Well worth a read.. Here’s the introduction
In this latest phase of its protests, ‘The Impossible Rebellion‘, Extinction Rebellion (XR) is turning its attention to the City of London – the financiers, the insurers and the City lawyers – who play critical support roles in the maintenance of the carbon economy.
How does XR’s justify this disruption? Surely City lawyers, for example, who act for fossil fuel companies, do no more than honour the principle that everyone has the right to legal representation?
Coming towards the end of the northern summer of 2021, the grim reality of the climate crisis is right here and right now. Even for those not caught up in the events directly, who can forget the images of row upon row of prostrate human beings in cooling centres in Canada; the towns and villages devastated by flooding in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg; and the deadly infernos engulfing Mediterranean holiday destinations? The Times reports today: ‘Children eat shoe leather in first famine driven by climate change’. On 20 August, UNICEF claimed a billion children are at ‘extreme risk’ from climate impacts.
These are not natural disasters. They are the consequences scientists have been predicting for decades if our economy’s deadly addiction to fossil fuels is not broken.
Few now deny the reality of the climate and ecological crisis (the UK parliament declared a climate emergency on 1 May 2019), but a disingenuous narrative is being propagated in which the UK is presented as a ‘climate leader’ – the problem, the vested interests would have us believe, lies with everyone else. It is true that the UK’s own domestic carbon emissions have declined from an exceptionally high starting point, as the UK has transitioned from an industrial economy to a service-sector economy (the carbon embedded in the goods we now import from China, for example, counts against China’s emissions total, not ours). But this narrative distracts from the UK’s most significant contribution to the climate crisis: the City of London – the arch-financier of the global carbon economy.
