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.

@Cloudz Even before going into arguments about climate change, the reason YABU, very U, is that JSO has no coherent aim or plan.

They want the UK Government to stop issuing oil and gas drilling licenses.

That's a very simple and very coherent plan - thirteen words.

The research paper includes XR actions which were characterised by civil disobedience, bringing much of the centre of London to a standstill.

How did all these climate activists, 30,000 of them from all over the world, manage to get to Egypt's luxurious holiday resort?

Well indeed @RedToothBrush though petitioning your MP and becoming involved in policy is thankless busy work and just not as high profile as sticking yourself to a Van Gogh in front of the telly cameras.

But after decades of austerity policy in which wealth has trickled upward the general public just won’t be motivated by the tactics XR are using.

Thanks, I've had a look. From my reading, the authors didn't actually point to any solid evidence that the protests carried out by XR have actually contributed to a change in public awareness, merely that they "may be important" in contributing to a rise in public awareness. They acknowledge that they have presented evidence of correlation rather than causation. They also don't appear to have offered any significant analysis of the impact of different types of activism, e.g. school strikes vs antisocial behaviour, and whether some approaches are more effective in raising awareness than others.

Again, I am struggling to understand why you think some of the silly antics of XR would be so much more likely to attract public interest and awareness than news about the impact of climate change on real people's lives. If the facts alone are not enough, why is emptying a carton of milk on the floor in waitrose going to persuade people?

First I've heard of that.
The message is lost.

Away and lie down in your hessian tent, with a piece of wet sackcloth across your forest.

I don't support going back to a pre-industrial age and neither would you if you stopped for a minute and thought about what that would entail.

For a starter, the nest time of your 'UP FRED FLINTSTONE' lot totter off to protest-don't wear anything made of oil-including your orange high vis jackets and don't use any safety equipment to keep you hanging from bridges like demented budgies-cos they cost oil too-either to make or get to the shop.

Try knitting a rope made from lentil and snail shells.

And walk to wherever you're going. Use slabs of hardened mud tied to the soles of your feet with rushes.

Why have you had a child if you are so concerned-you've made a whole other user of resources-a child who-even at 8-is thinking about his children.

And today, of course, we get to the real agenda of the climate crisis-money handed out for historical climate damage compensation.

Tis all bollocks and one day, books will be written about the big con and both the eejits who swallowed it and those who pushed it for money.

That's a very simple and very coherent plan - thirteen words

It's not a plan. It's a demand.

I am not sure that there is a clear message. The general public don't really know what action Extinction Rebellion want the Government to take, other than a very general attack on anything detrimental to the environment. They are demanding change but not putting forward particularly practical ideas of what needs to happen instead so I think the whole organisation needs more focus. At the moment the whole point of the organisation appears to be to take action, rather than putting forward sensible proposals for a drastic change to our society. Its aims are woolly at best.

The ones who threw soup at the painting were Just Stop Oil who are asking the government to stop granting licences for new fossil fuel extraction. That’s a pretty clear demand. And as we already have enough for around 8 years in the reserves we have, that would allow time for a transition to clean renewable fuel (if we act quickly and get on with it now). As renewables are much cheaper that fossil fuel, this would also make us more energy secure and address the cost of living crisis too. Seems pretty reasonable.

Its aims are woolly at best

Judging by the latter part of this thread (haven'tt read all of it) the message is either Ban It or Tax It.

This is precisely the conversation we were having last night , should have held it on Zoom or something if they want any credibility .

You are a scientist and you think that a nonsense protest in the UK will have any impact on your cause? Your powers of reasoning aren’t very strong, are they?

Exactly. It's social media activism rather than grown up in depth activism.

One gets likes and wonders why it's not winning the argument, the other reframes the argument as a positive step that is worthwhile for even the more socially and economically conservative (small c).

If you are taking the argument and understanding the obstacles that others have and slowly dismantle them, you are pissing in the wind and will change Jack shit.

Because this is where the action is, this where the cameras are, this is where the world leaders are. Physical presence is important, if not key, to active protest. How exactly do you think people would be engaged by a protest on Zoom while the COP meeting is ongoing in person?

Environmentalism isn’t a purity test, especially when we know how insignificant individual lifestyle choices are against the weight and impacts of the fossil fuel industry. We still have to live in the world as it is right now while campaigning for change in the future.

No that's half a plan

It doesn't explain how and what you replace it with.

As we saw with Brexit, it's a rather fundamental point....

