Define support? I've been there, repeating the information that you can't keep on pushing CO2 into the atmosphere, since the early 1990's as my interest was triggered in the mid 1980's. I have taken the abuse, the laughter, the isolation and the derision for decades. Yet I have never wavered in making sure that I won't be in a room where disinformation is being disseminated without having a say with the truth.
I will still be doing this a decade from today. But, at least, there will be more people who listen.
ER? A few demonstrations and a government minister, from a failing and desperate government, agrees to have a few "talks". Macron agreed to "talk" to the Giles Jeaune's too. Didn't get very far did it?
With all due respect to you as someone with undoubtedly greater experience in these matters than myself, all this really says is that you've been campaigning a long time and X/ER haven't. That doesn't seem like a good reason to dismiss what they're doing. This has all only just happened; if the talks go nowhere you can bet that XR won't be going away.
You see that's the problem with being older. We've already seen this kind of demonstrations. Over and over and over again.
This conversation reminds me of somebody I met once while I was handing out XR leaflets. He's a seasoned environmental campaigner, somebody who I'd heard of before and who is quite keenly involved in local environmental issues. Broadly speaking the conversation was along the lines of
"it won't work because nothing works, I've seen all this before, nothing works and by the way don't trust the police". Now to be fair he did have more specific criticisms of XR and that's totally fair enough, but I really can't get on board with the "nothing has worked, therefore nothing will ever work" thing. Not least because things are different now; we have really short timescales to work with that fall within the lives of people already alive now.
Now, I do accept that doing things *differently* to what has failed in the past might be a good idea. In fact I think this is what XR are doing; they've raised it to a new level. Do you know how much news coverage a march I went on called "Going Backwards On Climate Change" got? Pretty much none really. But look at XR - they've been all over the media (in the UK) in a way that no other climate campaign has ever managed. They've been sat in major TV studios telling the public that civilization could well collapse, that we need deep green adaptation, that we need radical and far reaching change. Rupert Read has been particularly notable in that regard, getting those points across very well in the face of some rather ignorant interviewers.
Just one little problem. Nobody is going to produce 30 million EV's next week, or next year or next decade (well, maybe that). As for 26 million solar roof's and powerwalls? Right, not going to happen is it.
So that's solar. Wind? We're already doing that. Just like Germany our power cost is climbing and everyone is up in arms. But it's worth the cost. Well if we can actually get rid of all those CCGT power stations that ensure you have power on a still winters night.
And what about tidal? Well you see most of those people who support ER don't want a Severn barrier. Why? Well, it might, just might, disturb some local species which live there. The fact that those local species are going to face their own extinction in the next half century, through CO2 based AGW doesn't seem to have filtered through.
Right let me address this a bit in terms of XR's plan. Clearly you've already addressed some issues in overview by stating that nothing will work because
isn't it all so difficult - but in fact XR does not seek to set out specifics.
One of the key demands of XR is for a citizens assembly to be formed to decide how to proceed nationally to deal with climate change as an emergency situation. There is precedent for such assemblies, not least in Ireland very recently - and as a result of the blockades last week this concept has had airtime on national TV.
The idea would be for citizens to be randomly selected to serve in the assembly, be fully briefed with all the facts and asked to choose the way forward. XR is not prescribing what needs to happen. It is a rather anti-capitalist movement but frankly the crisis probably does need anti-capitalist measures so I can see why that would be; nevertheless they do not seek to make this a political battle or to claim to be the people with all the answers. They want everybody to be involved and work out what to do; but getting to that point means massively raising awareness and forcing the government to sit up. Hence, blockades and glue.
Before the first actions in London some months ago, Roger Hallam (one of the co-founders) was interviewed saying that there would probably need to be 1,000 or so arrests in order to bring the Government to the table. That happened over the past week (might even be an unprecedented number of arrests in one police operation?) and now the Government has agreed to talks. One step at a time - yes the talks might not go anywhere, but if so we can already see that there is a great deal of support for XR and a large number of people willing to take part in further actions at large scale.
So lets see. For myself, I think this is something which could snowball in a big way (it already has, really).
