The Sixth Extinction (Environmental News)

[Ginger Yellow]

Well, the individual companies are largely behind the lobbying, surely. And they themselves were aware of the consequences of what they were doing. Not only did they press ahead but they funded a vast infrastructure to foster a political climate that allowed them to keep doing it. Because they are operating in a capitalist system their primary responsibility is to their shareholders and to maximise profits, not to protect the environment. Under a system with fairer, better regulation and less obsessed with profit and extraction, this would not have happened.

If there is a demand for fossil fuels, someone will extract them and it will be legal, sure. But today, as far as I'm concerned, that's just an argument for making extracting them illegal, eventually.

I don't particularly disagree with any of that, and I'm not trying to absolve the extractors. I just don't think the data tells us anything interesting or useful. We already know who the big fossil fuel companies are, and we already knew that the majority of emissions come from burning fossil fuels. It's not a surprise.

[gt3]

I work in the Walkie Talkie Building (20 Fenchurch Street)...Each of the doors into the building - of which there are 6 - currently has a protester dressed as a canary attached to it. Sadly, I arrived just before they did and am now stuck in the building...The irony being that I was chatting to some of the protesters on Saturday evening and had suggested that they need to take a leaf out of Ghandiji's book. Civil disruption rather than just protest. Little did I know...

[Snake Plissken]

So, XR - who I have largely supported in their campaign decide that the next step is to bugger up the Tube. Idiots.

[Paul S]

XR climbed on top of DLR trains but were pulled off by commuters shouting they needed to go to work so they can afford to feed their children. Not the way to gain public sympathy and neither is going on national TV to defend yourself dressed as a vegetable. People are largely tolerant of protests and protestors but this has lost them virtually all the sympathy they have. As Snake said, Idiots.

[Duncan Gardner]

Disrupting the Tube is hardly a shock. They're a rebellion, not an extended Blue Peter PR stunt for adults.

I was in Woolwich at the City of London Airport last Friday. Not superglued to a fuselage nor chained to the control tower etc., but actually in an aircraft on the puddlejumper back from Rotterdam. I'd have been pretty annoyed had it been cancelled with all the extra costs involved, but even more importantly had the worry of it turning violent...

Anyway, I sneaked out to see that Green colleague Rupert Read and pals had either fcuked off back to Traf Square, or been arrested. Coincidentally, back in town I was sightseeing along Fenchurch Street and popped into the Boots for a sandwich. Organic falafel, naturally.

Meanwhile, whichever way you turn some politico is getting lifted by Inspector Dick. I blame her election agent

[George C.]

That makes no sense.
And that's just the last post...

[The Mighty Trin]

I work in the Walkie Talkie Building (20 Fenchurch Street)...Each of the doors into the building - of which there are 6 - currently has a protester dressed as a canary attached to it. Sadly, I arrived just before they did and am now stuck in the building...The irony being that I was chatting to some of the protesters on Saturday evening and had suggested that they need to take a leaf out of Ghandiji's book. Civil disruption rather than just protest. Little did I know...

I watched the Walkie Talkie building being built from my desk in the old Cock and Balls Barclays building, gt3 and am now up the road the other side of what my Dad insists on calling the 'Cucumber'. I'll pop down at lunchtime for a gawp at the canaries. Based on my admittedly small office poll, it's best not to mess with people trying to get into work or get home from work on a hot and overloaded public transport system.

[pebblethefish]

If you stand on the wrong side of an escalator commuters will happily hang draw and quarter you, so god knows what happens if you try and stop one of their trains.

[Snake Plissken]

I used to support Greenpeace until I saw footage of them running around Sellafield dressed as barrels of nuclear waste. I thought that if they want my spend my donation on sixth form level art pranks they can fuck right off.

[Nefertiti2]

Tory backing beating up demonstrators

[URL]https://twitter.com/adamramsay/status/1184793941033529344?s=21[/URL]

[Etienne]

I think this was a mistake too (and I think most XR members do too, given FB debates when public transport was targeted last time). However, my idiot scale would run

Not Idiots

• People who believe it is a climate emergency and who employ faultless tactics to achieve action in this regards
• ...
• People who believe it is a climate emergency and who employ flawed tactics to achieve action
• ...
• ...
• ...
• People who believe it is a climate emergency and who make token personal lifestyle changes in response, while criticising those in category B
• ...
• People who believe it is a climate emergency and do fuck all in response, while criticising those in category B
• ...
• ...
• ...
• ...
• ...
• ...
• ...
• People who don't believe it is a climate emergency.

Idiots

[Etienne]

Extract below from an XR newsletter that's just popped into my inbox:

This morning, members of Extinction Rebellion climbed onto trains at Stratford, Canning Town and Shadwell. At Canning Town, members of the public pulled two rebels from the roof of the train.

Whatever your thoughts on the action, this footage was highly distressing to watch - and must have been much more so for anyone present in person.

It’s important to acknowledge that the distress did not start with the footage: this action had been announced on Tuesday, and was received with overwhelming opposition and consternation from those in our movement, both regarding the nature, location, and timing of the action. This concern was communicated to the planners of the action – a very small group, which did not participate in ‘national level’ Rebellion decision-making bodies. They issued this statement in response .

