A new study was released in recent days that should have been newsworthy, but it escaped the media’s attention in Australia.

It showed Australian police are world leaders at arresting climate and environmental protesters.

According to the study, more than 20 per cent of all climate and environment protests in Australia involve arrests, which is more than three times the global average (6.3 per cent).

Australia’s arrest rate was the highest of 14 countries in the global study.

It’s higher than policing efforts in the United Kingdom (17.2 per cent), Norway (14.5 per cent), and the United States (10 per cent).

The research makes it clear that Australia’s political leaders have joined the “rapid escalation” of efforts to criminalise and repress climate and environmental protest, while sovereign states globally fail to meet their international agreements and emissions targets.

But it shows killings and disappearances of activists in Australia are rare.

Between 2012 and 2023, it says there were over 2,000 killings of environmental defenders globally, with large numbers occurring in Brazil (401), the Philippines (298), India (86) and Peru (58).

In those countries, the arrest rates of climate and environment protesters are much lower than in Australia, the UK, Norway and the US. 

Researchers say that’s a trend worth highlighting. They say countries with the lowest rates of arrests of activists often have the highest rates of police violence and killings of environmental defenders, which suggests something about the social and legal reality in those countries.

However, overall they say Australian efforts to repress climate activism are part of an alarming global trend to squash dissent. They characterise that trend as a “threat to both the environment and liberal democratic systems.”

They also say groups like Extinction Rebellion, which operates in Australia and the UK, are running head-on into that clampdown, because they are intentionally employing tactics that may result in arrests “to the point that being arrested becomes part of their strategy for change.”

It’s worth reading.

New anti-protest laws in Australia and overseas

The study, Criminalisation and Repression of Climate and Environmental Protests, was published last week by researchers at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.

It follows a 2024 position paper from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders that warned of the growing urgency of the “triple environmental crisis of pollution, biodiversity loss and climate change,” and the global increase in civil disobedience in environmental activism in response to those crises.

It also follows a major report in 2021 from Australia’s Environmental Defenders Office (EDO), that was a collaboration with the Human Rights Law Centre and Greenpeace.

That EDO report warned of “a worrying proliferation of anti-protest legislation in Australia,” the “systemic repression faced by climate activists across the country,” and the “unregulated political influence of the fossil fuel industry driving that repression.”

The new study from Bristol University draws on data from three databases. 

It makes extensive use of quantitative data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), and supplements it with data from Global Witness, covering disappearance and killing of land and environmental defenders, and the Climate Protest Tracker, funded by the Carnegie Endownment for International Peace.

It analyses quantitative data on repression and criminalisation globally, and then looks more closely at trends and new legislation from a smaller group of 14 countries in different parts the world.

Those countries include Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, Uganda, United Kingdom, and the United States.

It says since 2019, there have been 22 pieces of new legislation introduced in those 14 countries that have been designed to limit people’s ability to protest. 

Five of those pieces of legislation were introduced in Australia:

The fight over the real cost of emissions, pollution and biodiversity loss

When you read the Bristol University study alongside the special rapporteur’s position paper and the EDO paper, you get a pretty good sense of how the clampdown on climate and environmental activism actually works, and why it’s occurring.

Collectively, the reports discuss an issue that links political donations and pressure from fossil fuel companies, governments writing new laws and harsher penalties for climate and environmental activists, federal and state policing agencies being put to work to enforce the new laws, and legal systems and courts being used to bed them down.

And hanging over the entire political problem is the question of the “pricing mechanism” and the role it plays in a society like ours.

When you look at this issue dispassionately, you’ll see that we’re witnessing a nasty global battle over the attempt to have the negative externalities of fossil fuels properly reflected in the market prices of the products of fossil fuel companies.

What does that mean in plain English?

It means if the true environmental, climate, and planetary costs of fossil fuels were really reflected in market prices, the price of petrol, for example, would cost many multitudes more than $1.90 a litre.

The same goes for gas and coal prices.

We’re seeing the global fossil fuel industry use every lever it can — political influence, legal systems, police forces, private security services, national armies, extra-judicial harassment and intimidation — to stop the true cost of their products being reflected in the market prices of their products.

And we’re watching climate and environmental activists using every lever they can to try to get the true cost of fossil fuels reflected in market prices. 

But they don’t have the enormous resources of capital behind them, so they’re using other tactics — letters to politicians, the legal system, protests, civil disobedience, and blockades — to try to generate enough social pressure to force politicians to act.

Why is petrol only $1.90 a litre? What’s the true price of approving another coal mine? What’s the true cost of opening a new gas field that will have a life-span of 50 years? 

They’re important questions.

And scientists are providing very different answers to those questions than lobbyists for fossil fuel companies.