Effectively Addressing Climate Change
Last I checked, in EA’s analysis of how to positively affect climate change, civil disobedience and ecosabotage were not options explored. And yet arrests and civil disobedience were crucial parts of how Keystone XL and DAPL got stopped (and would have remained stopped, too, if Hillary became president.) Those are just pipelines, and stopping them in and of themselves wouldn’t have solved climate change, but I think the movement strategy was to start there and snowball towards a higher frequency of oil pipeline stoppages.
In addition, arrests played a role in Sunrise’s recent action that AOC jumped in on, which now has brought a resolution to the table that asks representatives to treat the crisis at the scale it demands, in addition to energizing a lot of folks towards getting involved in the campaign. Their plans for the future involve another action where they hold offices and not leave until the Senator/Rep signs on to the Green New Deal. My guess is that their strategy will be a winning one, at the very least in the sense that we will wind up in a better place on climate policy because of it than where we would have been without it.
Anyway, on a slightly related, slightly unrelated note—I’d like to ask for your thoughts on this analysis on ROI for civil disobedience/ecosabotage actions.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10103059582414370&set=a.838715171170&type=3
I downvoted this because I think it’s valuable for the EA community to have a public, credible norm against violating people’s legally recognized rights. Destroying property does this, so we wouldn’t be a very trustworthy community if we endorsed such behavior.
So the destruction of property we can come out against, but what about other civil disobedience/arguably illegal actions? For instance, every example given in my post minus Ruby & Jessica’s actions. To add another example to that list, the truancy currently being practiced by an increasing number of children throughout the world until we achieve better climate policy.