Climate activists disrupt five British cities with ‘summer uprising’

Civil disobedience group Extinction Rebellion has staged protests in five British cities, aiming to renew pressure on the Conservative-led government to take bolder action to tackle climate change and slow the worldwide loss of plant and animal species.

The movement, which shut down four sites in central London for 11 days in April, said the latest actions in London, Bristol, Leeds, Cardiff and Glasgow aimed to generate momentum ahead of another phase of disruption planned for October.

“Right now we’re in a phase of movement building,” Dr Larch Maxey, one of the movement’s organisers, told Reuters Newsagency outside the Royal Courts of Justice in central London, where several hundred protesters blocked the road.

“We’re going to be doing more disruption in October in major cities around the world,” Dr Maxey told Reuters, standing near a sailboat emblazoned with the slogan ACT NOW, one of five brightly-painted vessels towed to protest sites in each city.

Extinction Rebellion’s Australian arm has been staging similar protests in Australia, mainly concentrating on the Queensland state capital, Brisbane, to draw attention to the Indian conglomerate Adani’s mega coal mine proposal.

It also plans similar action to that taking place in the UK later this year with disruptions in major east coast cities.

Reuters reports Extinction Rebellion said the protests in the UK would run all week and include blocking specific locations, bridges and roads.

It will also hold talks, workshops, training in non-violent direct action, family-friendly activities and debates.

Modelled on civil disobedience campaigns such as the United States civil rights movement and Britain’s Suffragettes, Extinction Rebellion has pushed climate up the agenda in Britain, where parliament declared a symbolic ‘climate emergency’ in May.

Critics of the movement say policing its protests is a major drain on resources at a time when authorities are struggling to contain an outbreak of knife crime in the capital, while its blocking of roads has inflicted losses on businesses.

The group has inspired offshoots in more than a dozen countries, including France, where riot police used pepper spray and riot shields to clear scores of protesters from a bridge over the river Seine in Paris late last month.

Last month, Britain became the first G7 economy to enshrine a legally binding commitment to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The country is due to host a major climate summit aimed at strengthening the 2015 United Nations sponsored Paris Agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions late next year.

Nevertheless, with climate-related disasters unfolding faster than scientists had feared in many parts of the world, Extinction Rebellion argues that only rapid, systemic change has a chance of averting runaway global warming.

The group is demanding the UK government call a national emergency mobilisation to shift its net zero target to 2025 and hold a Citizens’ Assembly to determine the economic trade-offs that such a rapid decarbonisation program would entail.