They have already been given their own name in Germany: climate adhesives, or Klimakleber. They stick their palms or soles of their feet to the asphalt with superglue, construction foam or cement. It slows down and makes clearing the roadblock difficult.
Air conditioner glue workers have been seen demanding quick climate action on the motorways of Germany, Austria and Italy often this year.
For example, at the beginning of the holiday season last week on Friday, glue workers struck at many intersections and roundabouts in Berlin, causing huge traffic jams.
The glue is toxic and irritates the skin. At the beginning of the summer, the protesters came up with an even more effective method than glue: quick-drying cement. That too can cause an infection for the gluer and seriously damage the skin – but removing it is at least difficult. You need a concrete saw for that.
It can take hours for the authorities to remove people from roundabouts and intersections. Liima activism has also caused the police to equip themselves in a new way.
German media data by the authorities have hundreds of liters of sunflower oil in their warehouses, which are used to remove activists stuck in the streets. Police officers doing patrol work are trained to free protesters stuck in the street.
Air-conditioning gluers usually receive fines or short conditional prison sentences for their exploits. It is known that in only two cases has an activist been sentenced to a few months of unconditional imprisonment in Germany.
The bad flood was the impetus
Germany experienced a lot of bad floods two years ago in the summer. More than 180 people died, houses collapsed, cars were swept away by the rivers.
The last generation protest movement was born at the end of 2021, and it organized the first demonstrations in early 2022.
Since then, many extreme weather phenomena have been seen in Germany. This summer in Berlin, for example, there have been both extremely violent storms and floods as well as scorching heat. The number of climate activists is growing.
The last generation name comes from the fact that its members say they are the last generation that may still be able to stop the destruction of life on Earth. There are people of all ages, from young people to senior citizens.
If similar extremists come to Finland, activism will probably increase here as well, the environmental organization estimates.
– The climate crisis is at the point where demonstrations are increasing, direct action is increasing. When the situation becomes more critical, we will definitely see something like this in Finland, Greenpeace’s deputy country director Juha Aromaa says.
– In these countries, where extreme phenomena have caused really serious damage and there have been floods and heat waves, people feel that this is now a real issue.
At the start of the summer vacation season in mid-July, protesters blocked the airports in Hamburg and Düsseldorf. They punched holes in barbed wire fences, cycled onto runways and glued themselves to concrete.
– If you consider that these flights go to countries, for example Italy, where it is 42 degrees warm at the moment, and demonstrations have been held in weeks when there were the warmest days in the world’s measurement history, then it [lomalentojen ilmastopäästöt] exacerbates the situation, says Aromaa.
– It is understandable that the activists are already ringing the alarm bells loudly, when the climate scientists’ alarm bells are not really wanted to be heard, says Aromaa.
According to him, activism in Finland and other Nordic countries is milder because citizens have a lower threshold to be in direct contact with decision-makers and be able to influence them.
– The distance between political decision-makers is smaller here than in, for example, larger countries in Germany or Britain, which also have a strong tradition of demonstrations.
If Finland’s decision-makers do not show with their actions that they are curbing climate change, the climate movement here too can recruit more and more activists.
– Activism finds new ways in Finland as well, and civil disobedience can increase. New movements will certainly emerge and old ones will strengthen as the climate crisis progresses, Aromaa estimates.
We won’t see any big weather changes in the next few years
According to the Finnish Meteorological Institute, exceeding the temperature limit of 40 degrees would be possible in Finland only towards the end of the century, if measures to curb climate change fail.
– The temperature has only risen to 35 degrees in the history of Finnish weather observations on only four days: July 9, 1914, July 15, 1934 and July 28 and 29, 2010, researcher at the Finnish Meteorological Institute Ilari Lehtonen enumerates.
According to Lehtonen, it is more likely that Finnish summers will warm up by a couple of degrees. For example, local floods caused by heavy rains may become more common and intensify “somewhat”, as well as strong thunderstorms.
Does climate activism provoke thought? You can comment on the topic until Sunday evening at 11 p.m.
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