Eco protesting

[Boomerwang]

Apparently there's a bill going forward to give police more powers to deal with protests and vigils that cause 'serious unease' or 'serious annoyance' and this bill has been blocked several times by Keir Starmer previously.

AIBU to think police should be granted more powers to stop protestors from blocking access points? I fully agree the right to protest must be protected, but what about when it affects others?

I'd argue to go even further and stop the waste of taxpayer's money by having to involve the police at all but then I know people would get seriously hurt this way and that's not okay.

At the same time, I wonder how effective these protests are by forcing us to confront what's going on and whether ultimately they are doing something good? Would they achieve results by sitting to the side of access points instead? Would anyone listen if daily life were uninterrupted? Does anyone stop to think of the cause just because they were physically stopped? Surely it's impossible to sympathise when you're angry?

Personally protesting is something I read about in the news but it doesn't prompt me to reflect on my contribution or research further.

Has anyone been affected by protests before and did it make you consider environment and ecology after the event?

I guess what they're doing here makes more sense then trying to handcuff to goal posts during a match. Think only one managed to actually do it the rest were charted off and no one had a clue what was going on.

The UK already gets 39.4% of its electricity from renewables

Are you including the 7% from biomass burned in places like Drax in that? It's still not great for the environment.

Jesus is nobody getting the message? It's scientists that got arrested this week. What's at stake is a lovable future on this planet for us and our kids. If the government were doing what they needed to do (no NEW fossil fuel licenses, speedily installing renewables, insulating every home) no one would be glueing themselves to lorries. Do you think it's fun to glue yourself to stuff?

Are other European countries being pressurised like this about fossil fuels & do they have pressure groups like ER

@DdraigGoch yes that includes biomass, and I get that the carbon in biomass has come from the air so it is carbon neutral, but it's also probably the easiest form of CCS.

@BigGreen how would the government insulate every home?

We need to build our houses in a super insulated way current govt scrapped these targets. We could do with some new ones.

Article here about how 2/3 homes need to be better insulated to fight climate collapse.

There's a lot of different takes on how this could be funded, like Green New Deal stimulus package (eg see Green Alliance).

The clearest and funniest summaries of the IPCC reports are on Amy Westervelt's Drilled site. She is a really cool journalist who also writes about working and parenting.

@BigGreen we've extended and refurbished our house to near passive levels, so I am fully aware of the necessity to reduce energy consumption, and, demonstrably committed. You are absolutely right that much more could have done to the standard of new builds over the last 20 years, but I'm still not sure what the protesters actually expect?

There is no one size fits all solution to the challenges posed by bringing our existing housing stock up to standard. And, even if there were limitless cash available the resources required to manufacture and install the insulation and renewables don't currently exist.

I would support change in the law to make it legal to run over stupid hippies blocking a motorway. Yanbu.

I strongly support the protests and the right to protest

@BigGreen thank you for the drilled link. The quality of reporting on climate change is generally so woefull.

@Oysterbabe how pleasant, legalising murder really isn't a great solution to anything.

[quote Daftasabroom]@DdraigGoch yes that includes biomass, and I get that the carbon in biomass has come from the air so it is carbon neutral, but it's also probably the easiest form of CCS.[/quote]
I'm not convinced that biomass is clean so I'll knock 7% or so off your figures and come to 32% which is less than a third. Whereas gas turbines represent around half of our electricity generation at the moment. Gas of course is a fossil fuel, the price of which has skyrocketed due to a combination of the post-covid recovery in demand (to which production hasn't caught up) and sanctions upon one of the world's largest gas producers. There's one heck of a long way to go.