Look at this article of hers, about extinction rebellion, criticising it yet her idea for addressing climate change is ‘Meaningful change on global warming does not happen this way. It happens through the very systems green extremists want to overcome: government, finance, investment, diplomacy. It’ll happen when major economies right around the world change course drastically, a process that will have nothing to do with chest-beating and revolutionary talk in London and Oxford and Cambridge.‘ and amounts to ‘having faith.’ I’m reminded of Mark Twains Quote: ![[Mark Twain#^7e083f]] I’d like to ask her what is going to motivate the major economies to drastically change? Especially when we consider the following… are we XR really so delusional, or is it Zoe Strimpel and company… The “Great Acceleration” refers to the rapid increase in human activity, industrial production, and environmental impacts since the mid-20th century. While it is primarily framed in terms of environmental changes, the role of social structures—such as governments, financial systems, and diplomatic efforts—is critical in understanding the broader consequences. Here are some facts and arguments suggesting these social structures bear significant responsibility for net negative effects: 1. Government Policies: • Governments, particularly in industrialized nations, prioritized economic growth over environmental sustainability during the Great Acceleration. Policies that favored industrialization, resource extraction, and mass production without adequate environmental safeguards accelerated deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, and pollution. • Regulatory gaps and lack of enforcement of environmental protection laws have further exacerbated the damage. Governments often failed to act decisively on climate science until much later in the acceleration period. 2. Subsidies and Support for Fossil Fuels: • Many governments heavily subsidized fossil fuel industries, making coal, oil, and gas more economically viable and delaying the transition to renewable energy sources. As a result, emissions soared, contributing to climate change and environmental degradation. 3. Global Financial Systems: • Financial institutions and investment markets, driven by short-term profit motives, often prioritized investments in high-return industries, which included resource extraction, fossil fuels, and other sectors with significant environmental footprints. • The financialization of economies led to capital flows that intensified the exploitation of natural resources in developing nations, contributing to deforestation, biodiversity loss, and climate impacts. 4. Investment in Unsustainable Industries: • Investment trends during the Great Acceleration funneled massive amounts of capital into industries such as petrochemicals, mining, industrial agriculture, and manufacturing, which were environmentally intensive. • These industries, without sufficient regulatory oversight or incentives to innovate toward sustainability, continued practices that harmed ecosystems, exacerbated inequality, and intensified carbon emissions. 5. Diplomatic Failures: • Despite international awareness of the environmental impacts of rapid industrialization (as early as the 1970s), diplomatic efforts to mitigate these impacts were often slow and fragmented. Global cooperation on issues like climate change did not gain significant traction until late in the 20th century (e.g., the 1992 Earth Summit, the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, and the Paris Agreement in 2015). • Diplomacy was often hampered by competing national interests, with wealthier nations sometimes prioritizing their economic growth over global environmental concerns, resulting in delayed action. 6. International Trade and Globalization: • The expansion of international trade and the globalization of supply chains accelerated the extraction and consumption of natural resources, contributing to habitat destruction, pollution, and carbon emissions. Governments and international organizations promoted free trade agreements that often overlooked environmental and social impacts. • Developing nations often bore the brunt of environmental damage due to foreign investment and resource exploitation, while wealthier nations benefited economically. 7. Corporate Influence on Policy: • Large corporations exerted significant influence over policy decisions, often lobbying against stricter environmental regulations or delaying the implementation of necessary reforms. This corporate influence shaped government policies that facilitated rather than mitigated environmental harm. While these structures fueled economic growth and technological advancements, they often failed to account for the environmental costs, leading to a range of net negative effects, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation. Anyhow, here’s her article: ### 'This House Would Extinguish the Rebellion', Feb 2022 https://zoestrimpel.com/f/this-house-would-extinguish-the-rebellion-feb-2022 18 February 2022 I always thought that the antics of Extinction Rebellion looked quite a lot of fun for a certain type of person. Not for the many thousands whose trip to work or ability to get home in time for a family dinner or attempts to keep emergency services on track were turned