Drones piloted by climate-change activists target Heathrow
economist.com
economist.com
This line is curious.
When was the first one? I mean there was the shenanigans where nobody was sure if there was even a drone, but there was in that case, as far as I am aware, no evidence for any activism beyond people saying that it might be activists.
I am dubious about this reporting. If someone can show me something from people representing the organisation, that is one thing, but so far I have seen this in the Evening Standard and The Economist, who are both quite capable of pushing a load of utter bullshit dressed up as news.
>in all cases UKAB has no confirmation that a drone has flown close to an aircraft other than the report made by the pilot(s). Similarly, other than from the report of the pilot(s), UKAB has no confirmation that a drone was involved.
- https://www.airproxrealitycheck.org/uk-airprox-board-reveals...
If this becomes disruptive, well, the aircraft are unmanned.
I'm curious what they're basing that on, and who's considered an expert on phantom drones (as opposed to Phantom drones).
Attention getting stunts are an important method of participating in democracy, the primary and most effective form of such participation is influence campaigns, not voting (voting is a behavior influence campaig seek to guide, but an activist by definition seeks to have more effect through influence campaigns than they would have through their own vote.)
Yes, but in this case, I think the attention getting stunt may be the article.
You seem to be suggesting that there's a "right" way to participate in democracy. Instead of passing down armchair judgements about which forms are the wrong way to participate, could you perhaps suggest what you think would be a better alternative to what XR has planned here?
> Why would you buy something that itself has a carbon footprint ...
I'm curious as to what point you're actually trying to make here. Why do people chain themselves to bulldozers to protest mass deforestation? Why do people perform acts of civil disobedience to protest nations fighting wars? Most of the time the people who are involved in those movements are fundamentally morally compromised. For example if you're protesting the Vietnam war and the general US war mongering as an American, you're doing this from a place of extreme privilege - much of which was afforded to you precisely because of the great success the US has in previous wars.
> What do you want people to do, fly only battery-powered passenger airlines?
This is a bad faith interpretation of what the activists are trying to do. They're not protesting commercial air travel (although I'm sure many of them have strong opinions against our frivolous use of it). They're trying to wake people up to the fact that, while somewhat contentious, there's a pretty large (and growing!) consensus that we're utterly trashing our planet and hurtling headlong into catastrophe.
Breaking the law, causing public nuisance (to say the least), putting aircrafts are risk are not acceptable.
As for putting aircraft at risk, the Economist won't actually let me read the article (I wish people would stop posting links to sites like this), but I doubt they actually put anyone in danger. It's like the environmentalists who spiked trees to stop loggers--they clearly marked the affected trees, they openly informed the loggers of what they'd done, and even if they went ahead anyway, a properly maintained saw has safety measures that would prevent injury. But they were still spun as trying to murder loggers.
Is this a good, effective, worthwhile protest? I dunno. But there's got to be more a more coherent argument you could make.
Flying drones to shut down an airport is nothing like sitting in the white seats of a bus. That's a ludicrous comparison.
Such drone attacks are dangerous (they do put aircrafts at risk), affect thousands of people, cause millions in damage, and, simply put, are lightweight terrorism. It is quite right that the article open with a reference to the IRA attacking Heathrow airport with empty mortar rounds to shut it down. This is exactly the same thing.
And it is completely ineffective. The only result is to alienate the majority of the public.
Why do I say that? Because in response to a pre-planned demonstration from a group that has made abundantly clear that they intend to engage in acts of civil disobedience that are 100% non violent, you have used the words "drone attack", "terrorism" and have likened them to the IRA.
I'm pretty confident I have absolutely no chance of changing your mind here, but it would mean a lot to me if you were to just consider for a moment your choice of words and what they say about your tolerance to people who hold different opinions to you.
By the way, I have not likened their actions to the IRA's, the article does that based on fact. That's obviously a very disturbing and inconvenient fact to you but that's a fact nonetheless.
Again, what they are doing is not civil disobedience and has no place in a democratic country.
>I'm not going to engage them because I don't think you're really interested in having an open discussion about this.
>I'm pretty confident I have absolutely no chance of changing your mind here
What's that about tolerance of other's opinions?
So far these people interfering with the airport operations have been compared to India fighting the British for independence, African Americans fighting for their civil rights and people hiding Jews from the Nazis. And you want people to take your arguments seriously?
> Of course, you are completely entitled to your opinions, but I'm not going to engage them because I don't think you're really interested in having an open discussion about this.
I feel like I shouldn't need to point out how this disproves your implication that I'm not tolerant of other people's opinions. But maybe I actually do. Yikes. Acknowledging that someone else holds a differing view but choosing not to engage with it is something I consider completely reasonable. Maybe you don't, and hey, that's cool! It's your opinion after all :) In case it wasn't obvious though, due to my forceful tone, I do want to state unequivocally for the record that not only do I respect that you might hold opinions that are incompatible with my own, but I also accept your conflicting opinions are 100% valid. If I then come up with rebuttals (even if they're worded as angry internet justice warrior rants), it's not because I think you're fundamentally an idiot, but because what you're saying makes me angry enough that I want to try and get you to look at things a different way. That's not intolerance. That's social discourse.
