Year 3, Month 7, Day 5: Right Time, Wrong Place?

We need more like this (from the Washington Post):

LONDON — Four climate change activists scaled gates at Queen Elizabeth II’s Buckingham Palace home on Saturday and locked themselves to railings in a protest demanding more urgent action to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The group, from the Climate Siren environmentalist movement, wore T-shirts with the slogan “Climate emergency. 10 percent annual emission cuts” and chanted through a loud hailer.

London’s Metropolitan Police said the four had climbed up a gate at the front of the palace and secured themselves to it, sitting with their legs through the railings.

The protesters unfurled a banner quoting a 2008 speech by Prince Charles, the queen’s son and heir, warning over a lack of progress on tacking climate change. It read: “’The doomsday clock of climate change is ticking ever faster towards midnight.”

This letter was an easy one to write. Sent June 24:

It’s easy to share the anger and urgency of the British environmentalists who recently locked themselves to the gates of Buckingham Palace. After all, the grim scientific news on climate change is depressingly complemented by the systemic paralysis of our political system when it comes to tackling the most crucial issue of our time.

But those four activists are directing their intensity at the wrong palace. While British royalty offers a telegenic backdrop, they’re not the real villains of the climate crisis. That role is reserved for the giant multinational corporations currently fighting tooth and nail to guard their exorbitant profits against meaningful climate and environment policies. They are the drug dealers to the world, misrepresenting their product as “cheap” and “harmless” when it is neither. The corporate headquarters and boardrooms of these oligarchs are more appropriate targets for the outrage of those justifiably concerned about our threatened planet.

Warren Senders