Extinction rebellion

Thursday

Charles Moore

We selfish gits must wear the name with pride

I walked down Villiers Street to Embankment Tube station. In front of me were two Extinction Rebels, a mother and daughter. Strapped to the little girl’s back was a white teddy bear. Strapped to the bear’s back was the handwritten slogan: ‘You selfish gits. Stop burning down my house.’ I wonder how they knew I was a selfish git, since I wore no emblem to announce the fact. Luckily they did not know I was off to a large party of fellow selfish gits to launch volume III of my biography of Mrs Thatcher. It was taking place in the Banqueting House, Whitehall, yards from XR’s encampment, and was eloquently addressed

Wednesday

Zac Baynham-Herd

Extinction Rebellion shouldn’t coax kids out of the classroom

I share Extinction Rebellion’s environmental concerns and I’ve previously joined their protests. My friends and colleagues fill their ranks. I even have a man-bun. But I can’t get behind their latest efforts to coax students to quit the classroom. Pre-empting this week’s disruption in London, Extinction Rebellion released a video recounting why student drop-outs, including marine biologists, gave up university for the movement. ‘I left university because someone told me the truth about what was happening and I realised that I had a responsibility to act,’ explains one former student. ‘(I left) because I am scared so many people I love are going to die and a masters won’t stop that’,

Tuesday

Brendan O’Neill

Extinction Rebellion is a menace

It’s tempting to laugh at Extinction Rebellion. I do it myself frequently. Those yoga sessions on Westminster Bridge. The amateur dramatics of wandering around in naff crimson-red outfits to symbolise ‘the common blood we share with all species’. That lame rave-style dancing they do as some bloke in an overlong beard plays the drums while his parents in the Home Counties wonder when he’s going to come to his senses and join his dad’s law firm. It’s all so ridiculous. They fancy themselves as revolutionaries but really this is just Hampstead and Homerton, the posh and the hip, descending on Westminster for a few days to wail about how howwible

Monday

Steerpike

Boris Johnson takes on Extinction Rebellion at book launch

To the launch of the final volume of Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher at Banqueting House. A mix of cabinet ministers, government aides and hacks descended on the Policy Exchange bash to hear both Moore and Boris Johnson speak. With the climate change Extinction Rebellion protests shutting down Whitehall, a number of ministers arrived via an underground tunnel to minimise disruption. Taking to the stage to pay credit to his former boss Charles Moore for his work on the biography, the Prime Minister said that he had been advised against attending by his own team: ‘I am afraid that the security people didn’t want me to come along tonight

Nick Rosen

Let’s give Extinction Rebellion protestors what they want

Extinction Rebellion’s leaders have arrived in London by fossil-powered train, car and bus – brandishing their mobile phones full of rare Earth metals, to protest against wasteful consumption. Extinction Rebellion is calling for urgent action on climate change. The good news for the government is that there is a radical green policy that would placate the mob and simultaneously tick several policy boxes too. Stripping away the rhetoric, Extinction Rebellion is making two demands – one is that countries commit to immediate radical action to cut carbon well ahead of the 2050 date in the current inter-governmental agreement (not endorsed by the world’s biggest polluter, the United States).  The second demand

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Contraception is the answer to climate change

When last week’s IPCC report warned that the human race may soon have trouble feeding itself, my reaction was: duh. Having pooh-poohed the 1960s ‘population bomb’ alarmism that would have us all balancing on our allotted five square inches of Earth by now, we’ve grown complacent about increasing our 7.7 billion world population by at least a quarter in the next 30 years, and by about half in 2100, when we’re likely to number around 11 billion. Perhaps it’s forgivable that an outfit called the ‘Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’ would blame a perilous future food supply on climate change. Yet it’s astounding that in the report’s broad news coverage

Thursday

James Delingpole

Saints and sinners | 18 July 2019

I’m beginning to feel like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers: almost the last person on Earth who hasn’t been assimilated by the evil, shapeshifting, floral pod creatures from outer space. Losing my comrade Christopher Booker the other day didn’t help. Nor did turning to the once robustly sceptical Sun newspaper this morning to find a spread on how to cut your carbon footprint and recycle. The final ‘reeeee!’ moment (fans of the movie will get the reference) will no doubt come when I next bump into Matt Ridley and he tells me: ‘We really must heed the wise things the Prince of Wales and Greta Thunberg are

Thursday

Ross Clark

Why are our MPs so pathetically in thrall to Extinction Rebellion?