> So far these people interfering with the airport operations have been compared to India fighting the British for independence, African Americans fighting for their civil rights and people hiding Jews from the Nazis. And you want people to take your arguments seriously?
Actually, I didn't make those comparisons. So why are you making strawmans of other people's arguments and using them to discredit me?
Has anyone actually checked if extinction rebellion actually has any plans to fly drones round Heathrow? Currently we are taking a very vaguely worded article from the Economist at face value. Not to cast aspersions, but the Economist does talk a lot of bollocks sometimes.
And yes, this is factual and does not come from the Economist: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-48470623
This action is actively committing acts to interfere with people who are engaged in exercising their rights as free human beings.
Are you seriously comparing sitting on a bus in the wrong seat (harmful to no one, costs to no one) to interfering with airplanes with a drone (potentially harmful, costly to others)?
>As for putting aircraft at risk, the Economist won't actually let me read the article (I wish people would stop posting links to sites like this), but I doubt they actually put anyone in danger
"I can't read the article, but I'll talk about it anyway..."
Every protest isn't the equivalent of India fighting for independence.
>Climate change is a vastly more serious problem than either of those two.
Fortunately, you don't get to decide which issues are "most important" to other people.
It's a tough line to swallow from the GP, but I wasn't expecting anyone to disagree that human effected climate change was important. Surely it's the most important issue humans have faced, ever?
Doing that just leads to emotion-charged-but-pointless arguments.
Sure, but it's also a vastly more complex problem. Those examples consisted of specific regimes which protestors wanted to change in specific ways, and making enforcing the law more trouble than it was worth for those regimes was a simple and logical route to achieving that change.
I don't see the same logical connection between the large-scale technological and institutional change across the entire globe needed to avert climate change and some guy in London with a drone ruining people's holidays.
If you're trying to achieve complex behavioural changes as opposed to rendering a bad law unenforceable, it's probably a good idea not to pursue a strategy consisting solely of irritating the general public.
Disrupting highly polluting businesses are probably the way to go. Many people don't care long term if there's some minor disruption to their workday, but if it involves them missing their daughter's wedding, or not being able to see a sick relative before they die then you lose that person along with a ton of other people forever.
Like what?
We have known about environmental issues for decades, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to get politicians to foerum to tackle the issue and sign treaties that the next guy voted in just decides they don't care, etc, etc, etc... Companies with more money than all citizen environmentalist groups put together lobby politicians and organise disinformation campaign. What do you do when "participating in the démocratie" no longer works?
There's a plausible argument that this isn't enough, but it's difficult to see how an unpopular activist group with little to say on actual solutions to climate change is likely to improve upon this status quo, especially since they actively ruled out engaging with supportive businesses because ultimately the aesthetics of grassroots protest appealed more to them than the opportunity to press for tangible emissions reduction.
The practical solutions are well known in the community, see the Drawdown project for a pretty exhaustive list. Since we are very late in the fight against climate change, all of these solutions need to be implemented, so there's no point in promoting just a few of them.
For now, they prefer to focus on raising awareness and get citizens to demand change urgently. The next step will be to ask for a citizen's assembly (https://rebellion.earth/act-now/resources/citizens-assembly).
This is a silly argument. It's impossible to live in the modern world without generating carbon. No one sane says we should stop entirely. People just want to reduce the impact to manageable levels. A single toy drone obviously has a tiny carbon footprint.
It would probably be fine to cause up to (maybe more?) than current global CO2 emissions if it then caused a global reduction over the next decade.
Their objection is like objecting to cutting fire-breaks to save a forest.
Pay about $200 for each ton of carbon dioxide equivalent their flights blow into the air instead of benefiting from tax free kerosene.
The generally accepted social cost for a ton of CO2 is about $40. The per passenger emissions are about 3,500 miles per ton.
We can't currently efficiently and scalably remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Charging based on marginal climate change or marginal removal cost is dumb. It's like MegaCorp charging marginal cost for a widget. Sure, it covers operational costs, but the company has no way to pay back debts for capex and other sunk costs so they go bankrupt.
Unless you consider whole-system costs for complete carbon neutrality, including at a minimum all hydrocarbon-utilizing modern industries (energy, transport, manufacturing), you're mispricing CO2 emissions.
The easiest way to calculate the marginal cost of 1 tonne of CO2 is to create a market and find the smallest amount you can pay someone else to reduce their emissions by 1 tonne.
