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EXTINCTION REBELLION took action against Scotland’s “biggest climate polluter” today by blocking the gates of Ineos’s plant in Grangemouth.
Groups of climate activists locked themselves together at the gates and blockaded approach roads to the refinery and offices with two boats.
Campaigners, who also demonstrated outside Ineos’s headquarters in London, held up banners proclaiming: “No future in fossil fuels” and “climate justice = social justice.”
Activist Annie Lane from Glasgow, said: “Ineos Grangemouth is Scotland’s largest climate polluter. It is Scotland’s only crude-oil refinery.
“It also stores fracked gas from the [United] States. Given the widely assumed ‘ban’ on fracking in Scotland, for fracked gas which harms communities worldwide to still be processed here is outrageously hypocritical.
“We are here to expose the climate destruction that Ineos is causing. We are running out of time with the climate crisis affecting so many in the global south already.”
Meg Peyton Jones from Edinburgh added: “We’re 10 years on from Scotland’s first Climate Act, and yet plants such as Grangemouth are still being expanded.
“We cannot trust big oil corporations to prioritise the planet and the long-term wellbeing of either their workers or the general population above squeezing every last drop of oil and gas out of the North Sea, no matter how much they try to distract us with greenwash about renewables.”
Extinction Rebellion Scotland said that Covid-19 safety precautions were taken, including use of face masks, social distancing and hand sanitiser, and that activists were using a track-and-trace app.
Ineos bosses, who claimed that the Grangemouth site continued to operate normally throughout the day, said that between 2009 and 2019 emissions there had been cut by 37 per cent, and from its chemicals business by 43 per cent.
A spokesman said that sites “continue to explore ways to reduce” emissions, adding: “We do our utmost to do this as efficiently and environmentally responsibly as possible because this is how we will remain in business.”
