I am all for saving the planet, especially while I remain respiring on it, but looking at Extinction Rebellion protesters around the world it does make me wonder if the planet is worth saving.
Hear me out. The air around our major cities smells richly of hippies. Not just young hippies who can be kind of cute but old ones with hair sprouting of every conceivable orifice. Old, smelly hippies who have taken to the streets years before to shriek about every conceivable threat from nuclear holocaust to the placement of a pedestrian crossing in Newtown.
Hippies of all ages supergluing their naked bodies to glass thus foisting their ugliness on the innocent, folk dancing on the streets, people chaining themselves to whatever obelisk is within arm’s reach. If this is a sneak preview of the end of the world, I say let’s get it over and done with as soon as possible.
Progressives 😂😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/nQgL0nm0hx
— 🎀кєℓℓιє🎀 (@kelliekelly23) October 7, 2019
A splinter group of protesters, known as the red rebels (decked out entirely in scarlet chiffon with faces painted white) loiter around cities performing what looks like a bad form of kabuki theatre which is already bad enough as it is. What harm could this do? Not much really. For the public, it would be a bit like being set upon by a pack of Tai Chi practitioners. They won’t do much damage but if they got angry, anyone who got in their way could be very lightly assaulted over five gruelling hours.
What sort of self-respecting planet would allow this to happen? Look around the solar system. This is not happening anywhere else and reports from Saturn say the climate there is a nightmare.
ER’s demands are straightforward: Governments around the world must declare a climate emergency (whatever that means), net zero emissions by 2025, the formation of a citizen’s assembly to oversee climate policies and dismantling the entire apparatuses of the Roman Imperialist State within two days.
All right, maybe not the last one.
We’d need a small army of actuaries to do the maths but net zero global emissions by 2025 by my back of the beer coaster arithmetic would necessarily plunge billions back into poverty who a generation earlier had begun to emerge from it. That would be more than a little frustrating for them, I suspect.
No electricity. No part to play in a global economy. Back to a grim subsistence, disease and eking out a living against the odds.
‘Araldite genitals to a yoga mat for all I care’
In a nutshell, ER proposes that saving the world’s billions means having to sacrifice a billion or two along the way. Let’s call those unfortunates collateral damage.
Like anyone with an axe to grind, Extinction Rebellion folk are entitled to protest. Hell, they can Araldite their genitals to a yoga mat the size of a small continent for all I care. But they do so in the knowledge that what they do is a bourgeois, we-can-afford-to-take-the-day-off-because-we-don’t-have-to-worry-about-where-our-next meal-is-coming-from protest. The answer, oddly, is the environmentalist’s Great Satan, MacDonald’s, if some of the photographs of ER’s protesters having a snack break are anything to go by.
Look around. ER protests have occurred in London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Sydney, Brisbane. The West. There’s not a whole lot happening in Africa, Asia or South America.
It’s no surprise. Two of the founders of ER are English, middle class and steeped in the business of outrage expression.
Roger Hallam had a ten-acre organic farm, growing stunted vegies and fruit with dirty great bruises before selling them to people with more money than sense.
He claims an extreme weather event cost him his farm and the subsequent loss of thirty jobs. Call me cynical but I’d probably want to have a good look at the books before shaking my head wistfully in empathy. The question does arise, however, was he some sort of Ned Flanders type who shunned property insurance thinking it was a form of gambling?
Farmless, he took to the streets.
Drones … not just over Heathrow
Most recently he was remanded in custody after threatening to launch drones over Heathrow air space. Was he protesting imminent climate holocaust or the construction of Heathrow’s controversial third runway? A little of both or none of the above? It’s hard to say.
“We are in a ‘time of consequences’ as Churchill called it in response to the Nazi threat in 1936,” Hallam huffed before being frogmarched off tom the slammer.
“The consequence of not rebelling is indescribable suffering and death for billions of people. The consequence of rebellion is a chance to avoid the worst. Rebellion means mass economic disruption and deep personal sacrifice. I am a rebel. That’s why I am flying drones at Heathrow.”
And blindly falling into Godwin’s Law, while likening capitalism to Nazism.
Another founder of ER is Gail Bradbrook whose claim to protesting fame was sitting on a couch outside the site of an industrial incinerator in Gloucester. It’s the sort of protest I could get behind. Fighting the power while having a long lie down on a comfy sofa.
But what she and her cohorts were and continue to protest about in this instance is an incinerator which promises to save British taxpayers over £100 million and generate enough clean electricity to power 25,000 homes at the same time by taking household, non-recyclable refuse out of land fill, burning it at high temperature and using the heat to generate electricity.
Why would any environmental warrior protest about this? Apparently, it’s unsightly and on the rare occasion trucks can get past the blockade, puffs of smoke can be seen coming out of the incinerator’s chimney and that is more horrific than any fact or statistic could ever realise.
Never mind the science feel the outrage.
Naked Morris dancing
The trouble with marketing Armageddon is that most of us have been there before. Existential threats are a part of the human experience. A catastrophic End Times is a feature of Abrahamic religions. Christianity is based on it. A few lucky ones survive but the rest of us are for the flame and no amount of naked Morris dancing is going to change that.
Anyone of a certain vintage will recall living peacefully enough while the nuclear superpowers pointed enough nukes at each other that any POTUS or Secretary of the Supreme Soviet having a bad day could set off the planet’s destruction not once but six times. Just in case they missed the first five.
And that’s the problem with Extinction Rebellion. The protests are a party. A bad party, sure but more celebration than reflection. It makes it really hard to take the end of the world seriously.
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