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Should Climate Protesters Be Less Annoying?
(newrepublic.com)
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
This is too simple of a view. There are few, if any, effective ways to strike at people in power without hitting common folk at the same time. Maybe you can mildly inconvenience them, but that's it. Their power isn't isolated, it often derives from the complicity of common folk. Protests are disruptive for a reason, and it's not because "everybody involved is stupid."
For example, by blocking streets you inhibit commerce, and therefore inhibit anybody whose power derives from that commerce. But at the same time, you're blocking the average person from going to work. How great must the threat be, how dire the circumstances, before you view that as an acceptable trade-off? Because if we are not at that point now, I find it hard to believe you'd ever find it acceptable, yet I've never been given an actionable and effective alternative from the people who are squeamish over these kinds of protests. So I have to ask; if not this, then what? If not now, then when?
Infiltrate the political parties, especially the conservative right-wing ones that right now have disastrous environmental policies. These organisations are currently echo chambers driving a narrative that environmental policies are the enemy. They need to be reformed from within to get the message across that capitalism won't work if there isn't anyone around for the wealthy to sell their shit to. As long as political change is confined to what is seen as the "radical left", it is easy to marginalize the moment.