Roger Hallam
(FB, 5/9/21)

I’ll be alright Jack
No you won’t
I recently spoke with a XR friend who is in his fifties like me and he said “I’m really sorry for the younger generation, they’re going to live through all this mess. I will be retired soon so I’ll be okay.” I thought you don’t have a clue.
One of key reasons why XR is being unsuccessful is because it refuses to communicate accurately and concretely in everyday language what is going to happen in the next two decades. This can be summed up in six words: the fiscal crisis of the state. Forget dolphins, whales and icesheets – there is only one reality here and it is what the state does when it runs out of money. This has very little to do with politics or values – it’s much deeper than that. The first principle of the state is to maintain itself. And when it experiences extreme economic stress it raids society to get cash. This means it takes money from unproductive parts of the society to pay for the parts that are productive. So, for instance, in World War Two the UK government raided the assets of the rich to pay for the war. This was done by Tory MPs – it was not a matter of politics but national survival. So you know what is going happen in a decade or so when western countries are having to pay for the massive cost of electrifying their economies, retro fitting their entire housing stock, and dealing with “defence” costs of social breakdown in the sub tropics: it’s going to raid the pensions of my generation. The brutal reality is that the interests of the retired won’t matter.
And as we enter the 2030’s and start experiencing the critical infrastructure tipping point of 40C plus temperatures on a regular basis, our children’s generation will be presented with having to upgrade or replace the melting roads, wiring and god knows what other stuff that stops working at such temperatures - just about everything (see the articles on 40C plus temperatures in British Colombia this summer). The costs will be eye-wateringly astronomical. Maintaining pensions, care homes, and the rest of the welfare state for the elderly is going to be last of the worries of the government.
But there is a darker side to all this. My generation will go down as the most selfish and immoral in human history, for being bystanders and allowing the corporate capitalist machine to decimate the biosphere over the critical decade of 2010-2020. Even after 2018 when it was bleeding obvious that we had to enter into civil resistance against this holocaust machine we continued to shit on our obligations to previous generations who died to give us our prosperity and liberties, and the next thousand generations who will have to deal with this “mess”, as it euphemistically gets called.
Well just consider that our children and their children will have no motivation to act any differently than us. Payback time is coming. It could be merely structural. The younger generation will come to power and the logic of the state, as mentioned, will lead to the rapid impoverishment of my generation, presently in our 40’s and 50’s as we get into our 60’s and 70’s. But more likely there will be a visceral contempt: you created this shit and so you can pay for it. Polluters pay and all that. We are not heading into some ecological steady state circular economy new civilisation. Much more likely we are heading into a time when people over 60 will be spat at as they walk down the street, and be literally left to die in urine stinking death homes.
Of course this is very unfair. Individuals should not be blamed for structural pathologies. But fairness does not come into it. What is “fair” about people eating meat and taking flights in 2021. Let’s be honest it’s a matter of “I can so I will”. That is the moto of today’s adults in Western societies. So don’t expect our children to be any different – they will follow our example. They can so they will.
I recently watched the film “The Father”. It was very upsetting. At the end of the film the elderly man returns to being a helpless small child calling out for his mother. But there is no mother to comfort him. Instead a care worker puts her arm around him as he sobs. The fiscal crisis of the state concretely means this: there will be no one to put their arms around him. Our generation will be left to wallow in self contempt for our cowardice, and to left to die, hated and alone.
If you want to speak with some effectiveness about the actual reality of the climate crisis to the public, this is what you have to start talking about. I did the world’s first “heading for extinction” talk in 2018 at King’s College (see it on you tube below). I started with the story of the 3 million soviet prisoners of war who were deliberatively starved to death in the autumn of 1941. And then told the audience that four years later soviet soldiers entered Nazi Germany and raped 2 million women in a couple of months. The point I was making is that under extreme pressure human beings are indescribably cruel to each other. In 2021 our governments are locking in this horrendous social stress because my generation of adults are refusing to go into civil resistance to stop it. It’s as simple as that. This is our war, but we are refusing to fight it.
Unsurprisingly this part of the talk along with the other “tell the truth” sections were taken out by the middle class liberal “let’s not upset people” regime that soon took over XR. But taking things out of talks which upset you does not stop then from happening: that is the post modernist conceit.
If XR is to have a future the realists in it have to enact some tough love and tell to some home truths to the “post modernists”. XR has to start telling the public what is really going to be happening with the raw passion and emotion it demands. And start saying the obvious, to quote ACTUP activist Larry Kramer:
“get out in the streets otherwise you’re gonna fucking die”.

Extinction Rebellion eyes shift in tactics as police crack down on protests | Extinction Rebellion | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/03/extinction-rebellion-tactics-police-crack-down-on-protests

As of Thursday evening, 483 people had been arrested in connection with the protests – compared with a total of 1,130 held during XR’s action in April 2019, and 1,768 the following October. For a movement that placed being arrested at the heart of its strategy, the drop seemed sobering.

