Rua do São Bento, in Avenida de Roma, in Avenida 5 de Outubro, in Praça José Fontana, in Avenida 24 de Julho, in front of the National Museum of Natural History and Science).
This public debate is not a neutral one, because we already know who benefits from of the genocidal-ecocidal system. The complementing story is to highlight and denounce the climate criminals.
We painted the headquarters of the gas and grid company REN, then we broke the glass in the façade.
The main electricity company EDP’s most famous image clean-up operation is the Lisbon half-marathon. In the October 2023 edition of the half-marathon, folks were arrested preemptively in a park, spending around six hours in the police station. Later, on March 2024, an action did take place but police arrested other folks who were just taking photos in broad daylight.
We then put cement on a golf course in Lisbon, which uses up the most needed water in the hottest year on record.
An activist glued herself into the airplane of a TAP flight between Lisbon and Porto, a bullshit flight par excellence.
Then on 21 October, the Vida Justa (Fair Life) movement called for a demonstration demanding social justice. Besides participating in the march, we contributed to the discussion by breaking the glass of a Gucci shop in Avenida de Liberdade.
However, these acts of highlighting the destruction (and what the climate weapons are that need to be disarmed) are socially irrelevant if we accept the normality – the false sense of social peace that is in direct contradiction with the factual state of war we live in. Art and culture play a crucial role in social reproduction, so we painted over a Picasso painting in CCB and interrupted a play in Teatro São Luís.
Thus ended the first wave of actions.
Interactions: Responding to Recent Developments
As we were building up the statement, several important events unfolded.
To begin with, the state of Israel launched a genocide in Palestine. We teamed up with other collectives to show the structural connections between the genocide and the Portuguese political and economic actors. This involved actions directed at Steconfer who has development projects in Israel, Navigator who exports paper to Israel, the Lisbon city hall who declared unconditional support for the colonialist project, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who maintains a diplomatic relationship with the genocidal regime.
Simultaneously, a corruption scandal involving top-level politicans made the government fall. However, the scandal was related to projects that involved the main fossil fuel corporations EDP and Galp, where there were no police raids. So we called for popular raids to confiscate evidence for their climate crimes.
Finally, a xenophobic march against “islamization” was met with an antifascist demonstration, and we were in the frontline of the counter-protest.
The Second Act: Building Up the Argument
The main statement made, the second wave of actions (in December 2023) went after the corporations who unilaterally declared war against the people and the planet, and who profit from it.
We interrupted the Eurogas conference and the Renewable Energy Summit, we denounced EDP’s image-washing museum MAAT, we disarmed a private jet in Tires aerodrome and SUVs in a rich neighborhood of Lisbon.
As again, these actions against climate criminals gain more popular support and simultaneously allow for emotional distancing, many people clicking on a like button without taking personal responsibility in stopping them. This meant we had to insist in the need for popular resistance.
We distributed flyers in Lisbon metro about the need for public transport (and got identified by the police for this). We organized a public demonstration with a Climate Resistance Assembly at the most central roundabout in the city.
Then, we blocked Avenida Duarte Pacheco, one of the main avenues entering the city center. This brought back the debate on who is supposed to solve the climate emergency: if the governments and the corporations are for decades fully aware of what they are doing and if last year the greenhouse emissions increased at a record rate, who is going to stop them? Does it make sense to request a dictator to bring in democracy? Would it make sense to politely ask Hitler to close the concentration camps?
The Third Act: Voting with our Feet
The beginning of 2024 arrived with general elections in Portugal. We were already aware that only a popular movement anchored at the climate emergency could stop the climate war that is destroying everything we love; but we were honestly not expecting to face such a dire electoral context: a total of zero political parties offered election programmes to put an end to the state of war we live in, and all political parties had policy proposals that would make things worse than now.
The intervention of the third wave of actions was therefore: vote every day, vote on the election day, vote on the day before, vote on the day after, vote with your body, vote with your feet.
The opening action, covering the political party billboards with the statement “With your vote, we guarantee climate collapse.” was so rudely interrupted by the police that we had to go back the next day to finish up the work. We also interrupted the television debate with the political leaders, announcing that a liveable planet was not in the ballot box.
