Extinction Rebellion

Here's some information from the leaflet I was handing out on Saturday, to give a general idea of what the march and the Extinction Rebellion movement are all about:

On the front of the leaflet, below the large word "REBEL", they note that scientists have been warning governments about climate change for 30 years, and in that time emissions have increased, so that now forests are burning and the average temperature is rising all the time.

The leaflet goes on to emphasise that Extinction Rebellion is about non-violent and respectful direct action.

On the back, there's some more science. Global CO2 levels hit a new record high in 2017. 200 species every day are becoming extinct. Since 1970, 60% of wildlife globally has disappeared (World Wildlife Fund report in 2018), the oceans are becoming more acidic and filling up with plastic.
Campaigners have been drawing attention to the problems for years, but now drastic action really does have to be taken. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has said we have 12 years to cut our emissions to zero to avoid dangerous global warming. However, the Arctic is melting faster than their predictions, and the ice may disappear in ten years, or less. This sets off a feedback loop which makes further global warming inevitable, as there is no ice to reflect the heat of the sun back into the atmosphere, and the darker sea water absorbs the heat instead. (and, of course, melted ice means sea level rises, means low-lying cities and land around the world flooded).

And yet our government supports fracking, which releases methane into the atmosphere (a greenhouse gas), and has pledged £30 billion for roads - car exhaust emissions are, again, bad for the climate.

Extinction Rebellion wants to see these policies reversed, and carbon emissions reduced to zero by 2025.

This really could be the "end of civilisation as we know it" yet, as Richard Priestley said in his speech on Saturday, it is possible to do it with present technology - it's just a matter of applying what we already know.

One of the problems with any campaign like this is that it's impossible for individuals to change the way the climate is changing, no matter how much they recycle or switch to Green energy companies or cycle instead of drive. It needs a mass movement, putting pressure on governments and corporations to change their behaviour in a radical way. Several of the people at the march said that they had been involved in campaigning for years, but it really did seem as if there was a change in the air now - that people were starting to realise what was happening and that we need to do something about it.