Six on Climate Change: The Media Are Complacent While the World Burns; Extinction Rebellion activists glue themselves to Lon
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"Yet at a time when civilization is accelerating toward disaster, climate silence continues to reign across the bulk of the US news media. Especially on television, where most Americans still get their news, the brutal demands of ratings and money work against adequate coverage of the biggest story of our time. Many newspapers, too, are failing the climate test. Last October, the scientists of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark report, warning that humanity had a mere 12 years to radically slash greenhouse-gas emissions or face a calamitous future in which hundreds of millions of people worldwide would go hungry or homeless or worse. Only 22 of the 50 biggest newspapers in the United States covered that report
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Since the protests began last Monday, 30,000 new backers or volunteers have offered support to the group. In the same period, it has raised almost £200,000 – mostly in small donations of between £10 and £50 – making a total of £365,000 since January.
The group said the figures showed the public was waking up to the scale of the crisis, adding that pressure was growing on politicians to act.
The group said numbers of people on the streets for the protests had dwindled from a high over the Easter bank holiday weekend, but the number of people who had signed up to offer ongoing support and backing for future demonstrations had risen from 10,000 before the protest to 40,000 by Wednesday morning.
The decision to call a halt to the protests came a day after Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish student who inspired a global youth-based movement when she began a “climate strike” outside Sweden’s parliament last year, visited Westminster.
In a speech to MPs, she said: “You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to. You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before.”
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"To walk the roads through even a corner of Alberta’s vast tar sands complex is to visit a kind of hell. This may be the largest industrial complex on our planet—the largest dam on Earth holds back one of the many vast settling “ponds,” where sludge from the mines combines with water and toxic chemicals in a black soup. Because any bird that landed on the filthy water would die, cannons fire day and night to scare them away. If you listen to the crack of the guns, and to the stories of the area’s original inhabitants, whose forest was ripped up for the mines, you understand that you are in a war zone. The army is mustered by the Kochs (the biggest leaseholders in the tar sands) and ConocoPhillips and PetroChina and the rest, and their enemy is all that is wild and holy. And they are winning.
It is hideous, a vandalism of the natural and human world that can scarcely be imagined. I’ve spent years working to end it, and my efforts have been small compared to the unending fight of the people who live there. And yet, giant as this scar is, in itself it represents no real threat to the human game. The Earth is not infinite, but it is very large, and if you retreat far enough, even this scab (the single ugliest sight I’ve witnessed in a lifetime of traveling the planet) gets swallowed up in the vastness that is Canada’s boreal forest, and that in the vastness of North America, and that in the vastness of the hemisphere."
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