These carbon credits exist, and they generally run for ~$40 per tonne. I presume they work, for example, by paying the premium for fully renewable energy versus non-renewal energy, thus converting some amount of electricity generation which would have been CO2 emitting into non-emitting for someone who is paying the non-renewable rate. They could also be indirectly reducing CO2 emissions by helping to pay for CO2 reducing R&D or other such projects. Or I suppose you could pay someone to extract the CO2 directly, but I would guess that's the least efficient way to spend your dollars presently.
There is a logical fallacy to what you are trying to say there. My advice - stay away from logical fallacies.
I am no fan of XR and their tactics. I recommend to anyone that they investigate XR a bit more to see what is going on with them. However, on this occasion they get a free pass from me, even if they are going to waste a lot of police resources with their publicity seeking.
The reason why I give them a free pass is because something has to be said about excessive flying. Rather than the facile black and white 'battery powered planes' nonsense, what it comes down to is this - excessive flying, by business primarily and also for tourism.
I know someone who flies every week from Scotland to London to sit at a desk doing green energy projects. This is absurd as it gets. He is not alone.
If your grandfather in Australia has died and the funeral is next week then I am not going to be berating you for your carbon footprint - you have got to go.
But, if you are hopping on a plane to go to an afternoon meeting in Europe from Heathrow and you are in the habit of flying on a weekly basis then you are probably overdoing it.
Many companies have merged to end up with curious company structures, so a team can be dotted out over several continents with several micro-managers having to jet around the world to have one to one meetings with their hires. It is all rather expensive but there is a whole class of people who just go around from one allegedly important meeting to another. They aren't the people doing the real work, they have people who don't fly for doing that. The people who aren't flying do all their communication over email, Slack and ye-olde-telephone.
We have all seen how these meetings go. There is a name for the culture that goes with this - 'jollies'. I mean, who wouldn't want a nice hotel for a couple of nights, the feeling of being someone that comes with being in a business class seat and everything expenses paid? It is all work and you can grumble about how gruelling the flight is and what a hardship it is to be away from the family.
I heard a manager once say how he had spent eighty hours flying that month. This was to deliver oral presentations for sales purposes. I appreciate sales have got to do what they have to do but this manager was doing old school travelling salesman stuff. The game really has moved on. Customer service on the web and the sales channels there is where the real magic happens, not with some guy shuttling around the world on a plane. If this manager had got his presentation out of PowerPoint and onto the web then he could have saved himself at least half his flying time. But no, some people are stuck in the past. Doing HTML is hard work and needs skill, going on jollies to present Powerpoint presentations is de-rigeur.
It is very hard to challenge the culture of excess flying in the UK. The people doing it have huge carbon footprints in the rest of their lives, with their homes, their cars and everything they consume. I know a weekend isn't peak time for business travel but activism often has to be at weekends because activists have jobs too. But, if XR do disrupt flying and that results in one sales person doing stupid flights thinking 'maybe I will put my powerpoint slides online and put together a really useful enquiry form' then that is a win.
Back in 2016 you could have pointed to the Brexit referendum as an example of meaningful participation. You could say to the environmental campaigners: copy UKIP, get the government to concede a referendum on shutting down Heathrow. Campaign in the the referendum. There are big problems with persuading enough people to win, but democracy works; if you persuade and win, Heathrow actually gets shut down.
Now they laugh at you. Even if you win the referendum, nothing happens. Then nothing else happens. Then the BBC uses a combat comedian to signal that you are fair game for acid attacks if you refuse to shut up about nothing happening.
The question of whether democracy in the UK is a sham splits into two questions. The split is analogous to the split implicit in the slogan. "Justice must be seen to be done." It is not really enough that Justice is done. Justice must be done in public, so that people can see that it is done. Similarly Brexit is complicated. Many people accept the politicians assurances that they are having difficulty doing something difficult. But that isn't really enough. We want to keep hot-heads on board with democratic politics. That required leaving on 29th March. We missed that deadline, and there will be adverse consequences throughout public life for many years to come.
Some tidbits: your comment is like saying "there surely must be less painful ways for your body to tell you to be more careful with a hammer"
In a trivial sense, it's true. But real pain and annoyance is exactly what it takes for people to prioritize dealing with a problem. These sorts of things are a healthy immune-system flare-up showing that we're not totally doomed.
The way to avoid such annoyance is to not have let the problem get as bad as it is in the first place.
I mean, who is going to get stuck in the air for an extra hour, land, and say "man, those guys are right".
At worst, it would just make me feel contempt for them. At best it just invigorates the people who already were on their side.
Really, listen to the podcast.
There are indeed lots of questions about the right way to do this.
When your body flares up like crazy over an allergy, many people indeed get contemptuous about their own immune system rather than just hate pollen. So, it's not like just any and all mayhem in the name of a cause is helpful…
If you abuse terrorism charges and make it so no protests of anything are ever really disruptive, things that threaten the long-term stability and health of society will go unaddressed until they actually cause far more catastrophic problems.
Please edit personal swipes out of your comments here. Your comment would be just fine and much better without that bit.
