Thanks to Extinction Rebellion, we’re experiencing a climate culture change
Polly
Toynbee
Rightwing
critics fulminate against the protesters, but the public is finally waking up
to the gravity of their cause
Mon 7 Oct
2019 19.08 BSTLast modified on Mon 7 Oct 2019 21.34 BST
In the
Mall, up Whitehall, or crossing Trafalgar Square early this morning, the
climate activists looked like rush-hour office workers and civil servants –
mainly 30 to 50-year-olds, with no dreadlocked tree-huggers, SWP banners or
black-masked anarchists looking for a punch-up. Chanting about the climate
emergency, frankly, they seemed a bit sheepish, not used to it. Their
ordinariness makes Extinction Rebellion, or XR, especially effective: farmers,
scientists, doctors, Cumbrians and other local platoons stand at the 12 key
roadblocks.
After their
successful capture of central London in April, local cells or “affinity groups”
all over the country have trained and planned for this protest. Deciding who
would be “arrestable” for highway obstruction – and who wouldn’t be, because of
jobs or young families – they were primed to expect a tougher police response
after rightwing press complaints against the friendly policing last April, when
officers were caught dancing at a blocked Oxford Circus.
“I do wonder if protest makes a difference,”
an office manager in her 40s from Hertfordshire said to me. “But what else can
you do? My children really made me feel I must.” A steward in a pink gilet, a
mother from south London, said the same: “It was my children who got me into
this.” Thousands more are expected to join.
For those
who doubt the effect of last April’s XR protests, Ben Page of Ipsos Mori says:
“In our polls in 2013, 59% said the planet was ‘heading for disaster’. This
year it’s gone up to 78%.” He reckons Greta Thunberg, the school strikes and XR
action played their part. What packs an extra punch is that London is just one
of 60 global cities engaged in “uprising” at the same time. To those who say
why bother, when the UK is too small for our carbon emissions to matter, this synchronised
global action reaches all those leaders who attended last month’s UN climate
change summit – where the UN general secretary warned: “We face a direct
existential threat.”
I think few
of these protesters read the rightwing press to know what they’re up against.
In a double-page spread in the Mail on Sunday, Douglas Murray, Spectator
associate editor and author of Neoconservatism: Why We Need it, launched a
blistering attack on climate protesters and soft policing tactics. He writes:
“Their refusal to acknowledge any view but their own deranged belief and their
defiance of democratic norms is authoritarian, even fascistic … Despite the
childish certainty these extremists promote, the science of climate change is
deeply contested. Most scientists agree there are variations going on but they
disagree on exactly what causes it.”
So that’s
where the climate deniers are now, ignoring Nasa’s survey showing 97% of global
climate scientists agree that the five warmest years have been the past five,
“extremely likely due to human activities”. Never mind the science: what
free-market obsessives like Murray can’t bear is that solving the climate
crisis requires state and international action. He would rather boil to
oblivion, faithful to his free-market creed, than see the planet saved by means
he regards as statist or even socialist. “Anarchists” and “warmed-over
communists” demanding “draconian solutions”, he calls the protesters. His
disgust spews out at Thunberg, “this privileged young girl … hectoring others
on things she barely understands … delivering unhinged sermons to the credulous
global elites”. Among the deadly weapons used against activists is that too many
are middle class, and they are all climate hypocrites. Progressives are prone
to self-flagellation, but being climate-pure is impossible. Do what you can,
cast off the guilt. Murray’s is the blind rage of the losing side. David
Attenborough is believed, not the Mail on Sunday. Even delivery drivers angry
at the roadblocks weren’t denying the gravity of the cause. Weekly the news
tells of sea ice and glaciers melting, species vanishing, the emergency
evident: pollsters find people well understand it and trust the scientists who
say humans are the cause.
Murray
accuses XR of wanting to “engineer the complete destruction of the global
economic system”. But this highly democratic group is carefully
nonprescriptive. All they ask is for politicians to accept the emergency, for a
much tighter target than 2050 for net-zero carbon (the UK is already badly
behind, our statutory Committee on Climate Change says) – and for a citizens
assembly, such as President Macron has just set up with a sample group of 150
citizens to advise on how France can cut carbon emissions. That’s the task:
finding solutions people will vote for.
At the
party conferences, the Tories barely mentioned climate, while Boris Johnson
talks of fuel tax cuts. But Labour puts a green industrial strategy at the
heart of its spending plans, building renewables in wind and solar, solar
panels and insulation for a million social homes, £3.6bn on charging points and
free loans for electric cars, nationalising the grid for a vast expansion of 37
offshore wind farms, tidal energy from Swansea Bay and no fracking.
The UK may
be entering a climate culture change that Page compares to the shift in our
lifetimes from locking up gay people to a recent poll that found 66% would have
no concerns about a same-sex marriage in the royal family. Flying, driving,
eating beef may go the way of smoking – but only if the heavy lifting is done
by the state.
• Polly
Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
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