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people have been arrested during the on-going climate change protests. Greta
Thunberg was enthusiastically greeted when she took to the platform
in front of thousands of people at the rally in Marble Arch and made
a speech of solidarity with the protesters.
The Swedish
teenager told the crowd "humanity is standing at a crossroads"
and that protesters "will never stop fighting for this planet".
She said: "For way too long the politicians and people in power
have got away with not doing anything at all to fight the climate
crisis and ecological crisis. But we will make sure they will not get
away with it any longer." The
Swedish student took aim at the “politicians and people in power”
and declared that governments would no longer be able ignore the
impending climate and ecological crisis.
“I
come from Sweden and back there it’s almost the same problem as
here, as everywhere, that nothing is being done to stop an ecological
crisis despite all the beautiful words and promises,” she said. “We
are now facing an existential crisis, the climate crisis and
ecological crisis which have never been treated as crises before.
They have been ignored for decades and for way too long the
politicians and the people in power have gotten away with not doing
anything. We will make sure that politicians will not get away with
it for any longer.”
Extinction
Rebellion have said there will be a “people’s assembly” at
Marble Arch on Monday afternoon to decide what will happen in the
coming week, with the movement appearing to disagree on what next steps to
take in their campaign of non-violent civil disobedience.
Extinction
Rebellion member Farhana Yamin said the group had offered to "pause"
protests and begin "a new phase of rebellion" to achieve
"political aims". She said the move would show the group
was an "organised and a long-term political force to be reckoned
with".
However,
another Extinction Rebellion organiser Larch Maxey told the BBC there
"certainly won't be a pause in our activities". He said:
"On Tuesday we've got a series of strategic points around the
city which we will be targeting to cause maximum economic disruption
while simultaneously focusing on Parliament and inviting MPs to
pause." Asked if MPs would
be able to get into Parliament, he added: "Not if we are
successful, we're going to prevent them getting in so they have time
to separate themselves from the politicking and concentrate on what's
at stake here."
Many
in Extinction Rebellion very correctly see the solution to the
environmental crisis as lying in the achievement of a system of human
activity which is in harmony with the Earth’s life-sustaining
systems only they imagine that this can be done while retaining
production for the market. Whenever wealth is produced for sale on a
market it acquires a commercial exchange-value in addition to its
use-value, or capacity to satisfy some human need, and this unleashes
economic forces which come to dominate production and orient it away
from production for need. The goods, whether primaries or
manufactures, that the self-governing communities would be producing
for exchange with other communities would be commodities, or goods
having an exchange-value, and so would be subject to the same laws of
commodity production as apply in any market economy. The greens
would come under exactly the same pressure as are today’s private
and state capitalist enterprises to seek to maximise sales and
accumulate the money obtained as capital invested in new means of
production.
Nature
has begun more and more to show its disagreement with humankind’s
administration of this planet with increasing occurrences of extreme
weather events. We sometimes like to believe that the matter of
global warming are something for our children and grandchildren, in
the future to deal with but already climate change is dragging us
down. Typhoons and tsunamis that scourge us are growing more
predictable as scientists link them to changes in our weather
patterns. Our environment is constantly destabilising and more and
more incompetent governments fail to tackle the rapid change.
Droughts as well as floods will become endemic. Even if many
disasters are ‘natural’, the mismanagement of them is man-made.
Nature
has no national borders. It doesn’t have a flag. Climate change is
global. There will be no change unless we challenge the entrenched
interests of the whole rotten edifice of capitalism. The people must
be the agents of their own destiny.
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