By John Daniel Davidson
Friday, October 18, 2019
If you think most people are willing to make drastic
changes to their lives because of climate change, let alone restructure the
entire economy and do away with fossil fuels and capitalism, think again.
A viral video of London commuters dragging a pair of
climate change protesters off the top of a train Thursday morning perfectly
captures this disconnect between environmentalist doomsayers and ordinary
working people.
The activists, part of a climate change group called
Extinction Rebellion that’s been staging protests throughout the city since
last Monday, shut down the tube when they climbed atop a train in London’s
Canning Town station in the middle of the morning rush hour to display a banner
that read “Business as usual = death.”
Initially, commuters on the crowded platform waited patiently.
A few of them hurled insults at the activists. One woman shouted, “The world is
not coming to an end!”
But eventually the crowd grew restless—no doubt because most
of them were trying to get to work—and forcefully pulled the activists off the
train. One of protesters appeared to be kicked and beaten after he was dragged
off the train into a throng of bystanders.
There were similar disruptions at other stations throughout
the city, where some activists glued themselves to a train, just as protesters
had glued themselves to the ground earlier this week at Trafalgar Square as
police tried to clear the area.
Extinction Rebellion vows to “peacefully occupy the
centres of power and shut them down.” The group, which promised similar
demonstrations in other cities across the world, began staging Occupy-style
protests in London last week, and by Monday more than 1,400 had been arrested.
Authorities have issued a blanket ban on Extinction Rebellion protests and on
Thursday London Mayor Sadiq Khan condemned the group for disrupting public
transportation.
Let’s Get Realistic About
Climate Change
So far, the protests have been extremely unpopular. A
YouGov poll on Thursday found 63 percent sympathized with the commuters who
pulled the protesters off the train. Just 13 percent said they support the
protesters.
It’s easy to see why. Even if one believes in
catastrophic man-made climate change and supports policies to limit or reverse
it, there’s only so much the average person is going to do. Skipping work to indulge
extremists demonstrating on top of a train simply isn’t an option for most
people. Neither is going without electricity or forgoing air travel.
In fact, most people are increasingly of two minds about
climate change. On the one hand, they fear it and want something to be done. On
the other hand, they’re not willing to do anything extreme. That’s what a
recent poll by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation found.
The vast majority of Americans — about 8 in 10 — said
climate change is man-made, about half said urgent action is needed, and nearly
4 in 10 said it’s a crisis. At the same time, fewer than 4 in 10 said they were
willing to make to make “major sacrifices” or pay for it out of their own
pockets.
In that sense, the scene at that train station in London
on Thursday morning is really the entire climate change debate in microcosm.
When extremist climate change ideology conflicts with the facts of everyday
life, like commuters needing to get to work, most people choose the latter.
If people aren’t willing to give up relatively minor
things, they’ll never support the radical emissions cuts and structural changes
to the economy espoused by advocates of the Green New Deal like Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez. Maybe that’s because most people know these changes would wreak
economic devastation across the world and condemn millions of people to
poverty.
Consider the aims of the group behind the London
protests. Extinction Rebellion wants the U.K. government to declare a climate
emergency, reduce carbon emission to net zero in six years, and form a citizen
assembly to oversee the changes. Whether the group will admit it or not,
reducing carbon emissions to net zero in
six years would devastate the economy of the United Kingdom and plunge it
into a pre-industrial dystopia. Simply put, most people aren’t on board with
that.
Climate Change Hysteria Is
an Insult to Working People
The visceral reaction of these London commuters
exemplified one other aspect of the climate change debate, which is the disdain
environmentalist elites have for ordinary people, especially for the world’s
poor. The protesters believed, implicitly, that the commuters should suffer
what they must for the sake of raising awareness about climate change—and they
should have no say in the matter.
Here again, the scene at the train station was the
climate change debate in microcosm. Those people were going to get on that
train, climate activism be damned. In the same way, people without electricity
in China and India and the Middle East will do anything to get it. They don’t
care whether it contributes to global carbon emissions, their priority is being
able to turn on the lights.
Indeed, the only way to reduce emissions on a scale that
will appease climate change ideologues is if poor people stay poor. Not only
that, but plenty of working and middle class people will have to become poor,
whether they like it or not.
No wonder they pulled those guys off the train.
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