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Comment by inflatableDodo | Hacker News Reader

>"Protesters plan a return to the airport—and there is very little the authorities can do"

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.

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I liked the part about how they never actually found a drone at Gatwick, but "experts" (?) say there "probably" was one.

I'm curious what they're basing that on, and who's considered an expert on phantom drones (as opposed to Phantom drones).

I tend to agree. It makes no sense. If you're an activist, and you live in a democracy, why wouldn't you affect change more meaningfully by participating in the democracy you live in? Why would you buy something that itself has a carbon footprint (manufacturing, distribution) and that will only serve to politically damage the cause you purport to care about? What do you want people to do, fly only battery-powered passenger airlines? They don't exist. A climate change activist should know this.

> If you're an activist, and you live in a democracy, why wouldn't you affect change more meaningfully by participating in the democracy you live in?

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.

> 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?

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.

There certainly are wrong and undemocratic ways to "participate".

Breaking the law, causing public nuisance (to say the least), putting aircrafts are risk are not acceptable.

Come on. Civil disobedience is a cornerstone of peaceful, democratic protest. Every black American who sat at a white lunch counter or in the white seats on a bus was breaking the law and "causing a public nuisance."

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.

This is not civil disobedience.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

>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?

Well, for starters, you are literally quoting me out of context. How about quoting me properly instead of making yourself look ridiculous?

> 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?

>Because in response to a pre-planned demonstration from a group

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.

The Economist is one of the most serious source in the business.

And yes, this is factual and does not come from the Economist: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-48470623

This is absurd moral grandstanding; you took three paragraphs to say "my opinions > your opinions." If you're going to do this at least don't try and pretend to be following the HN guidelines.

I respect people with different opinions. I do not respect people who try to impose their opinions through criminal and reckless actions.

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.

Quite right. Disobedience is being told by an immoral law to do something immoral. Such as to turn in a fugitive slave, etc, and then not complying.

This action is actively committing acts to interfere with people who are engaged in exercising their rights as free human beings.

>Every black American who sat at a white lunch counter or in the white seats on a bus was breaking the law

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..."

Without breaking laws and causing public nuisance India would still be part of the British Empire and African Americans would still be second class citizens. Climate change is a vastly more serious problem than either of those two.

> Without breaking laws and causing public nuisance India would still be part of the British Empire and African Americans would still be second class citizens. Climate change is a vastly more serious problem than either of those two.

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.

>Without breaking laws and causing public nuisance India would still be part of the British Empire and African Americans would still be second class citizens.

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.

Unfortunately with climate change nobody gets to decide, because physics decides for us.

So, you're saying global extinction isn't important?

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?

Problems can be profoundly serious and important in their own right, without needing to be ranked against one another.

Doing that just leads to emotion-charged-but-pointless arguments.

Global extinction? No, we shouldn’t make trillion dollar policy decisions based on fairy tales.

I have learned more about how to live a low(er) climate impact by bloggers on youtube than any of these people have.

> If you're an activist, and you live in a democracy, why wouldn't you affect change more meaningfully by participating in the democracy you live in?

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?

And yet changes to UK environmental policy have actually helped bring the UK's carbon emissions down to 19th century levels (yes, caveats about where our stuff is made nowadays apply) and companies with more money than all citizen environmentalist groups put together plough far more money into efficiency savings and renewables than disinformation campaigns.

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 success of the UK's energy policy is undeniable. However they still have a long way to go in every other sector (transport, agriculture, imports..) before reaching carbon neutrality.

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 argument of "enough" is depends on doling quantums of responsibility along national borders. I think in policical decisionmaking on national level it's a necessary evil but not really helpful in thinking about legitimacy individual actions.

> If you're an activist, and you live in a democracy, why wouldn't you affect change more meaningfully by participating in the democracy you live in?

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.)

>Attention getting stunts are an important method of participating in democracy

Yes, but in this case, I think the attention getting stunt may be the article.

> What do you want people to do, fly only battery-powered passenger airlines?

Pay about $200 for each ton of carbon dioxide equivalent their flights blow into the air instead of benefiting from tax free kerosene.

No need to be punitive. Recognize that there are legitimate and important needs for travel.

The generally accepted social cost for a ton of CO2 is about $40. The per passenger emissions are about 3,500 miles per ton.

Generally accepted by whom?

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.

You can bypass all of that messy calculating economically speaking.

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.

> If you're an activist, and you live in a democracy, why wouldn't you affect change more meaningfully by participating in the democracy you live in?

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.

> What do you want people to do, fly only battery-powered passenger airlines?

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.

> Why would you buy something that itself has a carbon footprint (manufacturing, distribution)

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.

Agreed.

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.

Nothing huge, but it did happen: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/19/extincti...

>The FOIA response said:

>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...

That example is just the same kind of protest that Heathrow has contended with since being built though. It doesn't say anything about drones.

The article is unclear - but I think you've got the wrong end of the stick. The subhead in the Economist article doesn't say anything about drones either.

What impression do you think someone might receive from that byline should they have not been keeping track? Especially given the headlines from last year pointing the finger at eco-protestors before that random guy got arrested? For added comedy points, there has still been no evidence presented that there ever was a drone in that case, but our press still ran headlines about who the culprits were.

That was Gatwick, not Heathrow.

And maybe I'm taking the news reports too literally, but... certainly the authorities have shotguns.

If this becomes disruptive, well, the aircraft are unmanned.

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