Instead, the activists here are disrupting air traffic using nonviolent means.
How about "I'm going to aim blinding lasers at pilot flying a plane unless you don't fly the plane?"
As you say, that's not 100% without risk. It's an erosion of the safety margin, and safety margins are there for a reason.
Perhaps I missed reading statements where these people said they would fly an unmanned drone into a plane
I feel like there should be a term for this tactic of debate...
They are doing this because they know that the risk of danger is high enough that officials will shut down air traffic.
The response may or may not be the same if a bomb threat were called, but that’s not what happened and it seems you clearly understand this; I’m forced to then ask-why stretch the metaphor to the point of absurdity as you’ve done above?
They aren't trying to kill people, so they aren't colloquially terrorists, but they are purposefully introducing risk to the activity of ordinary people.
Giving warnings is more responsible than the alternatives, but it doesn't really excuse putting passengers at risk.
Flying drone causes incoming planes to divert to other airports and prevents take-offs - there is no crash risk.
> They can hold up signs outside the airport, but they have no right to put aircraft at risk. That is extremism.
You suggest they should protest where everybody can ignore them and in order to prove your point pull up false equivalences. That is NIMBY'ism.
There very much is increased risk whenever a flight plan requires sudden changes- the increased cognitive load on the flight controllers, the increased stress level on the pilots, the increased stress on the passengers... Each one may not seem like much, but it's a hole poked in the cheese.
If drone would pose any significant danger to flight control system then entire system is not working as it should.
It's nowhere close to "cutting the power to air traffic control" as original post claimed.
If you treat regular people like the enemy, expect to be treated as such.
However, if you go into it calling attention to an issue using humor and goodwill, more people might join your cause.
These people are idiots and remind me of PETA.
However, I also think that the old adage "desperate times call for desperate measures" applies here. Yes, there are plenty of actions being taken to combat the damage we're inflicting to this little wet rock we all call home. But it seems obvious to me that there are enough people who think we're not doing enough that they are organizing and mobilizing in extraordinary ways.
Maybe some of those extraordinary ways cross the line. But who decides what the line is anyway? The people who are sitting at home typing out angry comments about how we should and shouldn't deal with the existential threat to our species? I hope not, or we're all doomed!
1b : the use or threat is designed to influence the government or an international governmental organisation
1c: the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause
So XR is an ideological and/or political cause, intended to influence Governments, and this threat to fly drones over airports in and of itself risks the public. Assume a failure and/or crash of the drone, and all the bad "accidental" things which could arise.
One could certainly argue that the statute is "wrong", and that this sort of action should be treated as some other criminal offence. However I believe it is capable of being argued as terrorism under that definition.
Hence anyone so charged could be subject to pre-trial detention of up to 28 days, and then may have to convince a jury that they should engage in Nullification.
Part of the complaints about that Act when passed was specifically that it covered stuff which did not involve violence (2b - 2e). Note that the criteria in Section 1 (2) are logically OR'ed - only one of 2a through 2e has to be satisfied.
If you believe you may need advice from a Lawyer, I suggest you consult one.
I'd rather expect it to conclude they did.
Forget about planes flying (or not).
How much does one of these drones weigh? How much damage or injury would one cause if it falls upon someone or some equipment within the airport grounds? Think of the various flammable liquids in various parts of the airport.
We have rules (and licensing conditions) about flying drones in general, simply because of the serious risk some of them can entail. They came in within the last few years.
I disagree with your assessment. I myself am certainly not a lawyer, but the way I interpret that language is for something to be considered an act of terrorism it has to meet a criteria from section [1] AND section [2]. I agree that the planned drone demonstration meets 1c, but I don't think it meets any of the criteria from section 2.
If you're suggesting that because they're disrupting transportation activity then they are somehow creating serious risk to the health and safety of the public, then I wonder what you think of any kind of large scale protest march that closes down the majority of main roads in a capital city? Is that terrorism too?
Also not a lawyer, but it seems pretty clear to me that flying drones around an airport can be considered to fall under 2(d): "creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public".
The fact that the airport can respond by closing down operations to mitigate the risk does not make it OK, any more than phoning in a warning before setting off a bomb makes that OK.
I still think it’s unfair to compare a drone inside restricted airspace (and notified well ahead of time) to an explosive device in the terminal.
But I can certainly see how the two things can be put in the same category by many people.
Imagine someone waiting for a life-saving kidney transplant or whatever. Now you have to get an uber to deliver it.
When I think of the word terrorism, and I'm sure many others think like me, I think of 9/11. Or the Las Vegas shooting. Or one of the many horrible bombings in various parts of Middle East, etc.
Those are acts that have no pre-warning, and are designed to inflict as much pain and suffering as possible, and to cause as much fear and, dare I say it, terror as possible.
