Vox: How radical should you be when you're trying to save the planet?

[OKIsItJustMe]

How radical should you be when you’re trying to save the planet?

“Die-ins,” Krazy Glue, and gridlock: The climate movement is embracing civil disobedience.
By Avishay Artsy Sep 28, 2023, 4:40pm EDT

In the 2022 film How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a group of young climate activists get together to blow up a pipeline in Texas. The movie is fictional, but the book it’s adapted from is not. In the 2021 book, author Andreas Malm argues that sabotage and property damage are valid tactics to confront fossil fuel use and calls for an escalation in tactics.

We should “[d]amage and destroy new CO2-emitting devices,” Malm writes. “Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed.”

Climate activists have yet to go that far, but they’re doing lots of other things.

Last week’s Climate Week events, timed to the UN General Assembly, drew thousands of protesters to New York. Over 100 people were arrested for blockading the entrances to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York while calling on financial regulators to stop funding fossil fuel companies. At the New York March to End Fossil Fuels, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told a cheering crowd, “We must be too big and too radical to ignore.”

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[LiberaBlueDem]

1. Bet

Bet the root of this is coming from the climate denial industry in an attempt to make us look bad.

The real radicals on this issue are the ones killing the planet for profits.

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. No bet

This does not appear to be an attempt to demonize protestors.

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I saw a video recently of some climate activists who were in Washington, DC, where I live, and they were blocking traffic. People were walking up to them and saying, “I need to get to work.” I mean, these people were really upset. Do these kinds of actions help or hurt the cause of climate activists?

The people who are actually doing this type of confrontational activism — which I’m calling in my new book “activism to shock,” and I use the term “shockers” to refer to these activists — these shockers are actually trying to shock the general public into paying attention to the climate crisis. Now, is it going to piss people off? Absolutely. And there’s lots of evidence of that. But one of the things that we know from the research is that while specific actions in specific groups that engage in these more radical tactics tend to turn off people, research shows that it does shine light on the climate crisis and actually draws attention to and support for more moderate groups and more moderate forms of activism. So in the broader movement, it may be quite effective, but for these specific activists and the tactics they’re using and the groups that they’re working with — and I know the groups that were blocking traffic recently here in DC — it’s completely unpopular.

Well, what would they say? If you asked them, “Was that successful when you guys blocked traffic?” Is the answer, “We got media attention”?

The answer, they would say, is, “Absolutely.” They really want the conversation to start with their activism and continue into the climate crisis. They’ll basically say, “We tried going to a legally permitted march, we tried carrying signs, we tried going to our elected officials’ offices.” And I can tell you from data I’ve collected that they do all of those things. And what they’ll say is, it doesn’t work. It’s not gotten the attention. It hasn’t helped change the conversation. But sitting on the street or gluing myself to the tarmac — when the media starts to talk about it, it helps us to start to have these conversations about what’s needed to address the climate crisis.

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For example, I don’t see them making a comparison to the “eco-terrorism” of the past.