Stop the Swedish “Triangle of Death” Seven polar bears held for attempted air travel

Cli­mate activist group Kli­max in Swe­den are tired of unnec­es­sary short haul and nation­al flights. Espe­cial­ly between the major cities of Gothen­burg, Stock­holm and Malmo/Copenhagen, all direct­ly cou­pled by the near­est thing Swe­den has to a high speed train. That’s why that on Fri­day the 15th of Feb­ru­ary strange things start­ed hap­pen­ing at air­ports around Swe­den.

Time might be mon­ey but how much cli­mate change is ten min­utes worth? If you don’t have any lug­gage and check in on-line that’s about how much time you can save by fly­ing between Swe­den’s major cities. Con­sid­er­ing that the Swedish trains run on renew­able elec­tric ener­gy, that’s a hell of a lot of cli­mate change for ten min­utes. Ok, it’s not that sim­ple. Why would any sane per­son with­out a cli­mate con­science or a fat wal­let take the train when it’s cheap­er to fly? A rail­way sys­tem that makes the UK’s look mod­ern could also help weigh the bal­ance when it comes to choos­ing how to get there.

Here’s a round up of the dif­fer­ent actions around the coun­try:

Mal­mo http://svt.se/svt/play/video.jsp?a=1057410
At the time of writ­ing sev­en activists are being held in cus­tody. It seems that the crime of run­ning about the coun­try­side dressed as a polar bear is frowned upon in the south of Swe­den. The sev­en were arrest­ed run­ning towards the perime­ter fence of Stu­rup air­port out­side of Mal­mo by the large police pres­ence. It seems that the boys in blue were out on a mass train­ing exer­cise at the time. The police should be hap­py to get a bit of real life train­ing. Attempt­ing to get onto run­ways whilst dressed as a polar bear is def­i­nite­ly one of the fastest going crimes of our time. An inter­est­ing high pub­lic­i­ty court case seems to be in the pipe line. At least one sol­i­dar­i­ty demon­stra­tion (Gothen­burg 2pm Gustaf Adolfs Torg) is planned on Sat­ur­day in Swe­den to demand the release of the Mal­mo sev­en.

Stock­holm
The polar bears of Stock­holm were treat­ed to ice cream by the air­port author­i­ties at Brom­ma. A pleas­ant ges­ture but hard­ly mak­ing up for help­ing to destroy the bears norther­ly habi­tat. Sor­ry you fam­i­ly drowned but here’s a rasp­ber­ry rip­ple to make up for it,sort of thing. A die in was staged as oth­er peace­ful pro­test­ers with ban­ners and fly­ers roamed the ter­mi­nal rais­ing aware­ness of the envi­ron­men­tal harm caused by air trav­el. There are present­ly plans to enlarge Brom­ma air­port in Stock­holm. The ques­tion is what are the politi­cians and plan­ners think­ing. In a time and a coun­try where every nine year old knows about glob­al warm­ing and its caus­es, the author­i­ties get the idea of expand­ing air­ports. It might be time to let the kids take over the pow­er. They could hard­ly do a worse job than the cli­mate crim­i­nals doing the job now. But then the kids are self­ish­ly more wor­ried about their future than in the hon­est busi­ness of mak­ing short term finan­cial gains.

Gothen­burg
A die in was staged in front of the secu­ri­ty gate at Land­vet­ter air­port out­side of Gothen­burg. Twen­ty activists arrived at the air­port to stage the protest on Fri­day evening. The die in was for the ben­e­fit of pas­sen­gers on their way to emit the largest pos­si­ble amount of green­house gas­es whilst cov­er­ing the 300 or so miles to Stock­holm. After mirac­u­lous­ly reviv­ing them­selves the activists formed a ban­ner wall to wel­come three plane loads of arrivals from the cap­i­tal. The whole thing went down peace­ful­ly with the mas­sive police pres­ence (at least three cop­pers for every cli­mate cru­sad­er) stand­ing around look­ing bored.

Upp­sala
The uni­ver­si­ty town of Upp­sala north of Stock­holm does­n’t have a nice warm pas­sen­ger air­port to stage an action in. The com­pa­ny Upp­sala Air is doing its best to change this. They want to pro­vide a pleas­ant pas­sen­ger ter­mi­nal so that local cli­mate activists would have some­where warm to stage protests. In the best “make do with what you’ve got spir­it“, the Upp­sala activist cre­at­ed their own run­way in the city cen­ter to illus­trate how pleas­ant­ly an air­port can con­vert a bor­ing piece of coun­try­side into noisy pol­lut­ing cli­mate chal­leng­ing strip of asfalt.

This is just the start of the Swedish resis­tance against cli­mate crim­i­nal­i­ty. Watch this space for the next move. We think cars are also plane stu­pid. Hon­est!

http://klimatet.org/