What XR are intending on doing is abusing an obvious outcome of notifying civil aviation authorities that a dangerous object will be active in airspace where civilian commercial airflight is taking place. The outcome being flights are grounded and redirected, causing a lot of inconvenience to people and costing the economy potentially millions of dollars.
I think XR believes it's a 100% obvious thing that by notifying the appropriate authorities well ahead of time, all planes will be safely rerouted or grounded. If there was even the slightest chance that their actions could cause a plane crash, then I firmly believe XR would not even consider such an action.
So yes, I understand we have actual legislation that could very reasonably be used to charge the people responsible for the plan at Heathrow airport. The problem is I think that the legislation in question was designed to target something very different. If activists from XR are convicted of charges stemming from the "Terrorism Act", it becomes perfectly reasonable to label those activists as terrorists.
But then what we've actually done here is placed activists who never had the slightest intention of causing grievous harm to other people (loss of life, massive economic damage, etc) into the same category we reserve for extremists who have perpetrated genuine atrocities. That just seems completely wrong to me.
If we want to bring about legislation that criminalizes certain forms of activism that go "too far", then fine. I think even that could be a perilous path, but I can make my peace with it being necessary. I would just hope we stop and ensure everyone is on the same page that we're categorizing these people as something like "activists who went too far" in order to distinguish them from "extremists who carried out attacks that we as a society consider utterly unthinkable and terrifying".
Did the Las Vegas shooter have any ideological motivation? I thought he was just a nasty guy with a lot of guns.
Probably the people you inconvenience.
A bunch of vegans disrupted traffic in Melbourne, Australia recently. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-08/melbourne-vegan-prote...
I don't think they made many friends.
It's really hard getting someone to change their mind or their thinking about an issue. But I firmly believe actively making enemies is probably not the way to go about things.
If I worked in Melbourne on that day, I would have eaten a revenge steak.
I don't think they're interested in making friends. They're interested in trying to persuade more people to stop eating the flesh of sentient creatures when our diets don't even require it.
> It's really hard getting someone to change their mind or their thinking about an issue.
I agree.
> But I firmly believe actively making enemies is probably not the way to go about things.
I disagree. Pretty sure there was lots of enemies made when women demanded the right to vote. Or when African Americans demanded to stop being segregated. We take a lot of things for granted as "obvious" now, but they're only obvious because enough people stood up and said they don't really care for your feelings.
> If I worked in Melbourne on that day, I would have eaten a revenge steak.
I think that says more about you than it does about the vegan activists.
And first making those people your enemies is a good way to persuade them to do it?
Also as an aside, I think there's deeper societal problems that we need to face if a few people lying on a road and stopping others from getting to work on time results in those people being considered "enemies".
It worked on the Klan, it worked on the babist church. Of course it is not satisfying and you get no virtue points.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that taking the time to really connect with an individual so that you can then grapple with their beliefs from a place of deep, shared understanding is more ideal.
The problem is most of the scientific community is telling us that we're heading towards dire circumstances in the next few decades. I don't think we really have the time to hold everyone's hand and bring them gently to the realization that we're all part of a massive problem that could very well threaten the continued survival of our species :(
Ideally, yes, but in the debate about climate change, as with other issues like vaccines and whether the earth is round, there are bad actors who aren’t interested in having a rational debate no matter how many indisputable facts are put in their way.
There’s no point trying to engage with them; it’s just a waste of everyone’s time and energy. At least flat earthers can largely be ignored and we’re finally seeing community-preserving action against anti-vaxxers [1]. I don’t know what an equivalent action would be for bad-faith climate “debaters” because it’s not like we can leave them on this planet and go somewhere else.
1: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/anti-vaxxers-defeate...
It means that I had a bad day because some one made me late for work and I vented my frustration out on a meal.
I watched the Netflix flat earther documentary and even the physicists interviewed preferred not to ridicule the flat earthers because they wanted to make sure they kept an open dialogue. I think there's a similar threshold for annoying people. Once you cross it, a lot of people are just going to stop listening to you.
In a strict sense, you’re right, our diets don’t require meat. But most people wouldn’t consider it practical to take the 5-10 different supplements needed to replace all of the benefits of eating meat, fish, eggs and dairy. And that approach is almost certainly suboptimal to whole food sources anyway.
You need B12, that's all. Pretty much everyone in the first world supplements iodine, I don't know why some people have such reservations with B12.
XR are not interested in making friends, but causing enough disruption to get government to treat the issue seriously, in the manner of civil rights and universal suffrage actions. They've certainly increased awareness and discussion. That they actually seem to be making friends by doing so would seem a surprise bonus.
Not only that, the signs are it's working, as change (insignificant tokenism, but nonetheless a step) has already achieved. Between XR and the school strikes parliament has actually declared a climate emergency, and even prospective Tory leadership candidates have declared positions on zero emissions. I don't expect the Tory party to actually do much, but it's a hook on which further legislation will be hung as XR and others are aiming to make it impossible to ignore.
