Greta Thunberg has taken part in climate protests in London for the second time this week, protesting outside the JP Morgan headquarters in Canary Wharf.
Apparently undeterred after being arrested and subsequently charged with a public order offence after a protest on Tuesday, the Swedish campaigner joined fellow activists in the east London financial district on Thursday morning.
“Change your diet, save the climate – eat the rich,” chanted protesters sitting outside the JP Morgan building on Bank Street, as financial services workers filed past on the way to their desks.
They handed out “free money” to passing workers, £10 notes issued by the “bank of climate chaos” which said: “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of loss and damage.”
A spokesperson for Fossil Free London, which organised the protest, told the Guardian: “We are here at the entrance to JP Morgan because they are, in the last seven years since the last Paris agreement, the worst financier of fossil fuels. They poured $434bn into fossil fuel financing, and this is a company that makes tens of billions of dollars in profit every year.
“We know that London is the heaving engine of financing for fossil fuel companies and as you know we have been protesting at the Oil & Money conference [Energy Intelligence Forum] and JP Morgan have been represented at the conference.
“We are saying at this time of massive inequality and climate change that is damaging the global south, here and now, that we need them to pay for loss and damage for the communities and people affected with some of their profits.”
Canary Wharf’s private security workers directed JP Morgan employees to alternative entrances. Police arrived at about 9am and did not immediately begin making arrests.
Thunberg declined to comment but stood at the doors of the building chatting to fellow activists and joining in chants including: “Profits rise and we get poor, climate crisis is class war” and “Oily, oily money. Out, out, out.”
At the same time, across London, doctors and other healthcare workers affiliated with Extinction Rebellion staged a “die-in” and “climate inquest” outside the InterContinental Park Lane, the venue for the Energy Intelligence Forum.
Fourteen people lay shrouded, like casualties at a military field hospital, in the road outside the hotel’s main entrance, while others circled them, in a mime of tending fallen colleagues.
After the action, the group was due to hand in a letter addressed to Luke Nelson, JP Morgan Chase’s head of sustainability, saying: “Society in the future is likely to judge companies that continue such fossil fuel investments as both immoral and as operating outside international law. What does JP Morgan plan to do right now to avoid such a judgment?”
A spokesperson for JP Morgan said: “We provide financing all across the energy sector: supporting energy security, helping clients accelerate their low carbon transitions and increasing clean energy financing with a target of $1tn for green initiatives by 2030.”
