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| Credit: David Holt/Wikipedia |
Extinction Rebellion, which formed in the United Kingdom in 2018, is a group dedicated to fighting against (what they incorrectly perceive to be) humanity's imminent risk of extinction. And, according to CNN, they believe the best way to accomplish that is through "non-violent" acts of civil disobedience, such as by preventing people from going to work, spraying graffiti, smashing glass doors, protesting naked, and gluing themselves to street furniture. If that doesn't save the world, what will?
The group's Facebook page declares the "bonds of the social contract to be null and void," and therefore they stand in righteous rebellion against the government. Lucky for them, they made this bold declaration in 2019 when the Queen isn't inclined to chop off their heads.
The Rebellion has a website, too, complete with vague demands:
It's worth discussing these demands in more detail.
1) We demand governments tell the truth about the ecological crisis. It's extremely easy to find information about the environment. (Whether that information is reliable is another question entirely.) But assuming that Extinction Rebellion only wants to read data that is aligned with their hysterical, hair-on-fire approach to policy, they can find it just about anywhere -- scientific journals, think tanks, government websites. Nobody is hiding anything.
Besides, the fact that just about every country on Earth signed the Paris Agreement undermines their claim that governments are guilty of "criminal inaction." It's also worth noting that Germany already tried to implement a major green overhaul of its energy infrastructure called Energiewende. Spoiler it: It failed spectacularly, and Germany is nowhere close to meeting its carbon emissions target.
2) We demand zero emissions and drawdown by 2025. Good luck with that. The only realistic way to put a major dent in carbon emissions is to embrace nuclear power, but environmentalists (like those in Germany) are almost unanimously opposed to it. Apparently, the best idea they have to offer is the Green New Deal, the brainchild of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which reads like a 4th grader's wish-list to Santa Claus. And though Ocasio-Cortez tried to deny it, an accompanying memo from her office really did propose to ban airplanes and cows:
"We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast..."3) We demand participatory democracy. It's interesting how environmental activists of all stripes seem to share this feature in common: They demand democracy, by which they mean, "Vote for our policies, or we'll break your stuff." That's not democracy; that's tyrannical mob rule.
As is so often the case, Extinction Rebellion consists of anarchists and other rebels-without-a-cause incapable of expressing a coherent thought, let alone sensible policy proposals. Like the Occupy movement that preceded it, Extinction Rebellion will make some noise then rightly fade into irrelevance.
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