“MIXED MESSAGES”
Supporters had been already gathered exterior courtroom on Thursday when Thunberg arrived round an hour earlier than the ten.00am begin of her trial.
They held giant yellow indicators studying “fossil free London” and “local weather protest is just not against the law” as Thunberg, carrying a gray coat, and her fellow defendants made their method by way of the group.
Maja Darlington, campaigner at Greenpeace UK, mentioned the activists had been on trial “for peacefully protesting” whereas oil executives had been “celebrating making billions from promoting climate-wrecking fossil fuels”.
“The prosecution of Greta and different peaceable protesters displays a authorities that cares extra about bolstering the earnings of oil bosses than preventing for a habitable future for all of us,” she added.
The Conservative authorities’s reversals on its pledges to fight local weather change have angered campaigners.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has postponed a ban on the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles and introduced plans to grant new licences to drill for oil and gasoline within the North Sea.
The British voters, which votes in a normal election this yr, is going through an inflation-fuelled cost-of-living disaster.
On Monday, the UK’s impartial advisory physique on local weather technique expressed concern that the federal government was sending out “blended messages” that had been tarnishing its worldwide affect on the problem.
Thunberg, who got here to worldwide consideration as a 15-year-old by staging faculty strikes in her native Sweden, repeatedly takes half in such demonstrations.
She was fined in October for blocking the port of Malmo in Sweden, a couple of months after being forcibly eliminated by police throughout an illustration in opposition to using coal in Germany.
She additionally joined a march final weekend in southern England to protest in opposition to the enlargement of Farnborough airport, primarily utilized by personal jets.