You might be interested by "The Happiness-Energy Paradox: Energy Use is Unrelated to Subjective Well-Being".
Earth’s per capita energy use continues to grow, despite technological advances and widespread calls for reduction in energy consumption. The negative environmental consequences are well known: resource depletion, pollution, and global warming. However many remain reluctant to cut energy consumption because of the widespread, although, implicit, belief that a nation’s well being depends on its energy consumption. This article systematically examines the evidential support for the relationship between energy use and subjective well-being at the societal level, by integrating data from multiple sources, collected at multiple levels of government, and spanning four decades. This analysis reveals, surprisingly, that the most common measure of subjective well-being, life satisfaction, is unrelated to energy use -- whether measured at the national, state or county level.
Cost is trivial compared to the cost of inaction. The consequences of no action on climate change will have enormous financial cost times ten, times twenty. Do we really want to find out?
You might want to look at Labour, SNP and Lib Dem climate policy. Whether they get to form a government or informal coalition is, of course, another matter as environment is not - yet - the sole issue that wins elections. Even the Conservative party is moving in the right direction, albeit glacially slowly with some creative accounting.
The only choice left is matter of degree.
(Also hard to imagine that legislators in more climatically-significant countries like China are likely to see climate anarchists shutting down British airports as a sign that more action needs to be taken on emissions and not a sign that certain parts of the West have lost their minds over the subject of climate change.)
The government's net zero strategy is little more than not disputing the Select Committee on Climate Change's report. As the committee themselves note there now needs to be actual policy. From an administration that has been hugely counterproductive to adoption of greener energy.
Edit: I suspect Boris forgot about his pledge the morning after he uttered it. :)
When are we all doomed? Can you put a date (year) on it?
Anyway, I'm not a climatologist, but from what I understand we will be seeing significant global ramifications in the next 2-3 decades. In other words, it's not just the next generation that's going to suffer, it's going to be a great deal many of us who are alive today.
When you do, you may find that while there's virtually no question human activities are having effect(s) on climate (very likely negative) there's a LOT of uncertainty on what and how much the effect(s) are.
How about when Al Gore told your that inconvenient truth that the sea levels world rise 100m during the next decade (that was 15 years ago btw)?
But let's not talk in the abstract here. We're talking about climate change now. In 2019. And I believe very strongly that our planet is going through unprecedented changes that are caused by human activity. Those changes will result in suffering for a huge number of fellow members of my beloved species.
If you don't believe the same things I do, that's cool. I truly hope I'm wrong and you're right.
Funny you mention that. No one needed to panic, 1980s politicians appeared to remember what some of their job was. Two rather right leaning free-market monetarist politicians - Thatcher and Reagan - championed international action to phase out freon and other CFCs. Very successfully. The ozone hole closed.
At the exact same time Thatcher was making speeches - to the UN and many others about the need for strong international action on climate. That was less successful. Had anyone bothered to listen we might have sorted emissions by now. Here's one snippet from her 1989 UN speech[1]:
"We should work through this great organisation and its agencies to secure world-wide agreements on ways to cope with the effects of climate change, the thinning of the Ozone Layer, and the loss of precious species.
We need a realistic programme of action and an equally realistic timetable.
Each country has to contribute, and those countries who are industrialised must contribute more to help those who are not."
How prescient.
> sea levels world rise 100m during the next decade
He did not say that.
https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/eu/
And my post was not about not taking measures, but about the catastrophic scenarios we keep being presented.
> The ozone hole closed.
Well, the thing is my point is exactly the exaggeration of those catastrophic scenarios:
1: we kept being told the hole would take hundreds of years to close even if we completely shuted down all CFC emissions at the time.
2: China continues to emit CFCs: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44738952
On the one hand, you're saying that trying to tackle climate change in the UK is pointless because China is contributing the lion's share of CO2. But then on the other hand you're equating the climate change crisis to crises that have come before and were proven to be exaggerated scenarios.
It might be worth you stating where you stand on climate change, otherwise I'm not really sure what points you're actually trying to make.
1: These catastrophic scenarios have historically been great exaggerations of reality.
2: The major culprit at the moment, by a long margin, is China, while the EU has actually a very good track in reducing CO2 emissions.
1. Yep, I somewhat agree. So can you please clarify your stance as to whether the current climate change situation is another example?
2. Yep, and I sincerely hope China also pulls their heads out of their collective asses. However, the UK is also not out of the woods yet [1]. Just because China has a long way to go doesn't mean any other country should be easing off the gas pedal (terrible pun, hope you'll forgive me).
[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/9779945/8-08...
i.e. If all other countries would go on a steady course of diminishing their emissions for about 1%/year like the EU has been doing for the past 3 decades, the problem will be addressed.
