Blocking the ambulance was unfortunate but they had glued themselves to the road prior to its arrival and it simply did a u-turn and carried on and the passenger was fine. It’s not like they set out to block emergency vehicles on purpose.
Meanwhile:
In 2018, more than 8 million people died from the pollution caused by coal, oil, gas, and other fossil fuels. That accounts for nearly 1-in-5 of all deaths worldwide.
So on one hand we got people being inconvenienced and ultimately being fine, and on the other hand 5,749 people have died in the 6 hours since I originally commented here…
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935121000487
I agree it’s not particularly impactful, and most would have made an exception, but it only takes one person to argue that it’ doesn’t matter, or to defend it as something deliberate on the news to upset a lot of people.
Id say the biggest problem with this reasoning is that these protests do not save millions of people, and that that number would be easy to reduce, that the only reason that those occur is that nobody fancies doing anything about it.
In the same way, my employer going out of business would be a big deal to me, my colleagues and a few others, but it’s ultimately unimportant compared to climate change. But if that happened due to these protests, it wouldn’t actually fix anything.
I don’t dislike these protests because I don’t agree with the core message, I dislike them because I genuinely see them as counter productive. Talking to people about climate issues at the moment feels like I’ve jumped back in time 20 years, and mainstream beliefs 5 years ago now get you put in the “tree hugging hippie” catagory, as people think about “those protestors”.
This can’t change overnight, as I’ve said, there no ‘just’ anything when it comes to the fuel and infrastructure that powers our world. The faster we change, the more impact there will be on quality of life, these are sacrifices that everyone will have to bear, and so the main battle is the political will, it’s about people across the world choosing to make sacrifices. This is why poisoning the otherwise positive image of environmentalism and pissing lots of people off for intangible ‘gains’ genuinely concerns me.
Id say the biggest problem with this reasoning is that these protests do not save millions of people, and that that number would be easy to reduce, that the only reason that those occur is that nobody fancies doing anything about it.
Yes, you’ve inexplicably stumbled upon the very reason these protests exist in the first place, while simultaneously not getting it AND ALSO setting the bar for success at the protestors themselves accomplishing what governments and oil companies should be doing.
And all because what?
It inconveniences you slightly while our planet and people go off the rails. Nicely done, this is precisely the type of thing we are fighting against just to get some damn renewables going faster.