The Extinction Rebellion movement formed last year in Britain with a three-headed list of demands (1. Tell the truth 2. Act now 3. Beyond politics) in response to growing concern over climate change. The group brought Central London to a standstill last week, blocking traffic and seeing hundreds of its members arrested.
While from the outside, the group might look like a continuation of past protest movements for social justice, there’s a recognition that the sheer number of people involved mean that it is increasingly a more inclusive movement than, say, the pro-Brexit marches also taking place on London’s streets over the past few weeks.
The protestors have joined schoolchildren from around the world who decided to ‘Climate Strike’, kicking back against a futureless future and even the UK government finally caved in and admitted the scale of the climate emergency – while at the same time concerns grow over air pollution and the other environmental costs associated with ‘business as usual’ carrying on despite the rise in global temperatures.
We think they’ve done a pretty good job of raising awareness. Certainly the ‘XR’ Extinction Rebellion logos are to be seen on mobile phone cases, handbags and all over the ticket barriers of the underground tube train network. But in focusing on climate doom, are they misrepresenting or failing to see the existence of solutions? It’s a tricky question.
For me, I would say that it is our job at Solar Media to present the arguments for clean energy and the specific technologies that can play a role in modernising our energy system(s) along a path to decarbonisation. Every day we see that solutions are in many cases already present for the biggest problems the world faces. We’ve seen batteries and solar replacing coal and now gas, we’ve seen the cost of solar drop 90% in the past 10 years and we’ve seen that even the UK is committed to phasing out petrol-powered vehicles by 2040.
However, there’s no time to be smug. Those that do not study history are doomed to repeat it, those that do study history are sometimes condemned to watching others repeating its mistakes. To fail to act now on climate change would be a huge dereliction of duty by us all. While Extinction Rebellion may have helped draw attention to the scale of the problem, it’s now up to us all – especially those of us with a head-start in the industry – to bring the solutions to life.
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