Apologies for my shorthand purely for brevity, I thought the real progress was quite well known. The ozone hole is not actually closed yet. The trend is very much in the right direction thanks to those international treaties on CFCs. There's also huge hysteresis in the system so change follows very slowly indeed. The trend of improvement has indeed slowed, apparently courtesy of China breaching the treaty they signed - they have form here, not just the recent breach of Hong Kong treaties. Sadly the UN and international community doesn't seem willing to sanction China for breaches of anything much.
At current progress - depending on China - a century or a little over looks to be right on the money. The clock is at about 50 years. Nonetheless it looks like we found the right cause and remedy, and acted in appropriate time.
Less exaggerated catastrophe, more bloody accurate estimate I'd say. As your BBC link confirms. Here's a link with some trend graphs - see for yourself.
Where's the exaggeration? The odd piece reporting badly doesn't make the case - the media is often terrible reporting science. Any science. :)
https://theconversation.com/ozone-hole-closing-for-the-year-...
My issue with those analysis is that they are political, not environmentalist. For instance, if you look at India in those same analysis, you see they are doing great (although having increased they CO2 emissions in 300% and set to soon become the 2nd biggest polluter by a long margin).
In fact that's my issue with this all movement: It seems to take roots in contesting Western Society by using the climate crisis to force major political change in the West by disrupting the all economic output (because this will be what happens if you suddenly break the energy consumption by several %), and then build a society according to the political views of a minority that thinks they know best.
At the same time, that won't stop global warming at all, since the emissions on the West are already the minor part of the global emissions (due to china) and soon will become an even smaller part (due to India).
I'm not sure which environmental extremists you are thinking of. Environmental extremists like the UN IPCC - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose current chair is an economist - are contesting Western society by disrupting all economic output? There was me thinking they are working to try and keep the possibility of some economic output by avoiding civilisation crash.
This is not some cliche hair-shirt 70s environmental hippies going overboard on the ganja at peace camp. This is chemists, meteorologists, climatologists and economists, etc appointed by the world's governments. Governments that are, I assume, mostly not seeking a rerun of 1917.
XR want to achieve the IPCC's aims. Nothing more. I see regular people from a diverse mix of very normal backgrounds with regular jobs. I see no reds under the bed.
Yeah, it's really strange that a planetary risk doesn't come to pass when society reacts swiftly and does what science recommends them to do (i.e. banning CFCs, which the world did in the Montreal treaty).
1: The part where we, at the time, were told that the hole would take hundreds of years to close: It didn't. (Pear Reviewed article from 1996: https://www.nap.edu/read/9042/chapter/1#6)
2: China is still producing those CFCs: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44738952
The fact that China is flaunting the rules the international community agreed on means what, exactly? The undeniable fact is the ozone hole did NOT continue to grow, because the majority of the world halted their use of CFCs. And wouldn't you know it, when we stopped using CFCs we stopped fucking up our ozone!
It proves the all thing was an exaggeration.
If they were really into desperate measures, their actions would be targeting China (you know, that country that now produces more CO2 than all the Western countries combined and that is set to keep greatly increasing it during the next decade), not the only set of developed countries that actually did something and greatly decreased their CO2 emissions in the last decades.
The people involved in XR are British citizens. If they were to go to China and start performing acts of civil disobedience, they'd simply be deported (or worse).
Instead, they're trying to effect change in a place where they're afforded civil liberties to do so. I don't claim to speak for that movement, and maybe I'm not even thinking along the same lines as they are, but I would guess their hope is that if they change their home country then that example will help to influence other nations.
Each country should be responsible to make their territory carbon neutral. If they have an high or low population density should be an irrelevant point.
Who knows how many more people would have been born if they did not enforce their one child policy or whatever.
You want to shift the goal post to territory instead of population? Sure, lets do this. Wikipedia already has a nice sortable list ready for us [0], with the UK at 1,564, nearly 50% worse than China at 1,133 t CO2/km²/yr.
So, how do we want to define a next target, that allows us to keep telling ourselves someone else is the actual cause of the problem instead of us? GDP/Co2? Scientific papers / Co2? Top 10 watched movies/Co2? Options are unlimited, so I'm sure we'll find something in the end. But maybe we should actually verify whatever we propose doesn't also make us look like the bad guys, since constantly shifting the goal post kinda makes us look like fools.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
China increased them by 300% in 30 years and is set to continue increasing then.
All in all, UK seting their emissions at 0% wouldn't do anything for global warming. But China decreasing them by 50% would probably save us all. Yet, these so called environmentalists, keep finding excuses for letting China go on with their business as usual, which makes it really clear they are not interested in the well being off the planet but in social upveal and some kind of revolution in Europe to install their ideology (which has very little of environmentalism) in power.
And, truthfully, I can't say I blame the people.
Also, I’m sure a good number of people flying are already worried about the climate but they still have to get where they’re going faster than a week.
This is not civil disobedience. This is actively attacking other people and putting their lives at risk.
Groups such as this are not doing anything noble, and they do not deserve any admiration, respect, or protection.
