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Stop While We Can – 55th Action in 13 months to Stop the war against people and planet

300 people disrupted normality of Lisbon, to “break the false sense of peace and call on all people to resist”. This is 55th protest done by supporters of Climáximo, a climate justice and anti-capitalist grassroot in Portugal.

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This afternoon, around 300 people joined the demonstration and civil resistance action ‘Parar Enquanto Podemos’ (Stop While We Can), called by Climáximo to ‘break with normality and enter into climate resistance’. The protest action began at 3pm on one of Lisbon’s main and busiest avenues, Rua Moraes Soares, making stops at shops and cafés, where people were invited to join the march and the resistance. The action culminated in one of Lisbon’s central squares, Praça do Chile, where groups of people, with their bodies and metal tubes, blocked and occupied the square, with a massive banner reading ‘Dismantle the Fossil Industry’ and ‘Governments and Companies Have Declared War on Humanity and the Planet’.

Maria Paixão, a professor and researcher in the field of climate law, says: ‘We cannot allow the violence of the climate crisis to continue to be trivialised. More than 200 people died in Valencia in a cataclysmic scenario; 350,000 were left homeless by the floods in South Sudan; and 50,000 died this summer alone due to the extreme heat in Europe. How many more lives will it take for us to act collectively? This is a question of survival that concerns my life, yours, everyone’s life. We are here to break this false normality and call on the whole of society to stand up to the attacks on our lives, because no-one is going to do it for us.’ This action was supported by the artistic community in Portugal, whether in public events, in mobilisation videos or even in joint subverting actions.

Hundreds of people joined for this non-violent protest, at the same time of the end of 29th United Nations Climate Conference, which was extended after the thousandth failure to reach an agreement on funding. It also coincided with the end of the negotiation of Portugal’s State Budget, which fails to present measures compatible with keeping the average global temperature below 1.5ºC. Mariana Rodrigues (29 years old), administrative worker, says: ‘Governments have known for decades that burning fossil fuels puts us on a highway to hell, but at the COPs they sit at the table with the companies that ignite the fire. How can we think they’re going to solve anything? This is an open war against the people and the planet. Their weapons of destruction – pipelines, airports, gas power plants – have already killed thousands of us and left millions homeless. We can’t ask a mass murder to just stop attacking. It’s up to us to dismantle the weapons, stop this war and build a society capable of stopping the climate crisis, with life at its center.’.

In the last 13 months Climáximo supporters have carried out more than 50 actions, from blocking Lisbon-Porto aeroplanes and private jets, disrupting fossil industry conferences and smashing the windows of fossil fuel company headquarters, stopping normality in the city of Lisbon with road blockades, painting the castle of Lisbon and a Picasso masterpiece. In addition, the collective has launched a Disarmament and Peace Plan, which outlines the measures needed in all social and economic sectors to stop the climate crisis.

Climáximo says it will continue to act until it stops the ongoing war, declaring that they refuse to lose everything without even trying to win, because the risks of acting to stop this war are incomparable to the risks of not acting.

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