But at least you have cell service, amiright?
/s
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I hate the noise a fire alarm makes when it goes off. So annoying.
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Well yeah… People forget that the civil rights movement did not just picket politely at congress or in state legislatures. They disrupted public spaces often. The march to Selma (once it got started) was thousands of people marching across the state, using public roads. They picketed outside of stores. They sat in at lunch counters.
Sometimes, it needs to be disruptive to have an impact.
Who do you think is dealing with the worst impacts of climate change - it’s poor people, especially from minority communities.
Is it? How do you narrowly target the rich and wealthy? How will protesting outside of a wealthy enclave of an oil baron cause people to pay attention? You disrupt city traffic though and people do pay attention…
[ETA] Meanwhile…
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Welcome to my world. This has been happening regularly in Berlin and in Germany as a whole for the last year or two - it started up around the time that throwing soup on precious works of art became popular for a few months. Except here, they usually glue themselves to the asphalt.
In Europe, people are much more blasé about it, for whatever reason. Personally I hate it, not least of which because it’s part of a campaign that seems dedicated to pushing climate protection out of the political center and into the far left.
Bridgegate. I don’t blame the family for wanting to stay out of the politics of it though.
ETA: this is of course an example of the more general concept of “did this impede emergency vehicles, causing that person’s death” not specifically about protests. I don’t claim there to have been an example in which it was climate protests in DC that done it.
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I don’t think the art protests do help, but disruption of public areas has a more proven track record, I’d argue.
Or we could just all bake, I guess. Since it’s not getting any cooler if we don’t do something. This has been the hottest summer so far and yet will be the coolest summer going forward.
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… protesters killed Florence Genova?
Chris Christie must be relieved 
I wonder if they’d let my Nissan Leaf pass…
It will be a helluva LOT more “inconvenient” for everyone if there is no clean air to breathe, no clean water to drink, and no uncontaminated food to eat.
Protesting may not fix any problems directly, but doing nothing fixes no problems, ever.
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I’d rather see climate activists blockading an investment firm with a deep fossil fuel portfolio or a PR office that works for Shell and BP, rather than antagonizing people who are just going about their lives.
Better yet, I would like to see strategic action that builds toward concrete, achievable goals. What I’ve seen with groups like Letzte Generation and Extinction Rebellion is mere untargeted disruption, and I fail to see how that advances their goals. On the contrary, instead of enlisting and persuading, it marginalizes and alienates.
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They can do both. But, I’d argue that the real way to get these corporations to change is state-mandated regulation, with the force of government behind them. As long as our politicians are getting paid by oil companies, all that will happen is that people will get carted off by agents of the state and probably charged with terrorism. Nothing is a bigger sin than threatening private property, after all.
I’ll point once again to the example in the US of the civil rights movement. We think that they were just a bunch of polite people asking for equal rights. They caused major disruptions to daily life with their protests. People hated it and said the same things - that it was upsetting the wrong people. King wrote a letter about it while in jail. It was disruption that proved the most effective. It can’t be a surgical set of disruptions that won’t bother anyone. It has to be disruptive enough to get politicians to see that the only thing that will quell these protests will be political change and regulations.
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to add to that: sometimes bad press – people being angry at a protest – is good press because it keeps the issue in the news and on people’s minds. and i definitely think any ire would be best directed at the oil companies: because at least the protestors are trying … something.
maybe if we had people doing this in every city, causing nationwide shutdowns, maybe then we’d be able to force real change.
( i do appreciate that the biden administration has been getting at least some things done. ultimately, we need to get the gop kicked out of congress before there’s any chance for truly significant change… on so many fronts. )
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And at our government for not pushing for tougher regulation on the industry…
Exactly! These multi-billion dollar companies have greater say in Washington than we do… we need to remind them our interests should come before that of corporations.
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Ooh, ooh, ask me! (waves hand in the air)
A climate protest delayed my ambulance transfer to a cardiac specialist hospital in 2020. I was okay with it. The time for convenience is over.
I have half-convinced exactly two other people that these sort of climate protests are absolutely vital. So I realize it is a difficult sell.
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Fast forward to this month. Wildfire smoke everywhere in Vancouver.
(Koff, koff.) FUCK that hurts! Did I say I got a bypass 3 weeks ago?
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Love them or hate them, it takes courage to block traffic 
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… I tried to take a picture of the alien red sun yesterday, but our cameras “fix” everything so it looks normal — this was a blood orange in the sky
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At this stage, we are beyond changing peoples minds. We need to stop using fossil fuel as individuals and as a society. Immediately.
That means direct action.
If you use fossil fuel expect to be inconvenienced.
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I do think it’s targeting the wrong people.
I know part of my reaction is based on the framing of the write-up, “everyday people trying to get to work so they don’t lose their jobs, are hindered by climate activists,” for sure. And I know that disruption is a part of effective activism.
But I also think there’s a difference between drawing peoples’ attention to something that’s (largely) out of their daily control, and stopping them from getting where they might need to be quite vitally.
And, I know you know this, and most others reading here, I think greater change comes from inconveniencing the institutions that support our detrimental infrastructure. In the northeast, a few years ago we were stopping the train cars of oil when they came through. It got attention, and inconvenienced (imo) the right people.
I don’t mean to come across like that whole, “you should protest peacefully, oh, but not like that,” yet I think there’s a balance of drawing attention to an issue versus hurting people who are just stuck in our shitty system that this particular action hit wrong for me. 
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Probably not or we would all hear about it. There always seems to be a lot of handwringing for hypothetical ambulances delayed by protests relative to the very real delays caused by regular everyday traffic.
Is that a reasonable standard? You can’t protest continued inaction by one of the world’s most powerful governments without perfect behavior?
Convincing viewers is only one form of protest, and relatively low on effectiveness. Other models of direct action focus on making the material consequences of inaction hard for people in power to ignore. Snarling traffic in the political decision making center of one of the largest CO2 emitters is probably more focused on that style of protest, rather than convincing bystanders. It also generated headlines well outside of the target area, which is hard for small groups to do without violence as a general rule.
So, what would constitute a more effective targeted protest for a comparably sized group?
That already happens. It is roundly ignored.
Is it really the wrong people? Some of the people stopped are definitely going to be random service workers and such, but it will also include a bunch of administrative staff at government agencies, congressional staffers, and people employed by lobbying firms. The traffic reports and evening news broadcasts will go to congresspeople and CEOs of major firms.
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