Most people would agree that peaceful demonstration to push the government to take (meaningful and immediate) action on climate change is worth a lot more than your commute.
They actually backed down from their original - misjudged - planned action of blocking the London Underground.
I agree it seems a silly target, people doing the right thing, but I think their point was we cannot continue business as usual and just hope for the best.
Most people? Not so sure. The ones who would agree are probably in that protest. Also in this day and age, these things accomplish very little, and certainly not any government action other than spending taxpayer funds on increased peacekeeping.
If a demonstration is actively blocking people from commuting then it's just harming innocent civilians and only hurting the cause. There are better ways to create change then causing chaos in the lives of people who can't do anything about it.
>Also in this day and age, these things accomplish very little
The thing about this day and age, is that it is generally different than it was yesterday.
The Extinction Rebellion protests have so far been some of the most successful in recent memory, they had politicians scrambling to be the first to declare a 'climate emergency'. Whether the talk converts to any action is another thing, but they have been very successful in raising the political visibility of the issue.
What exactly does declaring a "climate emergency" do? Especially when this is a global situation that requires the most cooperation and changes in countries like China, India, and elsewhere?
Declaring an emergency is a standard method employed by humans to let other humans know that they think there is an emergency that everybody should be acting on.
If I see a fire in the house I am in, it might be in the grate, or it might be on the sofa. If I declare some sort of 'fire emergency', it can help to point out to other humans which of the two situations I think I am encountering and how they might therefore choose to react.
I’ve also thought this in the past, and I know basically nil about British politics, but in the States at least, these declarations can control what pool of money you can use to work against the problem.
It's unfortunate when people are blocked from going about their daily activities, but when you are attempting to raise awareness, I think it's a reasonable approach.
Now, while there is no protest without any use of force (whether force of gravity by peacefully taking over an area, requiring force to be removed, or "force of language"), we generally categorise protest as peaceful if force is only used in defiance (you have to use the force to remove me).
Peaceful protest does not equate to inconvenient to everybody (actually, they are usually designed to be inconvenient to get their message across). Civilians are not "innocent" in the sense that they have elected the government a protest is aimed at. How much sympathy protesters will get is a topic of discussion for themselves, and I am sure they carefully weigh that before staging a protest.
If you can't distance your inconvenience from whether the protest has merits, you probably don't intrinsically trust the democratic process ("I know better what they need").
>but when you are attempting to raise awareness, I think it's a reasonable approach.
Seems like "raising awareness" is a convenient blanket excuse for people to do whatever the fuck they want, and blame everyone else if the actions breed resentment that's counterproductive to the original goal.
I've also already mentioned it should be a calculated risk on protesters' side: aim to win more people than you lose those who can't empathise with protesters.
I am not saying that all protests succeed, or that I agree with all of their goals, but I stand by their right to inconvenience me in order to get heard (and yes, there were cases were my personal circumstances would have made me furious at that moment, but that would not affect my general opinion of the approach).
Corporations do "whatever the fuck they want" as well, at the expense of our environment and to make themselves a few percent richer. It's a successful tactic and I support the use of it against them.
If you watch this video[0] where they interview people actually stuck in the traffic, the "victims" seem to be quite supportive of the movement. It's perhaps a biased view from The Guardian, I'm sure some people think like you do, but it's at least evidence of the opposite being also true to some extent.
Regarding what it actually accomplishes, here[1] is an older rundown (from April) of their main requests and the results so far.
On the other hand, in the 70s all the studies predicted the "coming Ice Age", which not only didn't come out to be, but turned to the opposite (the global warming).
“By the 1970s, scientists were becoming increasingly aware that estimates of global temperatures showed cooling since 1945, as well as the possibility of large scale warming due to emissions of greenhouse gases. In the scientific papers which considered climate trends of the 21st century, less than 10% inclined towards future cooling, while most papers predicted future warming.”
Excerpt: "There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then."
