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What really stands out with these incidents is that all the handwringing against the protests themselves and how they should be 'doing it the right way' is total bullshit.
Turns out direct action (up to and including violence) is justified... If you're delayed getting somewhere in your car by 15 mins. However, nonviolent direct action about our own government dithering on the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced is too much.
I totally understand people getting angry at this sort of thing... I'm 100% behind their cause, not so sure on their tactics.
But it's just a shame that people are not as angry about the inaction on climate change. The inconvenience caused by the protesters is a micro-fraction of the pain that climate change is already causing and will continue to cause.
The whole purpose of protest is to be disruptive. Protests that don't disrupt don't get anything done because you will never hear about it and you won't know about it. Who is going to report a protest that's indistinguishable from everyday life?
This is a much more immediate and tangible effect though. Climate change is much more abstract.
Is it abstract to people who have lost their relatives or their houses to weather events this year?
People don't think like that though.
A lot of people don't, no. And that's the problem.... which is why I was saying it's a shame. We are in for far more grief than almost anyone realises... the scale of the effects is well outside what most people can really imagine. And it can be avoided if we take concerted action.... even at this late stage. But we're not.
I didn't see anyone doing jack fucking shit about Brian cult leader Tamaki blocking the motorway, so as far as I can tell, anyone can block the roads and it's totally fine.
It started with the Covid "checkpoints", and it's been downhill from there.
Isn't the irony here that making cars sit idling instead of getting where they're going causes more pollution?
Who are these protests convincing? Do they even say what their demands are other than a completely unspecific and unhelpful "combat climate change"?
I'm pretty sure they have specific demands, asking for better inter-city passenger trains. It says in the article the protesters are from the "Restore Passenger Rail climate action group".
I don't know their strategy, but if their intention is to get publicity for the cause then the term "it doesn't matter what they are saying about you, as long as they're talking about you" comes to mind.
It kinda does matter what they're saying about you when you're trying to get public support for a cause though.
I have heard anecdotally that when these sorts of protests are going on, the "mainstream" environmental organisations get a lot more interest. So it could be that it is actually working, even though most people don't like the tactics.
They actually are quite specific in what they want, they want a restoration of all our intercity rail services, to a level of service that existed back in the nineties. It's not about commuter rail, as many commenters here seem to think.
In other words, they want the government to spend a few hundred mill on rolling stock, and still more on other subsidies, on a service that would take nearly twice as long to go between Auckland and Wellington as a bus. They've completely lost touch with reality.
This is also ignoring the fact that diesel rail isn't that much better than road transport, and can even be worse.
This is also ignoring the fact that diesel rail isn’t that much better than road transport, and can even be worse.
Huh? I mean sure, we should electrify all our rail. But moving hundreds of people in one diesel train produces way less emissions than hundreds of cars.