Following through with elections and votes, we painted and damaged the check-in gates at Lisbon airport in a protest that highlighted the “absurdity of the discussion on where the next airport will be”, very present in the parties’ electoral programs. And on the Feminist Strike of 8th of March, two female Climáximo supporters shattered the glass of Santander Totta’s bank to denounce their investment in fossil fuels “which are killing us, women, outrageously faster than men”, on an allusion to the Sufragettes who fought for women’s rights. Finally, the day before the elections, on the so called “reflection day”, we blocked the Rua da Escola Politécnica in Lisbon to highlight the importance of reflection in a state of climate emergency because there’s no abstention in the climate crisis.
When we said “vote every day, vote on the election day, vote on the day before, vote on the day after, vote with your body, vote with your feet”, we weren’t joking. As the right-wing coalition got the most votes, coupled with an increase in extreme-right votes, the entire progressive community was paralyzed, we had our actions all planned out.
On the electoral night of we interrupted and painted in red the party rally of the right-wing Aliança Democrática (AD – Democratic Alliance, right-wing alliance consisting of the Social Democratic Party, the People’s Party and the People’s Monarchist Party), to say that there is nothing to celebrate in a replacement of the generals who execute the war against the people and the planet.
Just a few days after, we were in the Oeiras golf course, transforming it into an urban garden by planting tree at the holes; and then during the fossil fuel company EDP’s half-marathon, we painted EDP’s headquarters as well as the bridge through its whitewashing museum MAAT.
This choreography of nine actions before, during and after the elections insisted on the need for a popular resistance to stop the state of climate war, and it also pointed towards the next act.
The Fourth Act: The People got the Power!
As the approaching 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution of 25 April, it was ever more relevant to have a public debate on what people’s power means and why we need it. If the governments and corporations declared war against the people and the planet, then it makes no sense to ask them to solve this issue. After all, it wouldn’t be reasonable to ask the Estado Novo fascist regime to democratize the country.
As a warm-up to this narrative of direct action as direct democracy, we put up subvertising posters against the aviation industry because we need public spaces cleaned up from fossil fuel advertisements.
Incidentally, eleven activists were called to court on 22, 23 and 24 of April because of one of the actions in previous acts. Yes, the three days before the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Day were dedicated to putting on trial ordinary people for popular resistance against the climate crisis. So we called for April Assemblies, a three-day vigil full of debates, music and trainings, right in front of the courthouse.
Then some curious stuff happened. We went to Lisbon metro to distribute flyers once more: we were stopped by the police and got identified, then we went back a couple of days later and somehow nobody interfered.
Around the same time, we organized a slow march in Graça, and the police arrested the organisers. The day after, we organised another slow march, in Calçada de Combro, and all demonstrators got arrested. A couple of days after, we organized another one, in Avenida Gago Coutinho, and no one got arrested.
The closing scene was in the fossil fuel company Galp, who had just announced record profits as well as a new oil drilling project in Namibia, so we painted and broke the glass of the façade of Galp’s new headquarters.
Plot Summary
This is but one way of telling the story:
9 months.
46 actions, 24 of which disrupted the false sense of public peace and the rest were directed specifically at the governments and corporations who unilaterally declared war on the people and the planet.
Some 80 to 120 arrests.
Around 25 court cases already going on.
Another way could narrate our international work, from the World Congress for Climate Justice via the Earth Social Conference to the 6th International Ecosocialist Encounters. Or we could tell our alliance building work at the national level, from one-on-one meetings with dozens of organisations via the 9th National Gathering for Climate Justice to the Energy Democracy Days.
We shared a tasted of the action part of the larger choreography, acknowledging that movement building involves a combination of strategic and political tasks.
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We live in uncharted territory. It’s also an uncharted territory in political, strategic, tactical, organizational, personal and emotional terms.
The governments and corporations declared war against the people and the planet. We know this. Deep down and across the globe, a lot of us know this and feel it in our skins. Knowing what we know, what will we do?
The popular resistance we are building is simultaneously an offer and an invitation. Join us and we will put a stop to this madness called climate crisis.