Have you thought about going to protest in China? They are one of the biggest polluters.

It's both

seems to me that the end results of these protests are so counter productive I sometimes ask myself if they are being funded by some of the players who profit from oil in order to make the average person anti the anti-oil agenda. Same with insulate Britain, amazing how something so useful and necessary for all of us to save money and help the climate - insulation - was become a dirty word.

As some others have pointed out, it's the small, daily boring approach that will have results. Climate change might be unprovable but getting covered in shite when you go swimming, getting lung conditions from pollution, having a massive bill because all the heat escapes from your attic etc may get people to "look up".

Still all feels like moving chairs on the Titanic though. The Russian war on Ukraine is currently ipolluting some of the most fertile land in Europe so that it may not be usable again in our lifetimes, has kicked up radioactive dust from Chernobyl and is destroying the quality of rivers running into the Black Sea and the sea itself. Russia has ramped up deforesting the Siberian forests as no one is looking (arguably even more dangerous for the planet than what is happening in the Amazon).

Renewable energy.

They say ‘may’ because as you said it’s a correlation, it would be very difficult if not impossible to have absolutely conclusive evidence in this situation. Most evidence isn’t conclusive, but supportive. Given the spikes in awareness tie closely with the protests I think they are very likely to have been caused by them. Or do you have a better explanation? It might not compare different types of civil disobedience, but it shows (if you accept my claim above) that civil disobedience, including the XR shutting down of London, effectively increases public awareness.

‘Of course, with this brief analysis (Figure 1), we show only correlations. Nevertheless, the data suggest that global movements of civil disobedience focussed on climate change, as well as traditional scientific reports, may play an important role in increasing public awareness and engagement with issues of climate change.’

Environmentalism isn’t a purity test

Could have fooled me.

especially when we know how insignificant individual lifestyle choices are against the weight and impacts of the fossil fuel industry

Ah right, so all the recycling and driving an electric car and biking rather than driving is pointless as it makes no difference

We still have to live in the world as it is right now while campaigning for change in the future

Except those people swanning around in their private jets are the ones telling the plebs not to fly and what cars they should be driving and how many children to have and not to eat meat, eat plant derived food. If it's OK for the likes of Musk and Bezos to fly in a private jet because 'that's the world as it is right now' then it's OK for the likes of me, right?

The current issue of Private Eye is extremely interesting on JSO and XR. JSO are funded by the Getty heiress via the Climate Emergency Fund (CEF). So far in 2022:
In 2022 so far, we have made $4.5 million in grants to 43 brave, ultra-ambitious groups.
www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/29/just-stop-oils-protests-funded-by-us-philanthropists

The groups funded by CEF predominantly consist of evangelical Christians, e.g. Evangelical Environmental Network, American Conservation Coalition and Conservation Hawks.

I have already suggested what I think is a "better" explanation.

You seem to be of the view that the abundant and growing body of real-world evidence of the negative impacts of climate change is insufficient to persuade the general public that climate change is a real problem that needs to be tackled.

At the same time, I presume that you would argue that the XR protestors have themselves been motivated to protest by that very same body of real-world evidence? Or do you believe that they have different motives for protesting that have nothing to do with the actual impact of climate change?

If XR et al are motivated to protest by the evidence of climate change that's out there, why would you assume that the general public are somehow less capable of accessing or interpreting that evidence and drawing their own conclusions? Why would you assume that random protests such as spilling milk or throwing soup at paintings would help to illuminate that evidence and make it more meaningful to people?

It's almost as if you think that the arguments for climate action don't quite stack up by themselves, so we need some extremist antisocial protestors to make people care enough to want something to be done. That's a very curious way of undermining your own argument.

Yes and...

...how are we going to achieve enough to replace fossil fuels?

Which renewables? Where?

What scale do we need to upscale what we have?

Do we have enough people to install enough renewable generators?

Is it cost effective - will it help people have lower bills?

How is the investiment in infrustructure being funded? Is it public / privately owned?

What issues are there will renewables in terms of meeting demand at peak times - if there is no wind or solar for example?

Is our battery tech sufficient at present? If its not do we need to invest to improve this?

You need a credible plan for replacement not just demanding like petulant toddlers who just ignore the practical boring stuff of 'how'.

A thirteen word statement which only gives half the issue and then has absoluetely no substance what so ever is very basic level primary school level politics. Indeed many year 6s probably would give JSO a run for their money on coming up with something with any level of cohesiveness.

It is nothing more that social media wah wah wailing.

Its not proper activism.