Philosophy Tube's "Violence & Protest" - "A video about protest, direct action, and revolution in the context of the climate crisis" - covered this topic, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh4G1Gjv7bA
> It is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism. After all, terrorism is for the individual by far the modern world’s most effective form of political action, and climate change is an issue about which people feel just as strongly as about, say, animal rights. This is especially noticeable when you bear in mind the ease of things like blowing up petrol stations, or vandalising SUVs. In cities, SUVs are loathed by everyone except the people who drive them; and in a city the size of London, a few dozen people could in a short space of time make the ownership of these cars effectively impossible, just by running keys down the side of them, at a cost to the owner of several thousand pounds a time. Say fifty people vandalising four cars each every night for a month: six thousand trashed SUVs in a month and the Chelsea tractors would soon be disappearing from our streets. So why don’t these things happen? Is it because the people who feel strongly about climate change are simply too nice, too educated, to do anything of the sort? (But terrorists are often highly educated.) Or is it that even the people who feel most strongly about climate change on some level can’t quite bring themselves to believe in it? ...
"blowing up petrol stations" can get people killed. Someone who advocates such terrorism does not have a valid complaint if they are the target of violence.
I see two forms of complaint you might be referring to.
I don't believe anyone carrying out "MASSIVEN KRIMINELLEN GEWALTTATEN" will fail to understand how the state-backed violence will be used against them. So yes, if they complain about that response, then I don't think it's all that valid.
However, that does not mean that the original complaint - the lack of required and urgent response to the climate change crisis - is not valid.
Suffragettes carried out a bombing and arson campaign. "Places that wealthy people, typically men, frequented were also burnt and destroyed whilst left unattended so that there was little risk to life, including cricket pavilions, horse-racing pavilions, churches, castles and the second homes of the wealthy. They also burnt the slogan "Votes for Women" into the grass of golf courses." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette_bombing_and_arson_... .
That doesn't invalidate the complaint about the lack of woman suffrage.
The funny part is that these sorts of acts increase consumption to fix or replace the destruction, which generally involves a lot of C02.
"just by running keys down the side of them, at a cost to the owner of several thousand pounds a time."
I imagine quite a few owners would stop caring. At least here in the US, you have to not give a shit about having a nice car in the city due to the high risk of collision, side swipes/mirror, vandalism, theft, terrible potholes, etc.
If all six thousand SUV owners paid their several thousand pounds and kept their SUVs, while 5% of potential new SUV owners switched to another petrol car ("2019 average emissions of petrol SUVs were 134g/km compared to 121g/km of other petrol cars") then the overall carbon consumption decreases.
> At least here in the US, you have to not give a shit about having a nice car in the city
I think it's fair to say the owner of a Land Rover SUVs who stereo-typically uses it "for the school run", gives a shit about having a nice car.
You'll need to get the side swipes/mirror fixed by the next MOT test.
> How? Aren't people forced to pay restitution? Isn't there insurance?
My views of this topic are shallow. I've seen the Philosophy Tube video I linked to, and read a few related essays.
If you really want the "how", I'm the wrong person to ask for details. The video references Malm's "How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire" - perhaps look there instead.
My shallow views on this specific example of keying SUVs are: 1) not everyone will be caught, 2) what happens if the activist doesn't have the money to pay full restitution?, 3) insurance goes up if this becomes a wide-spread practice, 4) the SUV will be in the shop to get fixed, adding some nuisance overhead, and 5) the the bubble the SUV owners live in will get smaller.
A DDG search for anti-fur protests, which included throwing red paint onto fur clothing, gluing locks shut, and more, found https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/03/11/a... with a related argument: "giving selfish people a selfish reason to stop wearing fur coats, even if they don't give a damn about the animal".
So, this might all be summarized as "giving selfish people a selfish reason to stop driving SUVs, even if they don't give a damn about CO2 emissions."
> So it sounds like they won't be deterred if the argument is that they want what they want.
What they want is a nice car. There are other nice cars besides Land Rover SUVs. Including ones with lower CO2 emissions.
I assume many of those cars don't have as much seating or as much room (if you're tall).
I kind of doubt the red paint thing made much if an impact- it wasn't that common.