Some of those involved in the planning, on hearing the feedback, chose to step back from the action; but some of those involved continued and ultimately carried it out.



XR’s current organising ethos is that anyone can carry out any action in the name of XR, provided it doesn’t conflict with our ten principles and values. Following two similarly controversial proposals in April and over summer, the process for ‘national’ actions has been revised such that proposals must pass through scrutiny from other teams before going ahead.

But, as stated, the group involved in today’s action was operating at the grassroots level; they received the feedback from the wider movement and made their own decision.

In short: very few people in XR wanted this to happen, but the ‘post-consensus’ organisational model which we currently employ is such that it happened all the same.

[john the revelator]

There is a desperate need for a seriously high carbon tax

It's the only way to send a signal to consumers and reward renewable energy

[delicatemoth]

This is a pretty interesting critique of XR, referencing the decentralised aspect Etienne mentions -

https://twitter.com/pancake_puns/status/1184773301513658368

For all my basic sympathy for them I can't help thinking that if I were in MI5 and wanted to run a psy-op it would look quite a lot like XR.

[Nefertiti2]

[URL]https://twitter.com/doctorsxr/status/1187377667928141824?s=21[/URL]

[Eggchaser]

Doctors - Fucking jobless benefit scrounging middle class hippy trustafarian SJW lefties.

[Etienne]

And he's wearing a leather jacket. Hypocrite.

[Eggchaser]

I bet he eats food and has driven a car.

[Etienne]

Lower than vermin.

[anton pulisov]

The New York Times now blaming scientists for not warning about climate change.

[anton pulisov]

[Balderdasha]

When I worked as a sustainability consultant, people routinely referred to a native American proverb that apparently exhorts people to think of how an action would have been perceived by seven generations in the past and how it would affect seven generations in the future. At the time, I thought it was a lovely idea, but I was quite young and it seemed unrealistic to me to be able to think that many generations into the past or the future.

More recently, I have realised that it is in fact, perfectly possible to personally know seven generations of the same family. When I was born, the oldest member of my family was my great grandma Jones. She was my dad's mum's mum and I have one memory of her. I remember trying to get out to the back garden of her house and she was standing on the threshold steadying herself to go out to the outside loo. She was wearing a long white holey cardigan and I was very annoyed that she wasn't moving fast enough. She died when I was about 18 months old. She's generation one.

Her daughter, my grandmother, lived until I was 18. She used to run a team of foremen in a mill and drank a crate of Guinness while playing bingo every Friday night. She knitted amazing outfits for all our dolls, threw herself so violently into our sofa that there was a massive dent where she regularly sat, and she was a diabetic who didn't believe that lactose, fructose, sucrose, etc, counted as sugar. She was generation two. She had two sons, my dad and my uncle. For this example, we're going to follow my uncle's line.

My uncle married his pregnant 17-year-old girlfriend when he was 16 years old. They're still together more than 50 years later. He lost a finger in an industrial accident in a factory and drank and smoked all the compensation money. He won £30k on the pools and did the same. Him and all his descendants live in a 3-mile radius and pop round each other's houses all the time to bicker and gossip. They own a caravan in North Wales and spend half their time there. He makes great pies and pasties. He's generation three.

His oldest daughter, my cousin, had her first baby when she was 18. She had a rough first half of life, a couple of abusive relationships, a baby that died from SIDS, but she's straightened herself out and found a really decent husband who's now stepdad to her son and daughter. She's worked in chip shops and taxi offices, spent decades on dialysis, but recently had a kidney transplant and is now enjoying life as a granny. She's generation four.

Her oldest son has not yet had kids, but her daughter had a baby when she was 20. Is she my second cousin or my cousin once removed? I'm not sure. Anyway, I remember her as a little kid and she was a nightmare. She set fire to the curtains in her bedroom. She broke her dad's nose. She stuffed her pet kitten into a video player. I could go on. But as an adult, she's an awesome mum, in a completely settled relationship with her childhood sweetheart who's a brickie and works as a careworker. Her oldest son had a cleft palate and she had to feed him with a pipette but after successful operations you'd barely be able to tell now. She asked my advice on breastfeeding her second daughter and managed 6.5 days which is longer than anyone in her extended family, before they all managed to persuade her that her baby would sleep better if she bottle fed her. She's generation five.

Her kids are now about seven and five. They seem to spend most of their non-school time rampaging in parks, jumping in puddles, climbing trees, getting throughly muddy, exactly as they should do. They are generation six.

So, I am only 37. I can easily live another twenty years to see generation six reproduce and meet generation seven. It really shocked me when I realised that I had met six generations in person already.

[ursus arctos]

Perhaps the most visible producer of sustainable household products in the US is named after that concept

We’re on a mission to transform the world into a healthy, sustainable & equitable place for the next seven generations.

[anton pulisov]

Another brilliant piece in The Onion

What if All That Flying Is Good for the Planet?

Without tourism, it’s easy to imagine the Serengeti turned into cattle ranches.

You really need to click on the link.

[Nefertiti2]

https://twitter.com/Schafernaker/status/1212829870591488002?s=20https://twitter.com/Schafernaker/status/1212829870591488002?s=20