To risk arrest for protesting about the climate emergency?

[medicellen]

I have recently taken part in climate protests with Extinction Rebellion but have stopped short of activities that would lead to an arrest.

I am a scientist and it has been beyond doubt for some years that the climate emergency is accelerating.

And yet, global carbon emissions continue to increase. Our government is granting new licences for fossil fuels, whilst oil companies rake in massive profits. This is utter madness (aka "collective suicide" according to the lead of the UN).

I have an 8-year old son who says one day he might like to have children. I have avoided saying that this may be either not possible or not desirable due to the state of the climate by then.

Petitions, campaigning, pleas, marches have failed. In my mind, the only option left is civil disobedience. Mass arrests advanced the causes of suffrage and civil rights and I am now contemplating arrest as the only meaningful contribution I have left.

@MrsBennetsPoorNerves - XR have held exploratory CAs to test the model, but they are aware that they are not necessarily representative of the whole population and therefore any concrete proposals would not be valid. A CA needs time, funding, input of multiple scientific and social experts and government endorsement. An example is the CA held in N Ireland about abortion. CA about climate action is likely to be much more complex

One of the key questions is where funding for carbon cuts will come from - the government will never redistribute large sums from rich to poor unless the population tells them that is what is needed

There’s a few groups involved - government, business and us

Politicians are elected on a mandate so it’s really us that has to vote and lead it, business reacts to demand. I think as consumers we have more power than we think. But as a pp said a quick glance on here - just on a thread with posters laughing at small houses etc, which model air con? threads picked up during heat waves.

Behaviour change is hard, although not impossible. Usually altered by £ - even small charge for a plastic bag dropped use substantially. People will increasingly be priced out of stuff.

Unfortunately the protests seem to create huge traffic jams and people annoyed more than much else atm

Change imo will happen due to cost

It's unknown. There are too many variables. If we stopped all (non-respiratory) CO2 emissions today it would take time for the changes already underway to slow and stop.

Taking the chicken out of the oven doesn't stop it cooking immediately.

Is it possible the impact would negligible?

If you have the answers seek election. We are a democracy.

Negligible for the immediate future. We won't live to see a halt in climate change based on what we do right now I don't think

[[https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/climate-change-evidence-causes/question-20/][

Ok, so are you saying that a lot of the work on this has actually been done and that ER have already drawn up detailed, costed policy proposals etc, with full impact assessments, plans on how these policies could be practically implemented, considerations about how to minimise the impact on the most vulnerable etc? And that the main problem is that politicians from all parties are failing to engage with their recommendations?

Giving some credit to ER, People's Assembles should not be about detailed solutions. They should be about demonstrating a commitment and desire to accept solutions in principle. Trying to get consensus on detail is an impossible task (you run headfirst into Parkinson's Law of Triviality).

royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/climate-change-evidence-causes/question-20/

That doesn't mean we can't change anything though. Rewinding, cleaning seas and other bodies of water can make an impact. We can work to mitigate against the worst of climate change in a number of ways, but halting emissions alone won't make a difference for a long time

The immediate impact would appear to be negligible.

The medium and long term impact would depend whether the inertia of events in motion is too great to prevent passing irreversible tipping points (see an earlier reply of mine). If irreversible change can be avoided, then anthropogenic climate change can be halted and indeed reversed.

Go and protest in China.

By how much could it be reversed if we took every single possible measure today and when would that reverse occur?

What form will your protest take?

Specifically I mean. What do you plan to do that may lead to your arrest?

Eg the people who superglued their hands to things, the people who threw soup at a painting.

That level of specific.

It isn’t just about reversing, it is about stopping it from getting worse and worse.

Does the climate not change anyway naturally?

@Daftasabroom You could read the blog post I linked to or you could try to understand what I'm actually saying. I'm not saying it's driving climate change now, but that on the long run, if you keep expanding energy consumption it will add to the overall heating of the planet beyond sustainable levels.

Nobody can answer that really @glowtorch. Even the top scientists who work in this area cannot agree on what you are asking.

I do disagree with some of the rhetoric which some people spew online. Do this now so we can stop climate change for our children hurray! That isn't possible. We need to prepare for the damage climate change will do. If it's all about "our children", then mitigation is more important (imo) than halting emissions immediately. (But I still think we should be aiming to do that)

It can be reversed to the extent that excess CO2 and other greenhouse gases could be removed from the system. Remember that the excess CO2 we're talking about has been locked up in fossil fuels for millions of years as a result of process that themselves occurred over geological timescales.

Stopping emissions stops the atmospheric levels rising. Reversing atmospheric levels requires emissions to maintained below the rate of capture from the atmosphere and storage in biomass, soils, etc.

House!

(we're playing climate change denial bullshit bingo, right?)

I'm interested in how you can reverse a natural process that's happened over millennia when we are the cause of accelerating it. If we are the cause how can it ever be reversed with us even present?

It is man made climate change @glowtorch. That is refuted by almost nobody.

So you assume because I think the climate changes naturally I am in denial that the climate changes?

So we can't reverse climate change but we can reverse our impact on climate change, is that what you're saying?

Yes, I agree that funding is one of the major challenges. I also agree that governments won't act to redistribute wealth unless there is significant pressure to do so. I just don't agree that the protests that are happening right now will be effective in applying that pressure. Quite the opposite, actually...I think the extreme protests make the message less credible and more easily dismissed.

I do take your point that it would be hard for XR to organise a forum that was truly representative of the whole population, but I'm not sure that the government could realistically achieve that either. I'm also very sceptical about the value of citizens' assemblies on a topic that is so complex. If Brexit taught us nothing else, it demonstrated that ordinary citizens typically have a limited understanding of complex matters which makes informed decision- making difficult. We could just end up investing an awful lot of time and money into something that wouldn't actually produce viable solutions.

We actually already have an assembly of elected representatives in the shape of the House of Commons. We pay these people to get their heads around these complex issues and to legislate on our behalf. I'm not really sure what the value of creating another assembly would be...if the representatives were elected, then how would that really be different from what we have in our current Parliament? If they were unelected/selected by government bodies, then how would their recommendations have any democratic validity?

Personally, I think it would be better to focus on the representative assembly that we already have (Parliament), and to find a way of making it work more effectively to tackle these issues. We need to take the party politics out of it, and to get a cross party group of MPs to drive the strategy forward. That group of MPs should be advised by a panel of experts in a range of relevant fields who could help them to understand the decisions that they're making and the likely implications of those. The process can include a public consultation if needed, but we don't need to assemble another random bunch of semi- informed citizens to address these issues...we already have that. What we really need is a way of bringing together the very best brains in the country, with expertise across a whole range of different fields, in order to find a way through this, and we then need those experts to work with our elected representatives who have the power to legislate in order to implement their recommendations.

I still don't see how glueing yourself to the road is going to move us any further forward.

The middle class handwringing over this issue is pathetic. If the U.K. disappeared tomorrow it would make absolutely no difference to the climate. But yeah stop people getting to work, delay ambulances while you fuck about and piss people off.