Protests Seen as Harming Civil Rights Movement in the '60s

I've recently had some conversations about activism and protesting about climate change on Tildes, which made me remember these polls again. I think they are a good historical reminder, and they demonstrate that masses much too often care more about comfort and privilege rather than justice.

These polls also show that you don't need to convince the majority to effect change. In fact, focusing on that might be detrimental to your cause. People who are bothered by your protest, because it disrupts "order", will try to tell you how to effect change while sitting in their own comfort. But this is not important.

Here is the gist of it, with MLK's own words.

"First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

Believing in the timetables created by comformist opinions would be a grave mistake for climate activists. We need more confrontation, more radical acts, and more direct action. We don't need to make friends with the majority to do this. We need to shake things up, and most people don't like that. You can see this by the worsening majority opinion of the Civil Rights movement after they intensified protests. But the activists were right, it was an urgent matter, and they succeeded. So, we don't need to play nice.

For example, after MLK's asssassination people started burning down cities, which resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1968 passing. You can see this in the citations; basically the government feared further escalation, and that's why they had to pass the act. Another example is the suffragettes' bombing and arson campaign in Britain and Ireland, which helped with their cause by putting pressure on people in power.

I'm not giving these examples to say there should or should not be one-to-one copies, but to show that being radically confrontational does work. Radical confrontation and direct action are what we need for climate justice, because time has been running out for a while, and every day past without a radical change makes things much worse. So we should cast off the yoke of mass approval and meekness. We need to embrace the confrontation.

I'm gonna try to be brief. This is the worst I've ever felt, weather-wise, in my life, and it's only the start of summer. It's heavily negatively affecting both my physical and mental health. I can't even properly work. I don't have AC. I can't afford it. Everybody around me is suffering very similarly.

I've been following climate crisis for years, but I've never thought I'd see such an extreme worsening this early. Even if I knew in theory that anomalies like this could happen, as it's very widely agreed upon that they would, it's much different to live through. It's hell on earth.

I'm one of the luckier ones, relatively speaking. There are over hundred thousand people dying from heatwaves each year. It's probably much higher than officially reported, because most governments don't track heatwave deaths. Millions and millions of people in India have been experiencing bigger and bigger water crises. Just in 2019, 600 million people faced a water crisis in India.. Hundreds of millions of people in Africa are suffering due to climate change related climate extremes and food security crises.

I also just found out that a location in Antarctica exhibited 70F (38C) higher than normal temperatures this year. Faster than expected, right?

I think this is inexcusable. Oil companies and such knew what was coming. There are countless documents and studies detailing this. Here are a few.

• Exxon confirmed global warming due to their emissions was happening in 1982.
• American Patroleum Institute similary knew in 1980.
• Exxon knowingly spread climate change denialism in response (source 1, source 2)
• Even in 2015, Exxon was dodging responsibility, telling people to "read the documents". So, two scientists, Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, did that. And found out that Exxon acknowledged global warming in the internal documents, while they denied it in public (article 1, source 2). In other words, it's been empirically shown that they fucking manipulated the public with full knowledge.
• Exxon is not alone. ExxonMobil, Chevrontexaco, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and Conocophillips spent 3.6 billion dollars for lobbying in US alone during 1986-2015.. 61% of these expenditures are after 2006, when climate change started becoming a hot topic. So, when they attracted attention, they doubled down.
• Another document is of American Patroleum Institute from 1998, showing they intentionally focused on exaggerating the uncertainties of climate science in front of the public.
• Big Oil still opposes science and us. A study published in 2019 shows that ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, BP, and Total spent 1 billion dollars on lobbying and branding after the 2016 Paris Agreement.
• Oil companies are not alone. A study examining the 2000-2016 time-frame in US found that "fossil fuel and transportation corporations, utilities, and affiliated trade associations" are all major climate lobbyists. Only 3% of the total climate change lobbying was done by environmental organizations and renewable energy corporations.

These crimes are inexcusable. The people responsible should pay for them. And these should be treated as crimes against humanity and the planet, of the highest degree. These people don't deserve anything but to pay. They are the evil, who, in great awareness, have unreversibly damaged the planet, caused untold suffering. They still continue to do this, and even if they stopped now (hah!), their evil will continue to haunt humanity and a myriad of other species for unimaginable generations.

They should pay.

This is a topic that's been on my mind for a while, and I wonder what people think about it.

As everybody knows, climate crisis is worsening, is going to continue to worsen, yet the pace of reforms is not nearly enough. "Faster than expected" has even been a meme for years. What's more is that we are very hastily nearing the 1.5 Celcius degrees limit IPCC and countless other climate scientists have been warning about (For details, check out IPCC 1.5oC special report, and IPCC AR6).

Another point is that oil and traditional energy companies, their politicians, and other people working for them have done irreversable damage to humanity and many, many other species of life. Yet, generally speaking, courts don't seem to hold them accountable.

In short, there's a good deal of reason to doubt legal structures will solve the climate crisis fast enough or hold people accountable for the most part.

I suspect this might lead to "violent activism". For example, human ecology professor and activist, Andreas Malm, wrote a book calling for such action. In the book, "How to Blow Up a Pipeline", he contends that non-lethal violence, meaning sabotage, is a necessary and complementary element to peaceful activism, in order to make people in power unable to ignore this issue any longer, and make the peaceful protestors seem the "reasonable alternative", strengthening their hand. This book seems to have found some popularity among a certain crowd.

Another, less specific but still noteworthy example is the growing violent feelings among the young people regarding climate crisis. Many of them are utterly jaded to the reform process, and are openly or semi-jokingly calling for violence.

I suspect we are nearing or maybe even passed a threshold, which will lead to the rise of violent activist groups, quite possibly in the current decade. However, I'm not sure about this, as predicting the future is a very uncertain thing. What do you think, and what are the reasons behind your opinion? I'm interested in how events like this play out in human history, and I feel like, either way, we are going to witness some very important developments.