A group of people acted like irresponsible fuckheads and got negative pushback? What a concept.
From what I see, successful protests were based around unifying actions. Who was ultimately more impactful, the Black Panthers or MLK? Which one promoted a message which split people into groups, and which promoted a message that unified people and promoted empathy?
Flying a drone into airspace is not only irresponsible because to puts lives and property at risk, but it does nothing to promote the cause because it divides people into two groups - the people affected by delays, and the people causing those delays.
https://insideclimatenews.org/sites/default/files/styles/icn...
Email is in profile if you have feedback, the goal is to get more people involved with reversing climate change
Now a new deal which, even if 100% effective, would only reduce global CO2 emissions by... 15%?!?[3]. To make matters worse, we're 12 years away from point of no return, but we're stubbornly refusing to build a new nuclear power plant even though things are so dire? It strikes me as unserious, happening only for show or other reasons.
1. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti... 2. https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-aler... 3. https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/emis/top2014.tot
What are your suggestions? 15% is leaps and bounds better than what anyone but Jay Inslee has suggested. Anyway that’s goddamn AMAZING for a single country.
Also, 12 years is the best case estimate. The worst case is in the past, and I’ve seen good qualified arguments for at most ~4 years before irreversible climate collapse with current technology (the figure I am citing is from speculation that high CO2 levels inhibit cloud formation, but I can’t find the source at the moment, so I encourage your own research to clarify my numbers). We need to try anything and everything in some reasonable order.
And our climate predictions are just that, predictions. And they can definitely change[1] when you’re talking about geological time, though we often accept them as some sort of gospel.
1. https://www.dailywire.com/news/48287/national-parks-toss-sig...
Yet many global elites (Obama, Macron, et. al) agree to impose heavy restrictions on vehicle emissions used to feed, transport, and employ the average citizens of their countries. Meanwhile those who can afford it take needless trips across the globe to entertain themselves.
Air travel should be limited to those that have a reason to fly that out weighs the damage it causes to the environment.
Suppose I'm poor but need to travel to another city to get medical treatment to save my life -- but a global carbon-tax prevents me. In contrast someone who happens to have been born to a rich family in a rich country goes around the World because they're bored.
Sure, that's a purposefully extreme example, but it's necessarily so.
Is that situation morally superior to you? Is it fair, desirable?
If we were organising things on a global scale we might give every person carbon credits. But that would be a massive redistribution of wealth.
What strikes me is we're going to need to normalise around a lower consumption lifestyle or vastly reduce the population.
Was that sarcasm? Because air travel has been a race to the bottom from what I've seen
If used in any other way, forget it.
Lets ignore all the other environmental costs of vehicles, roads, gas, refineries, deaths, gas stations, and the big one, city sprawl.
Cars are the single worst thing every created, and not just for the environment.
The single best thing people can do for the environment is refrain from reproducing, but that's not quite such an emotionally appealing thing to protest about.
The vast majority of the worlds population has never set foot in an airplane.
You have to calculate per capita.
2.5% is HUGE when divided by the number of people that make use of airplanes.
I'd argue that people who actively work on climate change mitigation should keep flying if it really helps them be more effective. One of my friends does that: she helps urban planners save millions of tons of CO2, while emitting a few tons by herself. Overall, it's a good investment.
As your graphic alludes to short distance regional flights can be replaced with a greener alternative, but the vast majority of flights cannot.
Air travel is growing exponentially and we have no way to stop those emissions. Virtually everything else has alternatives, there simply isn't the energy/kg to move airplanes with anything other than petroluem products. Biofuels would be an even worse disaster.
The only thing that gives me some hope is that generally when someone does something that provokes a ferocious response, it means they've really struck a nerve and gotten people's attention.
In an ideal world, this is because the Government decided it would be cheaper to subsidise a private company doing it, rather than doing it itself. Whether or not this is true -- or indeed was entered into in good faith -- is a case-by-case sorta thing.
Standard playbook.
Like being a serf and having to rely on your local Lord.
Used to work on the same industrial park as a critical part of the national grid. Boy racers near there learned very quickly that you'll have a gun pointed at you for being there, and that's in the UK.
In a socialized or communist nation, you would expect all national infrastructure, if not all means of production, to be nationalized, i.e., owned & run by the govt.
In a capitalist society, not only the means of production but many critical national infrastructure structures and services can be owned and run privately.
E.g., power & telecom companies are regulated monopolies. Some roads have been privatized so the company builds & maintains them, utilizing some of the toll money. Lotteries are often private companies running state-sponsored games. In the US, there are private prison operators. Many hospitals in US are private. And of course many of the airports are similarly privately owned.
Obviously results and benefits vary widely by industry and operation.
While the gist of your point is correct, I feel I should mention that socialism or communism doesn't necessitate that the means of production is nationalized and government owned. The means of production could just as well be owned by the workers, not the government.