XR’s latest protest campaign had been designed in two phases. First, a week of “crisis talks”: protesters would occupy busy areas where they could talk to passersby and discuss solutions to the climate crisis. Then the focus would move to the City of London, to disrupt the financial institutions they see as the key instigators of fossil fuel projects.

But as XR took to the streets, police were waiting. On the first Monday, a pink table installation activists hoped to hold for days in Covent Garden was isolated and removed by the next morning, foiling plans to make it a centrepiece for outreach. It was a similar story throughout the fortnight. XR would strike with a roadblock, installation or a theatrical direct action, and police would be hot on their heels.

Where cordoning off protests entirely could not work, as in the West End or Oxford Circus, officers would surround protest installations. Without activist support, protesters who had chained themselves in place were vulnerable; police could get removal teams in, cut them loose and arrest them. Dispersal orders would be issued and officers would begin by targeting XR’s drummers and music: kill the vibe, the strategy seemed to be, and the protest would melt away.

“[Police] seemed intent to limit the time and the opportunity for the public to witness our protests as early as they can, so essentially not enabling a protest installation or the centre of the protest to become the focus for the public to interact with,” said Richard Ecclestone, a former inspector with Devon and Cornwall police who is one of XR’s police liaisons.

...

Support for the group remains strong in other ways. XR point out that ahead of the latest actions, they raised £100,000 from supporters in just 24 hours. A recent poll showed 81% of people in the now UK regard the ecological situation as a “global emergency” – the highest proportion the world.

Bradbrook sees XR as undergoing a shift in emphasis. “A really important pivot that we have done this year is from talking about there is an emergency and sounding the alarm to talking about why there is not an emergency response, that that pivot has been about focusing on the political economy,” she said.

Doctors stage XR die-in outside JP Morgan offices in London | Extinction Rebellion | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/03/doctors-for-xr-extinction-rebellion-die-in-outside-jp-morgan-offices-london

Sixty doctors, nurses and other health professionals have staged a die-in protest outside JP Morgan’s Canary Wharf headquarters in London to highlight the bank’s investment in fossil fuels.

Jakub Hruška
1tS fponsnuoreshdh ·
Rozklad biomasy stromů uvolní ročně do atmosféry zhruba stejně CO2 jako roční emise z lidské činnosti. https://www.avcr.cz/.../Mrtve-stromy-rocne-uvolni.../ To se praví v tiskové zprávě AV ČR. Jenže pozor, ono je to trochu zavádějící srovnání (a náhodou jsou ta čísla dnes podobná - před 100 lety rozklad uvolnit 100x víc než lidské emise). A takto podáno to malinko vypadá, že ponechávání dřeva k zetlení vlastně "škodí" planetě. Mimochodem, už se takové hlasy objevily v souvislosti s bezzásahovkami na Šumavě.
JENŽE, ono se to dřevo prostě rozkládá zcela přirozeně, rozkládalo se vždy, a rozkládat se bude i v budoucnu. Je to přírodní proces, kterému nejde zabránit. Stejně jako se nemůžeme rozhodnout, že kvůli ochraně planety přestaneme dýchat (vydechujeme CO2, že...), nebo přestaneme čůrat, abychom nešpinili řeky, tak dřevo se prostě rozkládat nepřestane. Nemůžeme mu to zakázat.
Pokud si někdo myslí, že vytěžením a "použitím" se dřevo nějak zafixuje navždy, tak vězte, že průměrá doba setrvání dříví v oběhu, tedy než ho spálíme nebo vyhodíme na skládku, je zhruba jen 20 let.
Do dlouhověkých produktů (stavby) se použije zlomek těženého dřeva.
Ale ponechání mrtvého dřeva v lesích znamená, že se víc uhlíku zabuduje do půd (které jsou velkým rezervoárem uhlíku), i když je to třeba jen 20% z rozložených stromů.
A to vůbec nemluvím o podpoře mizející biodiverzity, která je v lesích na rozkládající se biomase stromů kriticky závislá (brouci, houby, ptáci, lišejníky, mechy a mnoho dalších). V případě holosečných těžeb totiž nastartujeme (rozrytím, osvětlením, zamokřením) oxidační procesy, které uhlík z půdy uvolní do atmosféry taky.
Rozklad dříví světových lesů je součástí přirozeného cyklu uhlíku na planetě. Pálení fosilních paliv nikoliv.
Vědecky je kvantifikace světového množství uhlíku uvolněného rozkladem velmi cenná informace, dosud neznámá. Ale prosím interpretovat ji ve správných souvislostech....

KEB: e-ink ako mas v kindlu, to zerie energiu, iba ked sa prekresluje obraz