Alarmist Extinction Rebellion getting it wrong and harming the environmental cause

The environmental protest group Extinction Rebellion continued its campaign of civil disobedience today in London, blocking Waterloo Bridge, one of the major conduits over the Thames. According to the Metropolitan Police, an estimated 500,000 people have faced disruption because of diverted bus routes over the last couple of days.

More than 200 activists have been arrested so far. All remain in custody.

Notable previous protests by the group include stripping naked in the gallery of the House of Commons. Their demands include a ban on flying, scrapping all petrol and diesel-fuelled vehicles and disconnecting all gas boilers within six years.

The group had planned to disrupt the London Underground network.

A statement made yesterday by Extinction Rebellion reads: “In any other circumstances we would never dream of disrupting the Tube but this is an emergency”.

The text continues: “This action has also the important effect of alerting the public to crisis by disrupting their daily lives”.

Crisis? What crisis? To coin a phrase. Well, the Extinction Rebellion mission statement tells us very precisely: “Human activity is causing irreparable harm to the life on this world. A mass extinction event, only the sixth in roughly 540 million years, is underway. Many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century”.

It continues: “The air we breathe, the water we drink, the earth we plant in, the food we eat, and the beauty and diversity of nature that nourishes our psychological well-being, all are being corrupted and compromised by the political and economic systems that promote and support our modern, consumer-focussed lifestyles”.

And the rhetorical coup de grâce: “The UK’s parliamentary democracy is a form of representative government: power in the hands of a few representatives (Members of Parliament or MPs) who are elected by the people. This form of government has proved itself incapable of making the radical long-term policy decisions needed to deal effectively with the climate and ecological crisis”.

Extinction Rebellion reframes a question that has haunted the West since the creation of the Atom bomb – can democracies deal with existential risk? In other words, what’s the point of elections if no one is around to vote in them?

It’s not a new argument – and it made sense during the Cold War. It’s easy to forget the potency of anxieties over the possibilities of a man-made extinction event that found such profound expression in art and culture on both sides of the curtain. In master Soviet filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky’s 1986 work, The Sacrifice, divine intervention averts nuclear catastrophe. Martin Amis’s novels are infused with spectacles of an oncoming extinction event. There was also the growth of catastrophising millennarian new religious movements worldwide.

The bombing of Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War, which resulted in the instant death of between 60,000 and 80,000 people, the terrifying brinkmanship that led up to Cuban Missile Crisis and the build-up of nuclear weapons over successive decades, all gave potency to the claims of the anti-nuclear protest movement.

Self-evidently, existential anxieties never really go away and they have found a new home in the increasingly alarmist rhetoric of the climate protest movement.

Why does this tend to appeal to the young? Mine is a generation that has been brought up in an age drenched in apocalyptic imagery – disaster or zombie flicks for example, ever more popular since the turn of the Millennium, situate evil not in the indifference and cruelty of the commonplace, as post-Christian accounts of evil tend to do, but in the awful perversity of reanimated flesh, science experiments gone drastically wrong, population wipe-out, mass extinction events.

In contrast, representative democracy is messy, raucous, and indeed sometimes irritatingly slow to act. But this is also its justifying ethic – it allows the clear-eyed activist to make his point and for the rest of us to then weigh it with our own sense of what is worthwhile.

That exchange is being played out already on the environment. The effects of man-made climate change will probably be alleviated by a prosaic combination of consumer choice and government intervention sanctioned by voters at the ballot box.

Look at the way in which burgeoning demand for electric cars in China is bringing to an end one of the great success stories of Western capitalism – German car manufacturers, who bet on the durability of diesel. In Scotland after successive administrations were voted in advocating a green agenda, renewables take up the majority of electricity consumption, approximately 70 per cent at the last count in 2018.

Ten years ago, the UK passed the Climate Change Act, which binds ministers to cutting at least 80% of emissions by 2050 from their levels in 1990. UK carbon emissions were 43% below 1990 levels in 2017, exceeding initial expectations.

So let’s not ditch the whole system – representative democracy and steady change may be our best hopes of dealing with climate change.