extinction rebellion protest in London

Of course, when they were organised these protests (which would have taken months) it was planned for after the Brexit deadline....

It's a bit rich to suggest they should have planned the protest for later in the same line that you say it should have happened years ago! It's not like people haven't been trying to get politicians to take action on climate change for years.

I really don't understand why people spend so much effort accusing protestors of hypocrisy because they come from middle-class backgrounds and live in the modern world like the rest of us do. Are you only allowed to protest if you're a hippy living in a self-sufficient commune?!

Because the point is that individual actions like re-using a water bottle or not flying actually have f***-all effect on the problem. What any one individual can do about their carbon footprint is a drop in the ocean compared to the overall scale of the problem.

Action needs to be politically-driven to have the required impact, because it needs to be large-scale and systemic. It needs legislative power behind it.

That plane flies to Malta regardless of whether that particular protestor is on it, as we all know. It's ridiculous to decide that we can ignore him because his job requires air travel when we're talking about the sustainability of our way of life on this planet long-term.

I was there myself yesterday, and it was slightly quieter than usual. I emerged victorious with a rather fetching pair of pink shorts, so if you ever see me out and about in them you know you can thank (or indeed blame) climate change for their existence.

Embargoed until press night.

In the nineteenth century, the Thames was full of sh*t and other waste, partly a result of the improved toilet system. Good toilets, bad sewage disposal. Not a single thing was done about it, nothing until the stench was so bad that Members of Parliament could not sit in the Houses of Parliament, they couldn’t breathe. Then they voted all the money needed for the Embankment and sewage system that has lasted out to now despite massive increas in population because the engineers, mainly Bazelglette ( spelling, sorry mate) thought ahead. So lesson is nothing gets done until the people in power actually feel the problem themselves. Climate change will happen, it is happening all the time, ice age anyone? We can help ourselves, our future selves and the flora and fauna with all sorts of changes to our behaviour but until the stench reaches the lawmakers it will be very hard to make serious improvements.

No-one is claiming to have any magic solutions - there aren't any, and in many respects the ship has sailed so the best we can hope for now is that governments do all they can in terms of damage limitation, as climate change is not going to go away. The difficulty is that these protesters seem to be expecting the government to abandon all the other hugely important and complex issues they have to deal with to focus on environmental issues alone - that is both unrealistic and incredibly naive. These issues cannot be tackled in isolation, they interact with and are dependent on other matters such as matters of legal sovereignty, which is itself a bit of a mess right now. Only when that is fixed can the government be in a position to pass meaningful climate change legislation.

It will also require buy in from corporations, and it strikes me that damaging their property is unlikely to motivate them to engage.

All of that put together means that the current protests are no more the correct solution than anything else that has previously been done. No-one has yet managed to explain what exactly this protest has achieved so far, because aside from a landslide of negative publicity and colossal waste of police resources it doesn't seem to me to have achieved much at all, certainly not anything positive.

Are they really though? They don't strike me as having too much concern for their own welfare and interests before those of others. Some may of course as in every protest but the ones I have seen appear to be more concerned about the planet and its future in general for the next generation rather than themselves. I'm not sure insulting them is the way to go. I'd hope that government would think about how to benefit its future population rather than thinking of new ways to arrest people who say and do what they don't like. I hope it does stretch on for weeks actually, one day protests don't seem to make the government take any notice of things, perhaps something more longer term will.

I'm not sure that they really want the government to abandon everything else and focus on the environment alone either. But I guess if the environment isn't dealt with as a matter of priority those other hugely important and complex issues won't matter a jot anyway.

Yes, that's absolutely true of course but as you say, CO2 emissions is only a part of the problem and the fact that they have fallen for the sixth consecutive year is great but (and I could be wrong of course) aren't the protesters trying to highlight the other issues affecting the environment as well?

O come on, if you make yourself a media photo op, get the details right.

How do you know those bottles haven't been re-used repeatedly?
I've got a few plastic bottles kicking around that I refill from the tap.

It's like people are looking for excuses to dismiss the protesters - 'oh, look, there's a plastic bottle in the photo, that means I don't have to listen to them! Lalalalala!! Climate change won't affect me or my children!'

They are right to keep an important issue visible. It's *a* way of doing it, among other ways as pointed out above, and in some ways perhaps not perfect but there is no magic silver bullet approach. I'm sure they know their current actions in themselves aren't going to suddenly make the government or any other players do more but the whole process of addressing climate issues is long term and it does no harm to keep it visible. That's what the schoolchildren were doing with their protests but some of the reactions that drew, the dismissal, assumptions, mocking and sneering condescension of them, while expected was still unsavoury and pretty disgraceful. It said a hell of a lot about the people who reacted that way.

When anyone, of any age group, social demographic, food and travel habits and bottled water preference, makes the effort to publicly protest something I choose to assume they are genuinely concerned, interested and engaged enough about that issue - whatever it is, including stuff I may not agree with - to have made that effort. Such people will be at the core of protests, marches etc but we know these well-intentioned demonstrations can be piggy-backed by intentional troublemakers, though I don't think that's happening with this one.

It saddens me that anyone in any way speaking out about anything climate-related is automatically met with the kinds of reactions seen in some of the above posts, which side-step the main issue and attack those raising it, using the usual worn-out tropes about class and age, and the predictable attempts at brinkmanship that spring from them. As was mentioned earlier, western life makes it hard for individuals to fully remove themselves from behaviours that in some way contribute to the issues concerned.

There is debate and discussion to be had and it's important to do that as it is with any issue. Climate is one where there is stark polarisation and both sides demonise each other but we've got to be better than that.

I mean, all I was doing was posting what I found rather ironic.
Not sure how you've managed to completely mangle that to interpret it as denial, specifically climate change denial.

Again, why the focus on the negatives? I don't doubt what you said about what you learned from those teachers. That's going to happen, unfortunately. Is it true of all of them? Does it invalidate all the protests here and in other countries? Christ in heaven we are down to the level of whether a guy will get his A* grade. It won't end his prospects for all time and terminally cut off all possibilities of a career in ending climate change. Is this really what we have to scrabble around to find in order to question these protests?