Are The Extinction Rebellion Protests Working?

Extinction Rebellion Protests – The Action Is Over (For Now). What Have They Achieved?

26 April 2019

After 2 weeks of mass civil disobedience, what have the Extinction Rebellion protests achieved?

There were XR protests in England, Columbia, India, Ghana, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Belgium, Ireland, South Africa and more.

First, you need to know what the protesters want. Then, we’ll look at whether they’ve made a difference, or not.

What Extinction Rebellion Wants

The group has three core demands:

1) Tell the truth
The movement wants governments to declare a climate emergency, in order to make sure that everyone knows how serious the threat is, and everyone can work together to drastically reducing carbon emissions. They feel governments are not communicating the scale of the threat, and therefore no significant changes are being made.

2) Zero emissions by 2025
We must drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions, hitting net zero by 2025.

3) Citizens’ assembly
The government must create a citizens’ assembly to hear evidence and devise policy to tackle the climate crisis.

How Reasonable are These Demands?

Asking governments to tell the truth is a reasonable demand. Scientists and experts the world over are saying that climate change is the biggest threat to ever face humankind – and we don’t have long to act.

Extinction Rebellion point out that no political leaders in any country are being honest about the scale or severity of the threat, or what it will realistically take to address it.

Zero emissions by 2025 – gosh, that’s a BIG ask! Just 6 years to completely and radically change our transport, energy, food production and the way we consume. It seems pretty impossible, particularly given political inaction across the globe. It’s necessary, and it would make a huge difference to the future of the planet, but it’s tough to imagine it happening.

Extinction rebellion say it’s time to stop talking about what’s politically acceptable and instead do what science tells us we need to do. They also point out that the drastic effects of runaway climate change will be far, far worse than the disruption of acting now. They’re right about that.

A Citizens’ Assembly would get the public involved in policy changes. It could be a great way to get ordinary people fired up, but it could also be difficult to manage.

Is Change Happening?

Partly through pressure from the Extinction Rebellion protests, scores of councils and local governments in many countries including the UK, have declared a climate emergency in recent months. Increasing numbers of politicians acknowledge that this is the biggest challenge facing humanity – but not too many with real power.

The protests were also at least party responsible for the resignation of the UK government’s fracking representative. Natascha Engel blamed protests and eco actvists, saying there was “no purpose” to her job, because with so much opposition, developing fracking in the UK would be an “impossible task”.  Hooray! (Fracking will still be pushed in the UK, but this is a great step).

There’s been more coverage than usual in the media (for and against the protests), which means more people are actually talking about climate change – for now, anyway. Words like “crisis” are being used more often. This is good in that it makes it more difficult for leaders to ignore.

I sincerely hope we’ll see more political action soon across the world. We have very little time to get our act together.

Below you’ll see a 3 minute video that will give you a flavour of some of the protests in the UK.

Here’s a quick (just 3 minutes) summary of some of the people involved – both for and against – by British newspaper The Guardian

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Warm regards,

P.S.  Don’t forget to download your free climate change report here!