Nine years ago on Wednesday 7th November 2012, the day that the election of Obama for a second term as President of the US was announced, the Campaign against Climate Change organised a series of protests in London urging him to stand up against the lobbying, dirty money and media lies funded by the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel companies.
Nine years later, after both the end of Obama’s presidency and four years of climate denier Trump, President Biden is still having problems in getting his plans to clean up the environment (and other policies) voted through because of opposition by a Senator who made a fortune from a coal brokerage business in which he owns more than a million dollars in shares and who receives more donations than any other senator from the coal, oil and gas industry.
The Campaign against Climate Change was founded in 2001 as a response to President Bush’s rejection of the Kyoto Protocol, and I think I first photographed one of their marches back in March 2002 when they pushed a bed with Bush in bed with the Esso tiger from Esso’s UK HQ to Westminster. It was a long walk and the wheels fell off the bed as it came to Westminster Bridge, but in 2012, after a static protest at the HQ of giant US private company Koch International they chose sturdier wheels in the form of an open-top bus.
Koch Industries is the US’s largest private company and made its fortune through developing improved processes of oil refining, and this remains a major part of its widespread activities. It is owned by the Koch Brothers, who ‘have been a major source for funding disinformation on climate change and in instigating the wave of populist anti-science, anti-regulatory, right-wing extremism associated with the “Tea Party”.’
Both in the US and the UK, governments are hugely influenced by the lobbying of big business, with many politicians accepting large payouts for services rendered, as well as a large PR and lobbying industry aimed at law makers and the media. The truly shameful think about the current case of Owen Paterson is not that he was paid paid £100,000 and broke the rules, but that their are rules that exist which he claims to have kept within to allow such paid lobbying by MPs.
Although the bus didn’t lose its wheels, it was desperately cold as it went through London on a cold, wet and windy November evening, with Phil Thornhill of the CCC leaning over the top with a large megaphone informing the public about the reason for the protest. It was also extremely bumpy, which together with the low light made photography rather difficult, and most of the time I was too busy holding tight to the rail across the top of the seats to take pictures.
Finally after its journey through the rush-hour streets the bus arrived at the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square and we all alighted. At first police tried to push the protesters into a penned area in a dark corner of the square where it would be neither heard nor seen. The protesters sensibly refused and after some discussion were allowed to protest as usual in front of the locked front gates – protected outside by a thin line of police, and inside the tall fence by wandering armed officers.
Protests such as this of course had no effect on Obama’s business-friendly administration, while Trump made climate denial core policy of his tweets. But these and other protests did raise awareness of the catastrophe the world is facing. Many of us had been aware of the coming crisis for many years – at least since the 1980s, though there were warnings from some scientists years earlier, but the wider public, often misinformed by the media was largely ignorant.
Without protests such as this around the world, it seems unlikely that their would have been an agreement reached at COP 21 in Paris in 2015, and since then, helped by the publicity given to Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough, not to mention various extreme climate events around the world, there is now a wide consensus that something needs to be done, and done urgently. But thanks to the huge continued efforts of big business in fossil fuels the politicians are still locked into doing too little too late.
More pictures: Stop Fossil Fuel Dirty Money takeover of US.
