Following @XRebellionUK's actions in London- in which thousands of peaceful protestors engaged in the largest acts of civil disobedience in the UK for a generation- Parliament declares a #ClimateEmergency.
July 2019: Conservative think tank 'Policy Exchange' hastily put out a report concluding "legislation relating to public protest needs to be urgently reformed in order to strengthen the ability of police to place restrictions on planned protest"
@GeorgeMonbiot@XRebellionUK 4/ 'Policy Exchange' charged XR with being 'extremists' in order to justify the crackdown on their peaceful protests.
"The funders of Policy Exchange are completely non-transparent, but I bet you if we were to find out who they were, we would find out in whose interests it is to undermine XR"
9/ But over the coming months we would hear repeated calls in the billionaire owned press echoing the report’s call for a clamp down on civil-liberties.
10/ LBC's Nick Ferrari even launched a campaign:
"to give police greater powers when dealing with protests which cause serious public disorder, such as Extinction Rebellion."
11/ By spring 2021 the government had introduced a new ‘Police, Crime &Sentencing Bill’.
Meanwhile, human rights & civil liberties groups were warning that the government's bill was “an attack on some of the most fundamental rights of citizens” theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/m…
12/ Ultimately, after much public outcry, the House of Lords defeated some of the worst amendments to the bill.
But a still draconian ‘Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act’ was passed in April 2022. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politi…
No! Immediately they are out baying for yet more blood.
Dragging us ever-further into authoritarian rule.
19/ All in an effort to prop up an unsustainable status quo:
“governments don’t act on climate without pressure from civil society: threatening & silencing activists thus seems to be a new form of anti-democratic refusal to act on climate"
21/ @CIVICUSalliance is warning the UK is “increasingly authoritarian”.
Explaining in a new report that they have downgraded the UKs status due to the "worrying trends we are seeing in restrictions across civil society that are threatening our democracy"
22/ If we value democracy and are committed to securing a sustainable future, we are going to have to refuse to be cowed by these attacks on our freedom.
We're going to have to fight back and force the next government to repeal these unjust and anti-democratic laws.
23/ I feel we should all take courage from…
… the fact that leading criminologists have pledged to
"lend our full support to climate defenders who are criminalised by the state."
I’m thrilled to announce @TristramWyatt, @CharlieJGardner & my new paper in @RSocPublishing 'Open Science'
In this paper we set out our case for responsible scientific activism in an era of planetary emergency.
A short🧵
2/ We argue that scientists & scientific institutions can have the maximum amount of influence by lending their support to social movements pressing for action, joining as active participants & considering civil disobedience.
3/ Einstein once said ‘Those with the privilege to know have a duty to act’.
But act how?
If scientists want to be more than chroniclers of a preventable tragedy, and to see science-informed policies enacted, we need to seriously reexamine our theories of change.
One thing I wished more people understood about climate change is that we have not yet experienced any where near the full consequences of the warming we've already caused.
Here's a 🧵 explaining why...
2/ As the planet warms we see extreme events become far more common, a heatwave that used to have a 1% chance of happening in any year, becomes a 10% chance.
That is the return period is reduced massively.
3/ These changes are very sudden and dramatic.
As this study by the @metoffice shows "we find that events that would occur twice a century in the early 2000s are now expected to occur twice a decade"
Let's pause & reflect a minute about what this shocking picture of @GretaThunberg 's arrest tells us about the current state of #climate politics.
A short 🧵on some key lessons we can take from this image
2/ What a difference 6 years makes!
In many ways climate politics is in a very different place to how it was when @GretaThunberg first started her strikes outside the Swedish parliament in the summer of 2018 to try and put the #ClimateCrisis on the agenda
3/ Largely as a result of protest movements #climate has now entered mainstream debate.
And the stakes are clearer than ever.
Following the latest @IPCC_CH report in 2022 @UN Secretary General @antonioguterres made clear we are faced with a 🚨"Code Red for humanity"