In the end, condoning illegal acts of violence is likely to escalte. For example, those frustrated people who are assaulted with paint or have their car keyed are likely to beat the shit out of the person if they catch them, maybe even kill them. Extreme tactics beget extreme opposition.
I earlier estimated that a 5% shift more than makes up for the additional CO2 emissions caused by replacing the damage.
Are you arguing that >95% of the population who bought an SUV did so because of seating or room or other essential feature that isn't possible in another car?
> I kind of doubt the red paint thing made much if an impact- it wasn't that common.
Things don't need to be common to have an impact. Look at the widespread worries about "stranger danger" when abductions of children by strangers is extremely uncommon.
And the Grey Lady appears to disagree with you: "For years, we’ve watched videos of screaming animals and seen red paint splatter fur coats. With these in-your-face and highly visual tactics, the activists helped win the culture war over fur." - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/style/peta-fashion.html
But really, I think you're missing my point.
I pointed to a half-dozen or more political movements with a militant component. (I'll add unionization, and anti-unionization, to the list. And Irish independence.). These are people who deliberately broke the law to advance their cause.
The use of militant activism does not negate the validity of the political goals of the movement. There's wide agreement that women suffrage is correct, even though the suffragettes carried out illegal acts of violence - and expected extreme opposition.
My point is to highlight these questions:
1) where is the equivalent militant arm among climate activists?
2) why are their actions so mild compared to the other movements I pointed out?
3) is there a point where militant activism (King's "a riot is the language of the unheard") would justified?
4) your observations (eg, "Extreme tactics beget extreme opposition") also apply to other militants - why didn't it didn't stop the suffragettes or others?
Now that I think about your phrase, ExxonMobil deliberately used extreme tactics to promote fossil fuel use even though their scientists knew about global warming back in the 1970s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont... . If "Extreme tactics beget extreme opposition" then where is the extreme opposition to ExxonMobil?
(Or do you want to argue that a multi-decade multi-national conspiracy to delay acceptance and action on global warming is not an extreme tactic?)
It could just be that we are in a new age. This is largely a first world issue and those raised in these societies for the past 20-30 years have been brought up in a zero tolerance for violence environment. It's also a much less hands-on environment, leading to people without the skills to execute the more complex/impactful violence.
It's also possible, and my favorite theory, that people don't want to be hypocrits. It's a lot easier to be a vegan and hate someone wearing fur than to live a modern lifestyle and not use any climate changing resources yourself (especially ageicultural products). Keying some SUVs just so they can be replaced by cars seems like it lacks any sort of "win" for the perpetrator, and most people see that. It's not an absolute, and extremism is built on absolute positions.
We see pro-abortion activists in the US arrested during protests. We've seen anti-abortion activists murder doctors. We've seen Q-Anon supporters arrested for their attempted coup. We saw anti-nuclear activists jailed for their vandalism (famously including a nun). We've seen eco-terrorists and anti-vivisectionists sent to jail.
Some suffragettes broke the law, deliberately and in public, and the more militant suffragettes committed vandalism, set off bombs, and more. One thousand suffragettes were in jail. Many of these prisoners went on hunger strikes.
I don't think any of these people would have been dissuaded by fines and community service.
The mainstream pro-life movement condemned the murder of abortion doctors. It achieved success through the political process -- supporting GOP presidents who appointed judges that overturned Roe and electing state legislators who enacted abortion restrictions.
And mainstream environmentalists condemned eco-terrorists and mainstream animal rights activists condemned the militant actions of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty.
I'm sure mainstream climate activates will also condemn militant actions in the name of CO2 emissions.
But as the video points out, people talk about the non-violent civil rights movement, and ignore the militant civil rights movement. ("A riot is the language of the unheard"); ignore the militancy of the suffragette movement in the UK; etc.
The question is: why do/did all of these movements have/had a militant arm willing to break the law, while the modern anti-global warming doesn't. gus_massa suggested it was due to the risk of being caught, fined, and punished.
Which doesn't make sense to me given the examples I listed of people willing to risk much more severe consequences in the name of their causes.
Did I miss something? So how do they see disruptive protest making a difference? I assume the people in power will use government condoned force to remove the "problem makers".
Exactly. Ecoterrorists would turn itself into an easy target for politicians trying to pickup some preferences. And the more green policies will bite into common folks wallets, the easier it is going to be.