Why are MPs so pathetically in thrall to Extinction Rebellion? This morning, while the world was focused on the Conservative leadership campaign six Commons select committees (Treasury, BEIS, Environmental Audit, Housing, Communities and Local Government, Science and Technology, and Transport) jointly launched a ‘Citizens’ Assembly’ on climate change. If you think you have heard that term before, it was one of the central demands of the climate change activists who occupied Oxford Circus for two weeks in April. One by one, they seem to be having their demands met as if they were a conquering army as opposed to a ragbag of anti-capitalist protesters. They demanded that Parliament declare a

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Prima le parole

‘I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all,’ wrote Stravinsky in one of his more honest moments, and when it comes to humour the old fox had a point. Strip away words, visuals, parody and extra-musical associations (the flatulent bassoon; the raspberry-blowing trumpet) and Orpheus, unaided, doesn’t have much left in his comic armoury. Two concerts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall could almost have been test cases. Geoffrey Paterson conducted the London Sinfonietta in the UK première of No. 50 (The Garden) by Richard Ayres, a composer whose playful, surreal sensibility cheerfully jettisons any idea of music as an end in itself.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

The trouble with Greta Thunberg

In popular mythology Greta Thunberg is a one-girl revolution who has inspired millions of young people into action by being able to see what adults refuse to see. But her promotion as global statesman is really a well-crafted piece of PR. Those on the Left who seek to use climate alarmism to further their war on global capitalism know full well that the likes of Robin Boardman-Pattison – the Bristol University graduate with a private education and fondness for foreign holidays, who stormed out of the Sky News studio when Adam Boulton accused him of being middle class – is a liability to their cause. But allow Thunberg to speak

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The Viz generation is in charge now

Unless you were a commuter struggling to reach work last week in London, the antics of Extinction Rebellion were comedy gold. If the world really is in imminent danger, as the activists tell us, then at least we’ll go down laughing. I’m not sure what gave me most entertainment. The giant yoga session, maybe, or the activists dancing across Waterloo bridge, although it looked less like dancing and more like a troupe of crusties trying to ward off a swarm of wasps. Then there was the side-splitting interview on Sky News with Robin Boardman-Pattison, the 21-year-old Extinction spokesman (and jet-setting skier), who threw a hissy fit when Adam Boulton suggested

Friday

Stefan Boscia

The Extinction Rebellion protests are targeting the wrong country

In 2007, then-Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd labelled climate change ‘the great moral challenge of our generation’. Rudd is right: if no action is taken on rising CO2 emissions then the world is in trouble. That’s why it is so disappointing that my country, Australia, has failed to tackle the problem and remains one of the highest emitters per capita of greenhouse gasses. However, the same is not true of the United Kingdom. Thanks to sensible and far-reaching climate change policies, Britain has significantly reduced its level of CO2 emissions and has almost entirely abandoned coal as an energy source. The UK has made some of the largest reductions in emissions

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Extinction Rebellion shouldn’t be given such an easy ride

Why is Extinction Rebellion being given such an easy ride? It isn’t hard to imagine the outrage which would rightly follow if, say, Brexiteers were to smash windows, block roads and bridges in the cause of trying to force the government into a no-deal Brexit. We would never hear the last of the Guardian condemning them for ‘fascist’ methods and attempting to bypass democracy. Yet Extinction Rebellion has been allowed to get away with all this for the past three days with hardly a murmur of protest from government ministers, MPs, commentators or anyone else. The whole things seems to have been treated a great big joke. While police have

Monday

Steerpike

Behind the scenes at the Extinction Rebellion protest

People are protesting on the streets of London again. But this time it’s got nothing to do with Brexit. Instead, activists belonging to campaign group Extinction Rebellion have attempted to bring London to a standstill today by blocking roads as part of what the group says is the ‘last best shot at survival’. Some of those Mr Steerpike bumped into in Parliament Square are certainly setting the bar high for what they want to achieve. As well as saving the planet, green protesters hope to replace ‘the complete and utter joke of democracy’ with citizens’ assemblies in the next six years. By 2025, some of those taking to the streets also want to