Urban Art Association

I went yesterday. This peaceful protest is fucking superb. It shouldn't even be questioned, its that positive. Fuck the police and fuck boris the derogatory buffoon.

Could you please explain in relatively short terms, what its all about and what was superb about it and what will this all achieve?

I live in the north and nobody really moans about much or protests around here.. ( other than Fracking.. is that included in the London protests? )

Thanks

G

I'm not sure if this is irony or if you're just trying to live up to your board name.

I have supported campaigns on issues of pollution, nuclear disarmament, conservation and sustainability since the 1980s and it is increasingly depressing to hear people saying that there is still scientific uncertainty about the damage we are doing to our living environment in regards to anthropogenic global warming. They are wrong – there is overwhelming agreement within the scientific community that the climate is changing and that industrialised humanity is the greatest contributor to that change.

This is the most urgent crisis of not just our generation’s time, but of the totality of humanity’s time. In the twentieth century alone the human population has quadrupled – it doesn’t take a genius to work out that there are serious ramifications for such expansion, particularly when that growth is supported by a demand for increased food and other resources. We are now consuming the planet’s resources faster than they can be replaced. And by ‘we’ I mean the developed world.

As a matter of existential urgency we must stop and reassess our entire relationship with not just the planet but our broader humanity. Where we are is as a result of the economic systems we have chosen to function within and those systems are leading us to oblivion. The conversation to address the most pressing current issue should have started being seriously addressed at governmental levels when I was a child (in the year I was born, 1965, the American government was informed by scientists of the inevitability of climate warming due to increased levels of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere) but insufficient progress has been made.

We have many historical examples (sadly, usually driven by the needs of conflict) where government takes control of the reins to steer their countries out of crisis. There is no reason, bar the greed of a tiny percentage of the population, to stop this happening again and at a global level.

Why can’t we have state-funded solar panels and batteries installed in every building to reduce its dependency on supplied energy?

Why can’t we have state-funded installation of insulation and other energy efficiencies?

Why can’t we be encouraged at a governmental level to move towards a plant-based diet?

Why can’t we have free to use public transport?

Why can’t we have ready access to state-funded, public sector maintained, social housing for all?

Because everything is measured by the failed science of post-war economics and we are told that we cannot afford these things if we also want our nuclear weapons, our proxy wars, our resource conflicts and our state protection from the terrorism encouraged by our resource conflicts. We can’t afford the public sector employment and social public subsidies because the dogma of Chicago School Economics stills holds governments to the line that the free market is so much more efficient. And we can’t afford it currently due to the state subsidy given to the banking sector as a result of their financial efficacy ten years ago.

Cost is irrelevant; money is an abstraction that fuels an economic engine that benefits a miniscule minority while the rest maintain a life of perpetual indebtedness to a largely invisible elite. We need a serious and meaningful change in our sense of priorities and aspirations. The current economic system is fatally sick and needs putting out of its misery once and for all.

That’s where we start. Not just with ‘Earth Days’ but real changes in personal lifestyles. We need broader recognition of media outside of the mainstream, increased political involvement and increased campaigning and activism. And, if necessary, civil disobedience. When our current elected state functionaries forget that they are the public’s servants and refuse to act in the greater interest, when their self-perceived position in society has become the ends and not the means… they need reminding that we are their masters.

This issue is too important for another fifty years of debate. And it’s not a debate about how we live in the future – it is about IF we live in the future.

The NEAR future.

Because the primary problem at the moment is not a demographic one though perhaps it's a contributory factor - but un-borning people won't get us out of the shit we're in. 

Shit, I love broccoli. He'll be back.

Clarify your figures. And where are they from?

According to NASA average global land temperatures have increased by 0.9°C since about 1870, sea temperatures have increased by about 0.2°C, atmospheric carbon dioxide is at a level not seen by humanity before, ice loss rates are increasing at the poles and mountain glaciers, the tundra in north Russia and Alaska is melting threatening to release horrific levels of methane currently locked in frozen clathrates, if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions we still have another 2°C temperature rise locked in (perhaps 5°C) at the poles... and on, and on...

It's not a prediction now. It was a prediction thirty years ago when a lot of me and my 'crusty' mates (paraphrasing that t**t Johnson) were being informed by photocopied handouts. It's a fucking crisis. It's  not climate change, it's climate vandalism and it's already affecting crop yields, animal and human existence... the real crap is only around the corner.

The arctic ice is only just holding on. It will be gone soon... So is that when we should start to do something? Or will there be another 'prediction' that you have to see run to completion before significant changes are made?
I've been reading on this subject for thirty years... and I've been reading the work of scientists... I'm scared - you should be too.

Bad decision by XR I think will lose a lot of support

 No irony. I know you are one of the good guys. 

There has been talk of the hard or far left infiltrating the environmental movement and other such issues in order to try to get their political agenda into the groups and attacking anyone who disagrees with them.

  I know from experience that Greenpeace are hypocrits and are politically motivated and cover up environmental abuse in exchange for indirect donations.  The economic sytem benefits the wealthiest and calling themselves liberals or socialists or conservatives makes no difference as they all act in their own financial self interest. Fossil fuels, tobacco etc are ways all governments gain money via tax. It would be very easy for a high tech government to implement an electric or hydrogen or alcohol vehicle policy but that would mean the Saudis etc won't be able to sell their oil for billions to the west that has it's own oil anyway and in turn won't be able to buy all those big shiny fighter jets and arms etc that are made by their friendly western governments.

 Deforestation has gone on globally long before the west did it during the industrial revolution etc. Kenyan cattle farmers have been responsible for loss of shrubland and trees. Easter Island, total deforestation before any western people arrived there. Soya bean crops along with cattle ranchers in the Amazon and south America.

  So how would you change the system and to what?

The Arctic:

1. 95% of old ice gone
2. ice free by 2021-2031
3. fastest warming place on Earth
4. no evidence sea ice will recover
5. heatwaves 20°C more than usual
6. vast wildfires mean carbon bursts
7. melting is destabilising the planet
8. permafrost collapse is irreversible
Massive glaciers in the Yukon territory are shrinking even faster than expected.

Climate catastrophe is 'on the margins' of news reporting, and that's why we're all on the brink of being killed by corporate capitalism.
So much of the Earth’s forest has been destroyed that the tropics now 'emit almost twice as much carbon as they consume'.

Tropical forests previously acted as a vital carbon “sink”, taking carbon from the atmosphere and turning it into oxygen.

The work of extinction rebellion is vital as the world's governments are too much in the back pockets of corporate capitalism.