Extinction Rebellion

[Brian Peacock]

[JimC]

And Bron and I are going to the Melbourne version...

[Brian Peacock]

[pErvinalia]

A couple of kids have glued themselves to the road over one of the major bridges in the Brisbane CBD today. Good work kids. But I can't help wondering how you glue yourself to a road. Have to be pretty good glue. I wonder how they get them off.

[JimC]

The Extinction Rebellion crew in Melbourne are planning to block a major bridge in Melbourne sometime in October for a whole day. I still wonder whether the publicity it will no doubt garner is worth the negative feelings about the protest from pissed-off commuters...

[pErvinalia]

We've reached dangerous times in regard to our relative inaction on climate change. This calls for radical action. The real fear is if (as they've begun to do) governments start to crack down on protest. Things will start getting messy.

[JimC]

My main point is that there needs to be a clear and sizeable majority of voters who are convinced about the need for more rapid action on climate change, and will vote accordingly. Some types of aggressive protests, deliberately disruptive to ordinary commuters, may be counter-productive in achieving the required groundswell...

[pErvinalia]

Nothing else is working at the moment. We seem incapable of voting for strong climate action.

[Scot Dutchy]

The Extinction Rebellion crew in Melbourne are planning to block a major bridge in Melbourne sometime in October for a whole day. I still wonder whether the publicity it will no doubt garner is worth the negative feelings about the protest from pissed-off commuters...

Bad publicity. Just another protest. Seen it all before; CND, anti-Vietnam etc. Nothing new under the sun.

[JimC]

Nothing else is working at the moment. We seem incapable of voting for strong climate action.

I think that the % of people who are deeply concerned about climate change is rising, and that the last Federal election will be the last gasp of conservative climate change deniers...

[pErvinalia]

I wouldn't be so sure. Labor seems to have gone back to being spineless after getting spanked in the last election. They are apparently already thinking of winding back their 45% renewables target. Coalition will continue to do nothing.

[Brian Peacock]

A couple of kids have glued themselves to the road over one of the major bridges in the Brisbane CBD today. Good work kids. But I can't help wondering how you glue yourself to a road. Have to be pretty good glue. I wonder how they get them off.

Superglue. Solvent.

[pErvinalia]

Dangerously flammable levels of solvent.

[Brian Peacock]

My main point is that there needs to be a clear and sizeable majority of voters who are convinced about the need for more rapid action on climate change, and will vote accordingly. Some types of aggressive protests, deliberately disruptive to ordinary commuters, may be counter-productive in achieving the required groundswell...

It's no different than grandad and grandma striking between the wars for better working conditions, wages, housing or healthcare. I'm sure people said the same thing during the general strike, "I think the miners might have a reasonable point, but I'm not sure deliberately disrupting ordinary people's ability to heat their homes is the most productive way of going about it."

Who are these 'ordinary people'?

XR are 'ordinary people' too Jim, they just live in extraordinary times. XR's protests are not aggressive, they are forms of deliberately non-violent direct action. For example, before a large action XR informs the police about what they going to do beforehand - they acknowledge that they're going to be breaking the law and that the police have to do their jobs, and while they might not tell the police exactly which part of town they're going to congregate on they assure the police that they're not going to act unpredictably or resist arrest. XRs protests are a form of civil disobedience but they are not an unpredictable unruly 'aggressive' mob looking for a physical confrontation with authority that involves deploying the riot squad, the mounted division, or trying to scrape grannies off the road with a water cannon. I would suggest that you've picked up this kind of language, and with the language the concerns, from the right-leaning media, who so far have focused on dividing the members of XR from 'ordinary working people' and framed their action within the context of a mob and extreme left politics.

Professor Gene Sharp's work on civil disobedience and protests suggests that if a national movement can mobilise 3% of a population in non-violent direct action and more than c.30% of the population basically think the protestors are right then governments are brought to a tipping point where they have to decide whether to crackdown, compromise, or cave in. The truth is that wherever XR stage a protest - and remember they're not all about gluing themselves to things, they do other non-violenty stuff - then they see a flurry of interest in the media and things like website hits, applications to join, and attendances at meetings go up.

Here's Gene Sharp's collated list of non-violent direct actions culled from protest movements around the world over that last 60 years.

https://www.aeinstein.org/nonviolentact ... nt-action/

[Brian Peacock]

No urban commuters were annoyed during this action...

Extinction Rebellion blocks UK fracking site in climate protest

Extinction Rebellion has blocked the entrance to the UK’s only active fracking site in a demonstration against what it called the “burgeoning catastrophe” of global warming.

Protesters from the environmental group gathered outside the shale gas site on Preston New Road, near Blackpool, on Tuesday morning alongside a yellow boat bearing the words: “Planet before profit”.

The energy firm Cuadrilla said its operations were not affected by the protest. The action comes 15 days after the UK’s biggest fracking-related earthquake to date was triggered at the site, causing houses to shake for miles around.

A spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion said its latest action was to highlight “the conscious, cynical inaction of the government in response to a climate and ecological emergency”.

They added in a statement: “We will stand with those communities which have tenaciously and peacefully resisted this for years. They have sought to defend against the threat fracking poses to their air and water, their health, their land, including their homes, as demonstrated by the recent tremors.

“There is a yawning chasm between words and deeds. The science is clear: the world must move urgently away from a system of ever-increasing consumption and destruction, totally founded and dependent on fossil fuels.”...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... -cuadrilla