Chaos in London as McKinsey & Co targeted by Extinction Rebellion

On Monday 17 February, Extinction Rebellion climate activists occupied McKinsey & Co and its London headquarters to demand it cuts all ties to its fossil fuel industry clients and starts putting planet before profit.

McKinsey & Co: chaos at its London HQ

Dozens of police arrived on the scene and arrested four campaigners, including two who were stood outside the building holding a banner:

The protest began at midday when activists sprayed fake crude oil over the building’s glass and steel exterior:

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 & Co 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:

Police even had to use a cherry picker to get the Extinction Rebellion activists down:

A damning rap sheet

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.

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. “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.

The company also worked for Big Oil at COP28, peddling a narrative aimed at undermining the goals of the Paris Agreement

Extinction Rebellion calls time on McKinsey & Co

Sandra Magee, 41, a farmer from North Devon present at the McKinsey & Co 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, 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.

Featured image and additional images via Will Colebourne/XR photographers