Extinction Rebellion should be classified as an organized crime group, according to the British prime minister and home secretary. Bad joke. It is a non-violent grassroots movement of people seriously concerned about the burning of fossil fuels that is threatening to make our planet intolerable for humans and many other beings.
Today we joined our first Extinction Rebellion protest. It was in the Jubilee Garden, a pleasantly curvilinear small park between the Thames bank and a towering plain-faced concrete building, the headquarters of Shell.
The large and friendly crowd was sprinkled with yellow: the yellow jackets of the police and the yellow banners with the Extinction Rebellion symbol. Half a dozen police paddy wagons, ready to carry off criminals, waited like a defensive wall in front of Shell.
The organization was a little amateur, as is perhaps fitting. The criminals are not as hardened as criminals should be. The speeches were clear, earnest, and sometimes poetic. But it is not enough to say we must cut our own use of oil and plastic. A little nearer to the solution was “We’re going to sue Shell, bankrupt them!” But Shell and other such corporations are by nature unable to do otherwise than maximize profit, and use their financial power to defend themselves. They enrich a relative few (executives and shareholders) at the expense of a majority that will eventually include themselves. They fit some reasonable definitions of an organized crime group. (It was good that their murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa was remembered.)
What we need to do is not just call on government to act but create governments that act: vote into power those who will have the guts to triple fuel taxes, stop subsidizing airline fuel, invest massively in renewable energy, ban import of the products of tropical deforestation, and more.
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