The interesting thing to me is since the long Easter weekend of XR protests in the UK, opinion polls have shown them rising in popularity and environment polling higher too.

XR are not interested in making friends, but causing enough disruption to get government to treat the issue seriously, in the manner of civil rights and universal suffrage actions. They've certainly increased awareness and discussion. That they actually seem to be making friends by doing so would seem a surprise bonus.

Not only that, the signs are it's working, as change (insignificant tokenism, but nonetheless a step) has already achieved. Between XR and the school strikes parliament has actually declared a climate emergency, and even prospective Tory leadership candidates have declared positions on zero emissions. I don't expect the Tory party to actually do much, but it's a hook on which further legislation will be hung as XR and others are aiming to make it impossible to ignore.

It doesn't matter which party is in control, no action will be taken. Any action that takes a significant bite out of CO2 emissions will either cause a major decline in standard of living, or have an enormous financial cost. The people who answer that poll don't understand that. When they find out it will not be pleasant for whatever party is in power. The politicians from all parties know this. That's why they make lots of declarations and promises to do things by 2050 but take insignificant actions like banning plastic straws.

Not convinced polls only catch the ignorant. :)

Cost is trivial compared to the cost of inaction. The consequences of no action on climate change will have enormous financial cost times ten, times twenty. Do we really want to find out?

You might want to look at Labour, SNP and Lib Dem climate policy. Whether they get to form a government or informal coalition is, of course, another matter as environment is not - yet - the sole issue that wins elections. Even the Conservative party is moving in the right direction, albeit glacially slowly with some creative accounting.

The only choice left is matter of degree.

I would rather risk a small decrease in my standard of living today than cause a worldwide genocide within a few years.

You might be interested by "The Happiness-Energy Paradox: Energy Use is Unrelated to Subjective Well-Being".

Earth’s per capita energy use continues to grow, despite technological advances and widespread calls for reduction in energy consumption. The negative environmental consequences are well known: resource depletion, pollution, and global warming. However many remain reluctant to cut energy consumption because of the widespread, although, implicit, belief that a nation’s well being depends on its energy consumption. This article systematically examines the evidential support for the relationship between energy use and subjective well-being at the societal level, by integrating data from multiple sources, collected at multiple levels of government, and spanning four decades. This analysis reveals, surprisingly, that the most common measure of subjective well-being, life satisfaction, is unrelated to energy use -- whether measured at the national, state or county level.

The polls I've seen put the public at 52% broadly opposed to their actions (36% broadly supportive) back in May, and I have trouble believing droning Heathrow will improve that. Sure, they have succeeded in pushing climate change higher in the news cycle, but the secular trend was in that direction anyway, "awareness" of anthropogenic climate change was at ~95% and the government already had a Net Zero strategy that was less insubstantial than the symbolic declaration of emergency, and a backdrop of emissions having fallen steadily in the UK for a very long time. Not all news is good news either: if our most-likely next PM needs an excuse to renege on his old "I'll lie in front of the bulldozer" pledge to do everything in his power to block Heathrow expansion, it's difficult to think of better cover than arguing that he's not going to let protestors set his legislative agenda...

(Also hard to imagine that legislators in more climatically-significant countries like China are likely to see climate anarchists shutting down British airports as a sign that more action needs to be taken on emissions and not a sign that certain parts of the West have lost their minds over the subject of climate change.)

I'm inclined to agree that drones at Heathrow will be a misstep that could backfire for XR. It's an outsize disruption with possibility of outsize jail sentences when they always claimed they were focusing on the capital where the government and decision makers are. Heathrow seems a bit of a stretch. City airport perhaps. To me it's a confusing choice.

The government's net zero strategy is little more than not disputing the Select Committee on Climate Change's report. As the committee themselves note there now needs to be actual policy. From an administration that has been hugely counterproductive to adoption of greener energy.

Edit: I suspect Boris forgot about his pledge the morning after he uttered it. :)

> I don't think they made many friends.

