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Re:Drones piloted by climate-change activists target Heathrow by NeedMoreTea on Saturday June 15, 2019 @05:58AM (#20189221)
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.

Re:Drones piloted by climate-change activists target Heathrow by travisoneill1 on Saturday June 15, 2019 @08:42AM (#20189737)
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.
Re:Drones piloted by climate-change activists target Heathrow by NeedMoreTea on Saturday June 15, 2019 @11:06AM (#20190330)
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.

Re:Drones piloted by climate-change activists target Heathrow by helkafen on Saturday June 15, 2019 @09:04AM (#20189838)
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.

Re:Drones piloted by climate-change activists target Heathrow by notahacker on Saturday June 15, 2019 @10:33AM (#20190177)
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.)

Re:Drones piloted by climate-change activists target Heathrow by NeedMoreTea on Saturday June 15, 2019 @11:14AM (#20190364)
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. :)