Hay-on-Wye and Extinction Rebellion

No-one can have missed news of the Extinction Rebellion protests in London over the last week.
People from all over the country have travelled down to it, including people from Hay and the surrounding area.
There were reports yesterday in the national press and our own B&R about arrests made in Oxford Circus. Around 700 arrests have been made so far. One of the people arrested was Justin Preece, well known singer at local open mic nights (he often sings in Welsh). Because of the pressure of the crowds, he was kept in a police van for several hours before being taken to a police station to be processed. In the end, he was held for 24 hours, because of the number of arrests that had been made, finally being released at 5pm on Saturday. The police station ran out of food to give them!
Justin went down as a member of the Brecon and Abergavenny affinity group, and was one of five of their members who was arrested. Arrested at the same time as Justin was Janet Barker from Llangammarch Wells, though she was released more quickly.
Earlier in the week, Sadie Stanton from Brecon, Rob Proctor from Abergavenny and Sian Cox from Llangorse were also arrested. Sian Cox was interviewed by the Brecon and Radnor Express - there's a good report on their website.

The protestors are there because the government is not taking climate change seriously enough, and a recent IPCC report stated that the world only has 12 years to act if we want to have any chance of keeping the climate change to 1.5 degrees C over pre-industrial levels.
We are already seeing the effects of climate change around the world - the hot sunny weather this Easter weekend may be lovely, but it is also very worrying. As well as record temperatures, we are also seeing more forest fires, droughts, floods and so on around the world.
Individual actions like recycling are good, but they are not enough. The system we live in needs to change - locally that would include better public transport, for instance. And less plastic that needs to be recycled. The 5p charge on plastic carrier bags shows that changes can be made for the better - after the charge came in, there was much less plastic seen around the coasts of Wales, but that's just a small change - collectively we need to do a lot more. After the School Strike, Hay Town Council declared a climate emergency, and Herefordshire County Council has also declared a climate emergency, but it remains to be seen how much action they are willing to take to achieve positive results.
For the changes that are needed to happen, we need government legislation and big changes to the way multinational corporations work, not just in the UK, but all over the world. There have been climate change talks, the most recent being the 2015 Paris Climate Change Summit organised by the UN - but many countries will not meet even those agreed targets and more drastic action is needed.