Extinction Rebellion: the new millenarian cult

Austin Williams
spiked.com

Over the past week, large groups of protesters have brought traffic to a standstill in central London. They have glued themselves to bus stops, pavements and Jeremy Corbyn’s fence. They have stood on top of trains, barricaded bridges, painted slogans on corporate headquarters and planted trees in the streets. Meanwhile, politicians have remained on holiday or cowered in Westminster. The police appear to have no idea what to do when confronted by a mass of people who don’t care if they are arrested. This is Extinction Rebellion (XR) – a new environmental protest movement that is spreading across the country.

I’d argue that three things have influenced the rise of this movement. The first is Brexit. Indeed, the politics of anger, disillusion and frustration unleashed by Brexit are possibly the most significant. There are no statistics on the Leave / Remain make-up of the environmental protesters, but one suspects Remain is overrepresented. That said, to her credit, Dr Gail Bradbrook, self-styled co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, told the Today programme that similar disruptive tactics would be ‘perfectly reasonable’ from Brexiteers ‘if democracy is not being honoured’.

The XR protesters – as Jon Snow might say – are mostly white, middle-class and often elderly. They are demonstrating their frustration that environmentalism isn’t getting enough coverage in the press and that, as XR puts it, ‘conventional approaches of voting, lobbying, petitions and protest have failed because powerful political and economic interests prevent change’. The first claim might seem to fly in the face of reality for the rest of us, who see climate campaigns, global-warming paranoia and environmental journalism at every turn. But the second point is the most contentious.

The conclusion drawn by XR activists is that democratic change is impossible and disruption is the only way to force change. Rather than pledging to improve the democratic process, to hold people more firmly to account, they are campaigning to work around it. It is the democratic process that they seek to overturn, not capitalism. Forget the old-fashioned arrogance of the Occupy movement’s slogan, ‘We are the 99 per cent’. Forget the stubborn Remainers’ assertion that 48 per cent takes precedence over the 52 per cent. XR types say that they only need ‘the involvement of 3.5 per cent of the population to succeed’.

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Kicking away the energy ladder – How environmentalism destroys hope for the poorest

Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That?

There is a new white-paper out from The GWPF that illustrates the damage being done to people in poorer countries by environmentalists’ obsession with decarbonization in their imaginary quest to stave off global warming. As Dr. John Christy once said:

"Without Energy, life is brutal and short."

 

The report, by eminent epidemiologist Mikko Paunio, says that international bodies and NGOs are trying to prevent poor countries from expanding their use of conventional fuels, have abandoned the so-called “energy ladder”  — the gradual shift to cleaner types of fuel that underpinned the clean up of air quality in industrialised nations.

As Dr Paunio explains, this will have devastating consequences:

“Indoor air pollution from domestic fires kills millions every year. But instead of helping poor people to climb the energy ladder and clean the air in their communities, the poorest people are being given gimmicks like cookstoves, which make little difference to air quality, and solar panels, which are little more than a joke.”

What is worse, the greens inside and outside the development community are blaming air pollution on power stations, industry and cars, as a way to prevent any shift to industrial power production. As Dr Paunio makes clear, most air pollution in poor countries is in fact caused by burning low-quality biofuels and coal in domestic stoves:

“Trying to blame power stations for indoor air pollution might make greens feel they are saving the planet, but the reality is that they are allowing millions of deaths from air pollution to continue. The body count is going to rival that of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.”

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