I don't think they're interested in making friends. They're interested in trying to persuade more people to stop eating the flesh of sentient creatures when our diets don't even require it.

> It's really hard getting someone to change their mind or their thinking about an issue.

I agree.

> But I firmly believe actively making enemies is probably not the way to go about things.

I disagree. Pretty sure there was lots of enemies made when women demanded the right to vote. Or when African Americans demanded to stop being segregated. We take a lot of things for granted as "obvious" now, but they're only obvious because enough people stood up and said they don't really care for your feelings.

> If I worked in Melbourne on that day, I would have eaten a revenge steak.

I think that says more about you than it does about the vegan activists.

> I don't think they're interested in making friends. They're interested in trying to persuade more people to stop eating the flesh of sentient creatures when our diets don't even require it.

And first making those people your enemies is a good way to persuade them to do it?

First of all, you need to make sure that the cause is known. Every demonstration, every strike, has the primary goal of raising attention. Yet, every strike, every demonstration inconveniences people and as such may make enemies.

I wasn't trying to make the case that it's the best way of doing it. Nor was I even implying that it's a particularly good way of doing it. But I do think that sometimes, it's the only way of doing it.

Also as an aside, I think there's deeper societal problems that we need to face if a few people lying on a road and stopping others from getting to work on time results in those people being considered "enemies".

> I think that says more about you than it does about the vegan activists.

It means that I had a bad day because some one made me late for work and I vented my frustration out on a meal.

I watched the Netflix flat earther documentary and even the physicists interviewed preferred not to ridicule the flat earthers because they wanted to make sure they kept an open dialogue. I think there's a similar threshold for annoying people. Once you cross it, a lot of people are just going to stop listening to you.

> They're interested in trying to persuade more people to stop eating the flesh of sentient creatures when our diets don't even require it.

In a strict sense, you’re right, our diets don’t require meat. But most people wouldn’t consider it practical to take the 5-10 different supplements needed to replace all of the benefits of eating meat, fish, eggs and dairy. And that approach is almost certainly suboptimal to whole food sources anyway.

> But most people wouldn’t consider it practical to take the 5-10 different supplements needed to replace all of the benefits of eating meat, fish, eggs and dairy.

You need B12, that's all. Pretty much everyone in the first world supplements iodine, I don't know why some people have such reservations with B12.

Then they are going about it the wrong way. It is know at this point that the way to change people is to befriend them, listen to them and make sure that they see you as human, despite the differences.

It worked on the Klan, it worked on the babist church. Of course it is not satisfying and you get no virtue points.

Reminds me of the proverb "Honey attracts more flies than vinegar"

I wholeheartedly agree with you that taking the time to really connect with an individual so that you can then grapple with their beliefs from a place of deep, shared understanding is more ideal.

The problem is most of the scientific community is telling us that we're heading towards dire circumstances in the next few decades. I don't think we really have the time to hold everyone's hand and bring them gently to the realization that we're all part of a massive problem that could very well threaten the continued survival of our species :(

But I guess nothing I say here matters because I clearly don't actually believe any of it and I'm just virtue signalling.

> I wholeheartedly agree with you that taking the time to really connect with an individual so that you can then grapple with their beliefs from a place of deep, shared understanding is more ideal.

Ideally, yes, but in the debate about climate change, as with other issues like vaccines and whether the earth is round, there are bad actors who aren’t interested in having a rational debate no matter how many indisputable facts are put in their way.

There’s no point trying to engage with them; it’s just a waste of everyone’s time and energy. At least flat earthers can largely be ignored and we’re finally seeing community-preserving action against anti-vaxxers [1]. I don’t know what an equivalent action would be for bad-faith climate “debaters” because it’s not like we can leave them on this planet and go somewhere else.

1: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/anti-vaxxers-defeate...

One objective may be (or may at some point be) to cause enough economic damage that certain ecologically damaging activities are no longer economically Portugal. Start working on economic terms and governments and corporations start to listen.