Hijinks

140,000 people came to Roskilde Festival, but many were dismayed to find posted signs at entrances stating the festival would be collecting and indefinitely storing all text and phone conversations, internet activity, and metadata while on the festival grounds. The signs, designed to look like the festival’s official branding, informed attendees that all digital communications would be collected and shared with “partners”.

During the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on the world drug problem—whose dates strangely centered on April 20, or 4/20—the LA Times quoted the UN's new plan to decriminalize drugs and make them a health care rather than criminal justice issue.

In European Parliament in Brussels, a "defense and security consultant" presented an "industrial solution to terrorism" which—unlike all other military and security solutions—is guaranteed to actually work.

When Edward Snowden made his first in-person public appearance on U.S. soil since receiving a Presidential pardon, a bi-partisan crowd went wild. Sadly it wasn't true...

Royal Dutch Shell has spent billions on its plans to drill for oil in the Arctic. Despite setbacks, in the spring and summer of 2015, they were ramping up operations to go drill in areas made newly accessible by climate change. To counter the negative attention they were getting, we decided to help them out by launching a guerrilla marketing campaign to offer people a taste of the melting Arctic.

Before the UN Climate Talks in Lima, the New York Times told us: “At stake now is the difference between a newly unpleasant world and an uninhabitable one.” But in Lima, the world's governments chose the latter, offering the world not solutions but rather a roadmap to global burning.

Are we really just going to sit by and watch until most species on earth—including our own—go extinct? Or are we going to turn up the heat on our tone-deaf leaders in every way that we can, until they finally realize they have to stand up to the fossil fuel companies, and stop the carbon madness?

Environmental and indigenous rights activists team up with the Yes Men to impersonate the U.S. Department of Energy, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Department of Defense, and announce the nation's new energy plan.

In towns across Canada, troupes of mischievous activists disrupted the attempts of TransCanada (of Keystone XL fame) to ram through another Tar Sands pipeline, Energy East, by dressing as TransCanada reps, but with "SaveCanada" logos, and telling the real story.

In Chiapas, México, a group of students and activists issued a fake Monsanto press release announcing the Mexican government had officially approved the sale of their patented seeds on a commercial scale. Though the announcement was a fake, Monsanto apparently felt very threatened.