Flaring climate protests becoming more confrontational as free speech tested globally
Climate protesters have grown more confrontational in recent years, experts say, including publicly cataloging energy sector leaders and conservatives as "climate criminals," staging disruptive protests outside conservative organizations in the...
By Fox News · Fox News
Climate protesters have grown more confrontational in recent years, experts say, including publicly cataloging energy sector leaders and conservatives as "climate criminals," staging disruptive protests outside conservative organizations in the U.S., while climate activists in the UK have gone as far as attempting citizen's arrests of water company CEOs. "It's been getting worse during the 21st Century, ever since Bush vs. Gore in the year 2000," Heritage Foundation's director of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, told Fox News Digital. "Before that, I think that the relations were better and that they've been gradually getting worse. It seems to be worse, worse every year. I would say, and I think partly the year 2000, it's also where there was more access to the internet in general." Climate activists have increasingly become more confrontational in splashy and often costly acts of protests, including throwing soup at glass protecting the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in Paris while protesting food insecurity in 2024, vandalizing Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate in 2023 with orange paint while calling on the German government to stop using all fossil fuels by 2030, and a yearslong international campaign that has vandalized and deflated thousands of tires on SUVs since 2021. Fox News Digital took a look back at how climate protests have intensified in recent years, most notably in Europe, and how the activism is also playing out on U.S. soil and in the court system. SCALISE LEADS GOP FIGHT AT SCOTUS TO STOP 'RADICAL' LEFT’S ‘WAR ON AMERICAN ENERGY’ In the UK earlier in October, a group of female climate activists were seen surrounding water company CEO Mark Thurston near a train station in London while trying to place him under a citizen's arrest for "charges" of public nuisance related to environmental damage and sewage spills. The women surrounded the CEO of Anglian Water and linked their arms together before he was seen jumping into a cab…