Two supporters of the climate justice collective invaded and interrupted the first day of the European Refining Technology Conference (ERTC) at the Estoril Congress Centre, with GALP, Total and Shell. Outside, other supporters painted the building’s façade red. “They are gathered here to discuss new deadly attacks on society and the planet. This conference is not only illegitimate, it is criminal”. Two people were arrested.
This morning, supporters of Climáximo interrupted the European Refining Technology Conference (ERTC), taking place at the Estoril Congress Centre, stopping the morning session with GALP and stating that “this criminal meeting where plans are being made to annihilate humanity is unacceptable”, before scattering red powder across the stage. Outside, the façade of the building was painted red, covering the logos of companies such as GALP and Shell, marking them as entities with blood on their hands.
Mariana Rodrigues, a supporter of Climáximo, states that “this conference brings together all the major oil companies that are responsible for 1 in 5 premature deaths worldwide and are actively pumping carbon into the atmosphere, causing death and devastation in the form of floods, droughts, fires, typhoons, heat waves and crop failures. This is a criminal event where murderous entities close deals to keep their profits at record levels by expanding the burning of fossil fuels, at the cost of destroying our lives. How dare they? We cannot accept that they continue to kill us”.
The conference takes place at the same time as these same companies are attending the 29th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) in Azerbaijan. “It is the fossil fuel system in all its destructive fury: empty talk about solutions to the climate crisis taking place in a petrostate, with governments from around the world sitting at the table with thousands of lobbyists from the very companies responsible for igniting the climate inferno, while those same companies meet here to design the collapse of civilisation”.
The climate justice collective emphasises that in a “sustainable and resilient future”, the sarcastic motto of the conference, there is no place for these companies. Mariana, 29, adds that “this will only be possible if we stop the attacks on life that companies like BP and GALP are carrying out today and make a large-scale transition, compatible with planetary limits, that puts people’s well-being at the centre, not profit. And clearly it will not be these companies, nor the governments that give them carte blanche to kill, that will do so. It has to be ordinary people who stop them and change the course of history”.
Climáximo calls on “the whole of society” to “stop accepting the mass destruction of everything that matters” and to join the mass civil resistance demonstration and action Stop While We Can, on November 23rd, which will start at 3 pm in Praça Paiva Couceiro and block Praça do Chile to “break the normalisation of the violence of the climate crisis and build the resistance capable of dismantling the fossil fuel industry that is destroying our lives, before it is too late”.