No we don’t, this disruptive behavior just makes people angry against you, it doesn’t do anything for your goals, even if you have good intentions.
Unfortunately, being angry for our cause is better than being apathetic towards our cause, so we’ll take what we can get while the planet melts and ecosystems die.
I really disagree with this premise.
For example, where I’ve worked, I’ve generally found it easy to make improvements that solely benefit the environment, even though they are virtually always more expensive and carry no other advantages, and often additional disadvantages.
Since the more recent protests, though, and especially after we all nearly lost our jobs due to the antics of a handful of protestors, that support has just gone. Being greener is no longer and end unto itself, and people don’t want to either be seen as supporting their cause or ‘helping’ the people who cause real problems for everyday people.
It may not be logical, but even I am quieter about my environmentism because I don’t really want to be associated with people who proudly block ambulances and cause pain for thousands of regular people.
Because ultimately, nobody’s going to ‘just stop’. We’re not here due to the scheming of a few people, there are a lot of reasons oil is currently so ubiquitous, and fixing it is going to be a fairly gradual process. Fortunately, oil isn’t the only way we can fix emissions, and so progress over spans of a decade or two, when that progress is going in parallel, can yield dramatic results.
My concern is that antics like these are going to slow or even reverse some of the political will to suffer the short term pain required to make these changes as quickly as we need.
Blocking the ambulance was unfortunate but they had glued themselves to the road prior to its arrival and it simply did a u-turn and carried on and the passenger was fine. It’s not like they set out to block emergency vehicles on purpose.
Meanwhile:
In 2018, more than 8 million people died from the pollution caused by coal, oil, gas, and other fossil fuels. That accounts for nearly 1-in-5 of all deaths worldwide.
So on one hand we got people being inconvenienced and ultimately being fine, and on the other hand 5,749 people have died in the 6 hours since I originally commented here…
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935121000487
I agree it’s not particularly impactful, and most would have made an exception, but it only takes one person to argue that it’ doesn’t matter, or to defend it as something deliberate on the news to upset a lot of people.
Id say the biggest problem with this reasoning is that these protests do not save millions of people, and that that number would be easy to reduce, that the only reason that those occur is that nobody fancies doing anything about it.
In the same way, my employer going out of business would be a big deal to me, my colleagues and a few others, but it’s ultimately unimportant compared to climate change. But if that happened due to these protests, it wouldn’t actually fix anything.
I don’t dislike these protests because I don’t agree with the core message, I dislike them because I genuinely see them as counter productive. Talking to people about climate issues at the moment feels like I’ve jumped back in time 20 years, and mainstream beliefs 5 years ago now get you put in the “tree hugging hippie” catagory, as people think about “those protestors”.
This can’t change overnight, as I’ve said, there no ‘just’ anything when it comes to the fuel and infrastructure that powers our world. The faster we change, the more impact there will be on quality of life, these are sacrifices that everyone will have to bear, and so the main battle is the political will, it’s about people across the world choosing to make sacrifices. This is why poisoning the otherwise positive image of environmentalism and pissing lots of people off for intangible ‘gains’ genuinely concerns me.
Id say the biggest problem with this reasoning is that these protests do not save millions of people, and that that number would be easy to reduce, that the only reason that those occur is that nobody fancies doing anything about it.
Yes, you’ve inexplicably stumbled upon the very reason these protests exist in the first place, while simultaneously not getting it AND ALSO setting the bar for success at the protestors themselves accomplishing what governments and oil companies should be doing.
And all because what?
It inconveniences you slightly while our planet and people go off the rails. Nicely done, this is precisely the type of thing we are fighting against just to get some damn renewables going faster.
Nobody being angry at you even listens to your course thatd the point.
Its like spitting in someone’s face and telling them their shoes are untied.
Protests are likely older than your last name, and have worked about as long.
You can tell kinda in the same way you can tell unions work. The people theyre meant to be used against get reeeeeaal agitated when they start happening.
There is a difference between protests and throwing tantrums…
What part of climate change do you not take seriously?
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You called it a tantrum. Which means you think that someone can overreact to the problem.
If someone can overreact to climate change, that means you think theres something not that serious about the problem.
If you were serious about climate change, you would understand that making a few people mad doesnt matter as much as getting as many people as possible talking about it as possible, because of how pressing and serious of a threat it is.
But you think doing anything that risks making others mad is too far, a tantrum. Which means you dont think its that pressing, because if you did you would be more concerned about stopping it.
So. What is it that you dont actually take seriously?
I call it a tantrum because that’s what it is, its not a protest or anything to be just and only disruptive. Its literally just one step away from murdering people for your course, aka terrorism. This Shitshow has to be stopped or actual climate change protests loose all credibility by being associated with this shit.
And its not just a few, take the idiots that glue themselves to roads in Germany, there have been studies that literally say that they make most people just mad and hate them. Like so mad that police could literally beat them into hospital and most normal people would be happy about that.
I disagree, some people get angry and then think about ways to make it stop, which gets them thinking about why people are doing the protests in the first place.
Sorry but disagreement is only possible for opinions, i stated a fact. Your “protest” ruins peoples day, they don’t think about your course, they think you are a asshole.
If i destroy your phone and try telling you that you need to think about the environment im pretty certain you would be to angry at me to even listening to what i want to say…
Disagreement works just fine when youre incorrect about your fact.
Im just not however…
I mean, you objectively are. How a random person might react to a protest isnt a fact. Some people might react that way. Many will not. It is not the factual response to have a specific response to an event.
It your opinion that more people will respond in that way. Nothing factual about it.
A random person? No. A society? Pretty much.
It’s not like that at all, though. It’s like interrupting a large games event to protest drilling for oil. No one has been spat on, and it’s about something much more important than shoelaces.
It comes down to the exactly same thing. Nobody cares about your saying, everyone hates you.
I care, and I don’t hate them. Matters more than some fallout boys jackoff tournament or whatever it was
Amen
I agree. It’s time to stop the nonviolent protests and start the violent protests.