into a nightmare with each hour of protest. But for the people doing the acts of rebellion – what fun! Blocking bridges, locking oneself to lorries and airfield railings, chanting, supergluing oneself to Parliament, lying in the middle of the road, dressing in outlandish but gorgeous bright red robes and capacious headpieces. For all those would-be thesps out there, those tired of being humdrum and unnoticed, the old as well as the young, being a rebel is the ultimate performance piece, the audience a city of 9 million. What a rush! That the movement has attracted so many middle-class, oat milk chugging, hemp bag toting, craft-loving folk is hardly a surprise – these are surely the very people most likely to have lives in need of a bit of excitement, a bit of roughing up by police, the hopes of being in the newspaper.   It’s also easy to understand the appeal of XR’s mission and its policy of civil disobedience.  With a crisis this cosmic, fusty old law and order be damned!  Indeed, when it comes to the need for urgent action, XR _seems_ to be right on the money, soothsayers in a gas-guzzling world of vested interests, and it is absolutely true that climate change poses an urgent threat.  Let me very clear. I am not disputing the reality of global warming or the extent of the crisis. I’m disputing the response. Quite simply, it is delusional to believe that XR’s carnival of resistance is what it’s going to take to solve this problem, when in fact it can only make it _worse._Because XR is not about stopping or reversing global warming. It’s actually about performance, emotional manipulation, hyperbole and the politics of fear. It’s about distortions of r_ea_lity and the skewing of _mo_rality.  Let’s start with its name – even that is deliberate equivocation. _What_ is the extinction this rebellion is seeking to deflect? Most people think it means humans. But it could mean ‘the planet’. Or ‘civilisation’. Or animal life. Or all life. Rupert Read thinks it means the lives of the undergraduates he teaches at UEA, telling first-years about the strong possibility that “the later part of the lives of most of you in this room is going to be grim or non-existent’. These are the kinds of prediction most serious scientists consider way off base. But kudos to Read and Allam: their end-times language about human extinction now pervades the discourse of institutions like the UN and the [[The International Monetary Fund|IMF]] that should know better.  In XR’s hands extinction is a term designed to incite fear rather than withstand serious analysis. It is there to ratchet up the level of anxiety about the environment to the point that it is crippling, helping to turn the current young generation into the most pessimistic and depressed ever, despite the fact that they have more security, health and cause for optimism than any generation before them. Yet 60 per cent of 16-25 year olds now suffer from climate anxiety, 56 per cent think humanity is doomed, and 45 per cent say climate anxiety inhibits their daily lives. [Bath university, ten countries, commissioned by Avaz]. This fear wouldn’t be so bad if it was channeled productively, but more often than not, it just leads to psychological distress and a tyrannous hairshirtism. Guilt and worry are so pervasive that 40 per cent of young people, paralysed by fears about overconsumption, overpopulation and an uncertain future, are now hesitant about having children [Lancet]. It’s fine not to want to have kids. But not doing so out of existential terror is a sad form of unproductive defeatism.  For all XR’s claims of the urgency of waking people up, it is in fact pushing at a long-open door. In 1990, a Gallup poll found that 76 per cent of Americans called themselves environmentalists. In 1995, “environmentalism” was declared “one of the most successful contemporary movements in the US and Western Europe” by the International Journal of Public Opinion Research. Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006 and is now included in school science curricula around the world. Polls showed that 88 per cent of people who watched David Attenborough’s Blue Planet 2 cut their use of plastics after watching. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle talk of little else, and numerous polls show that Western publics accept the reality of a changing climate and man’s contribution to it. Politicians are aware. All kinds of businesspeople are aware. Silicon Valley is packed with start-ups all working in climate change solutions. Green parties are ascendant in many parts Europe. So what has XR added to the party? Just a new note of political and emotional extremism backed up by methods that put more people off than they persuade [Yougov: XR liked by just 17 per cent of the British public].  XR - So far, so futile. But there are three elements of the group in particular that should cause real concern: its authoritarianism, its millenarian fury, and its antihumanism.  First, the authoritarianism. For all the hemp bags and red garb and ostentatious gluing, XR has a totalising politics that desires to control every spasm of human consumption, and that wants parliamentary government subordinated to the virtue police. XR wants society to be organised around ultra-bureaucratic citizens’ assemblies, unelected groups who will see to the ‘democratic’ delivery of the zero-carbon goal. But rather than _include_these in its decision-making, XR wants the government to be ruled by them – Rupert Read himself has argued for a ‘third house’ representing future generations that ‘sits above’ the houses of parliament.  