If You're Outraged By XR & Just Stop Oil, Imagine The Outrage Of Full-On Climate Collapse
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Yet even though the climate crisis has worsened faster than many pessimistic analysts expected, and even though the official response to it remains far too slow, the work of XR and its successors still enrages many people. There are endless online videos of activists being dragged off the road by drivers, or being dangerously shunted by vehicles, or simply being shouted at by passersby. The print and broadcast media are full of similar denunciations. Tory and Labour politicians compete to be the least tolerant of disruptive climate activism – even though Labour’s opposition to the expansion of our oil and gas fields mirrors the stance of Just Stop Oil.
The constant attacks on the activists are inadvertently revealing. They are called “selfish”, when they are sacrificing far more for the environment than their critics. They are called “extremists”, despite the world’s ever more extreme weather. They are dismissed as middle-class dilettantes, yet also feared as fanatical members of a cult. They are condemned for interfering with “people going about their daily business”, as the presenter Mark Austin put it with an air of outrage on Sky News, even though our everyday habits are a central cause of the crisis.
Underlying all these criticisms is a strong but unstated desire not to engage with the activists’ main argument: that the climate emergency is so huge and urgent that modest changes to our lifestyles and conventional political action – from summits such as Cop27 to marches to polite negotiations between governments and companies – are no longer enough. On the videos of drivers confronting activists, the drivers’ fury feels about more than their vehicles being blocked. British motorists are used to obstructions and delays. The anger suggests resentment at being reminded about the climate crisis. It also acts as a way of avoiding being drawn into conversation with the protesters – a conversation that might be uncomfortable or frightening. Starting with XR’s brutally frank name, disruptive green activism presents what the US climate campaigner Al Gore once called An Inconvenient Truth.
Critics of the movement often underestimate how much support it has. An official “factsheet” justifying the government’s public order bill – legislation intended to hinder “protest groups such as Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain” – cites an opinion poll from April. While the survey shows that twice as many people support as oppose “tougher laws to tackle climate change activists blocking roads, transport and other infrastructure”, it also shows that among 18- to 34-year-olds, opinion on the issue is evenly divided. Many of those likely to be most affected by the climate crisis, and likely to become an ever more important part of the electorate, do not see disruptive protest as illegitimate.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/18/outraged-xr-just-stop-oil-disruptive-climate-crisis
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