Examples include Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion here in the UK.
Personally, I think some charities are groups are genuine in their outburst wanting large firms to stop strangling the natural beauty for profit, however for me there is a red line that can be crossed.
Blocking roads preventing medical care, people going to work, interview and possibly a nice vacation away. This doesn’t really help but make the public look at your group in a bad light.
The same can also be said when attempting to destroy priceless art for a cheap publicity stunt knowing it’ll get clicks on social media.
TLDR - I think some groups are genuinely good whilst others are just shouting in a speakerphone, pissing everyone else off.
What do YOU think?
The planet is being destroyed and the politicians are not doing enough. So activists protest. That’s good! I can’t imagine being angry at climate activists for inconveniencing my day; after all, the real culprits are the politicians who don’t do enough!
I used to agree but now I do not anymore. Politicians want to get elected, so they say and impement stuff people like. If people wanted real change, then we would have politicians in power who would implement these changes. But (most) people don’t want that, they’d rather be lied to, everything is fine, we’ve got it under control, you don’t have to change, trust us, keep shopping.
tl;dr: things are bad, things will get worse, be angry at the criminals, not those sounding the alarm
We’ve known what we’re in for for half a century, meanwhile governments have kept catering to fossil industries. What’s being destroyed by governmental inaction dwarfs that what you accuse these groups of (art has not been destroyed) and at this point I’m not surprised that people are looking to more disruptive and direct action.
We’ve had scientists do the researching and informing, public interest groups do litigation, NGOs trying what they can themselves, etc, yet we’re still headed to a degree of climate destabilization where large ecosystem tipping points may well launch us into uncharted territory - and even if not, we’re already past the point of ‘dangerous’ climate change and that’s something we’ll have to bear the human, societal and economic costs for.
I don’t think they’ve ever tried to destroy art. If you’re talking about the sunflowers, they knew it was behind glass. Their whole MO is doing shocking things to get attention to the cause and to point out that these things will be gone if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels.
Anyone doing anything to protest the climate or damage the profits of fossil fuel companies is fine by me. I can’t call everyones methods “efficient” but it honestly doesn’t matter to me, an extreme response to climate change is reasonable at this point.
This, I don’t live then e.g. throwing paint on painting because it seems kind of pointless, but at least it gets attention.
Painting was behind glass, the point is that in a climate change hellscape all this precious art is in danger. If all the people who read about a painting they’ve never heard of before get angry about “paint being thrown at it” they’ll really hate what’ll happen with extreme weather in a climate disaster.
Both Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion are great, and protests should be disruptive, otherwise they’re just ignored. Maybe they’re not doing enough disruption and damage to force governments to listen. Or, maybe someone should go after energy/oil companies directly via sabotage or other means and cause enough economic damage that the cost of polluting and resource extraction becomes too high for them to profit from.