This has sinister historical echoes. In revolutionarily situations, parliament often gets overtaken by an extra-political body, aka the mob. And unless you actually like guillotines, this is not a sustainable or desirable model for a political system.  With the mob in place, XR can then action its plan, which is nothing short of the remaking of the modern Western order, the process by which it will bring about “climate justice”. Thus it will “[reform and extending our broken democracy.](https://rebellion.earth/act-now/resources/citizens-assembly/)” It will “affirm the rights of ordinary people.” It will “raise the voices of marginalised groups and the historically oppressed. It will “recognise the systems of capital and control that oppress and enslave people all across the world and understand that the destruction of our natural world is not an isolated crisis.” It will “empower ordinary people to organise, to act, and to educate themselves”. Some may call these noble goals; for others they will seem bombastic. Either way, seeing as we are apparently in the midst of an emergency, we might not have time to tackle all, or even any, of the items on this familiar left-wing wishlist.  Then there’s the movement’s religious zeal. XR’s first demand is to get the government to ‘tell the truth’, a manifestation of a crypto-Christian obsession with forcing people to reveal their true sinful hearts. It wants “industrialised countries to acknowledge their role in the emergency and their own moral responsibility.” This is about confession and repentance, not practical policy.  It all comes together in a disturbing antihumanism, in which we are to preserve the planet not for us or future generations, but irrespective of us. In XR’s scheme, humans seem to add up to little more than a blight on the planet; this is the animus behind the new reluctance to have children. And consider the comments by Roger Hallam to the German newspaper Die Zeit in 2019, in which he repeatedly minimised the Holocaust, calling it just “so-much human fuckery”. This is just nihilism. XR may appear to want to preserve human life, but slips of the mask like this point to a callous disregard for its meaning. Indeed, under XR’s rule, the scope of human life would be winnowed down as far as possible, until we’re as small and sparse as we can be. We are to do less, make less, live less. To them, we are just parasites on the earth, but to me we are its active custodians, and we need the scope to do, think, and act _more_.  Of course, like everything affecting, or affected by humans, there are social and therefore political elements to climate change. It’s not that a climate change movement is silly unless 100 per cent technocratic or economically focussed. Of course there can reasonably be a politics of desired social and structural transformation so that governments end up putting pressure on the vested interests of oil lobbies, and so that it is easier for people to change their patterns of consumption. It is also true that some forms of performative activism can nudge corporates to change course, and there _can_ be a certain impressive moral majesty to protest: Julia Butterfly Hill’s two-year stake-out in the branches of a California redwood tree from 1997 is an example. But XR lacks both focus and majesty. It targets everyday commuters taking the train and the ambulance trying to get to the hospital. The Rebellion is as superfluous as it is counterproductive. Blocking Oxford Circus, dancing in red garb, or forcing police to grapple with the delicacies of superglued limbs instead of tending to violent crime, including against women, might be for them a worthy day out. But for each ambulance held up, one more person is turned off from the cause.  Meaningful change on global warming does not happen this way. It happens through the very systems green extremists want to overcome: government, finance, investment, diplomacy. It’ll happen when major economies right around the world change course drastically, a process that will have nothing to do with chest-beating and revolutionary talk in London and Oxford and Cambridge.   In conclusion. Gloom and terror and self-flagellation have been irresistible forces throughout history. But what is essential now is optimism, a little faith in humanity. The fact is that human ingenuity inadvertently got us into this, and human ingenuity _alone_ will get us out of it. It’s already happening; think of the breakthrough in nuclear fusion by British scientists, announced last week, which brings us closer than ever to clean, green, cheap and sustainable energy. Think too of the Covid vaccines, and how much they have taught us about the wellspring of scientific creativity – the ability, when we put our minds to it, to pull off what had always been assumed to be impossible.  It’s time the rebellion gave way to realism; millenarian pessimism to hopeful hard work. Instead of indulging a fixation with punishing or obliterating humankind, ladies and gentleman, let’s get to work on mobilising its genius.