Greta Thunberg Occupies Maersk Tankers
On Tuesday, climate activist Greta Thunberg and protesters from Danish environmental group Den Gronne Ungdomsbevaegelse (The Green Youth Movement) briefly occupied the offices of Maersk Tankers, located in the Amager East precinct of Copenhagen.
The group's aim was to protest Maersk Tankers' primary business, the transport of fossil fuels. Dozens of activists took up positions in the firm's head office, rolling out cloth signs and chanting messaging with megaphones. With spray bottles and rags, some of the protesters cleaned the office's glass partitions, an act intended to mock Maersk Tankers' alleged "greenwashing" PR efforts.
The NGO had a secondary messaging objective: they took aim at a related firm, A.P. Moller-Maersk, for alleged transport of weaponry to Israel - a message that many other anti-war protesters have presented over the past year.
Maersk Tankers is owned by A.P. Moller Holding, the same family foundation holding company that owns container freight and ports giant A.P. Moller-Maersk. The tanker firm is independently run and unrelated to container division Maersk Line. As a wet bulk operator, Maersk Tankers has no meaningful capability to transport weaponry.
"We demand that Maersk stop their shipments of weapons to Israel, which are used directly in the genocide of the Palestinians, but we also demand that they stop all shipments of oil and gas," activist Freya Skriver said at the event.