Climate chaos hits McKinsey & Co’s London HQ
February 17, 2025 by Extinction Rebellion
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Activists scale building and spray fake oil to protest McKinsey’s role in helping the fossil fuel industry drive climate change. Four arrested, including two protestors holding banner outside building
Today, Extinction Rebellion climate activists are occupying McKinsey & Company’s London headquarters to demand it cuts all ties to its fossil fuel industry clients and starts putting planet before profit.
Dozens of police have arrived on the scene and have so far arrested four campaigners, including two who were stood outside the building holding a banner. Protestors are still occupying the entrance portico.
The protest began at midday when activists sprayed fake crude oil over the building’s glass and steel exterior while a group of climbers scaled the entrance portico, lighting up smoke flares and unfurling a massive banner reading, “McKinsey & Company: Cut the Ties to Fossil Fuels”.
On the pavement outside, a long list of climate crimes committed by ‘The Firm’ was read out over a megaphone, as three people in hazmat suits kneeled before an activist dressed as a McKinsey partner who ‘drowned’ them in oil, in a scene symbolising the effect on humanity of McKinsey’s ever-expanding fossil fuel business strategies.
Demonstrators handed out leaflets to staff and passers-by, informing them of what is going on, asking staff to boycott fossil fuel clients within the firm and to demand McKinsey stops working to increase fossil fuel production.
McKinsey & Co. is the world’s biggest management consultancy with 45,000 employees operating globally. They work directly with Big Oil CEOs to maximise profit at the expense of people and planet.
Recent investigations and analysis reveal that McKinsey & Co is central to driving the climate and ecological emergency and show McKinsey clients are responsible for around half of all the CO2 emitted worldwide since the Paris agreement was signed [1].
The company’s client list includes most of the worlds’ biggest polluters, including ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, TotalEnergies, Eni, Saudi Aramco and Sinopec. McKinsey typically help their clients maximise production ignoring the increasingly desperate pleas of climate scientists and the United Nations.
McKinsey clients Shell and BP have been scaling back their transition to renewables and Aramco’s CEO described the phase-out of oil as a “fantasy” that should be abandoned.
McKinsey & Co. has also been working with the Saudi government to artificially stimulate demand for oil in order to offset declines due to efforts to tackle the climate crisis.
Another client is Koch Industries, notorious for funding the thinktanks and other climate-denial groups that lobby against action on the climate crisis.
McKinsey & Co. is also working in India to increase the country’s oil refining capacity by 200m tonnes a year and help meet its aim to become a gas-based economy despite the fact that 2024 was the hottest year on record, and the first calendar year in which annual average temperatures were higher than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels [2]. “Limiting global warming to 1.5C would require the CO2 rise to be slowing, but in reality the opposite is happening,” says Richard Betts of the Met Office [3].
The company also worked for Big Oil at COP28, peddling a narrative aimed at undermining the goals of the Paris Agreement
Sandra Magee, 41, a farmer from North Devon present at the action, said: “McKinsey and Company develop the strategies which are propelling our planet into a catastrophic ‘hothouse earth’ state. We’re here to tell McKinsey employees that a habitable planet is infinitely more important than the profits of a few fossil fuel execs. Demand action on climate from your CEOs, not collaboration towards our mutual destruction!”
Caroline Hartnell, 74 from Wandsworth, London, also participating today, said “Wake up! Fossil fuel emissions trap heat equivalent to a million Hiroshima bombs every day. Last month was the warmest January on record at 1.64ºC above pre industrial levels, the agreed safe limit was 1.5ºC. You are living through the sixth mass extinction event. So what we need from McKinsey and Co. is less greed. We demand McKinsey and Co. put Planet before Profit”.
Notes for Editors
[1] “Just 57 fossil fuel producers have been responsible for 80% of all global CO2 emissions since the signing of the Paris agreement in 2016. Almost two-thirds of those are among the list of entities connected to McKinsey & Co.”
Two-thirds of McKinsey clients x 80% of global CO2 = 53.333%, around half of all the CO2 emitted worldwide since the Paris agreement.
Research from ‘Capitalism incarnate’: inside the secret world of McKinsey, the firm hooked on fossil fuels:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/nov/20/mckinsey-fossil-fuels
[2] 2024 first year to pass 1.5C global warming limit https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd7575x8yq5o
[3] Planet-warming gas levels rose more than ever in 2024 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c30dn5dn53jo
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Time has almost entirely run out to address the climate and ecological crisis which is upon us, including the sixth mass species extinction, global pollution, and increasingly rapid climate change. If urgent and radical action isn’t taken, we’re heading towards 4˚C warming, leading to societal collapse and mass loss of life. The younger generation, racially marginalised communities and the Global South are on the frontline. No-one will escape the devastating impacts.