Pope Leo Continues in Predecessor's Footsteps, Embraces Climate Activism

Pope Leo XIV is following in the environmental footsteps
 of his predecessor Pope Francis with his concern
about climate change and similar issues

It looks like Pope Leo XIV is following in the ecological footsteps of his predecessor, and I'm sure the MAGA crowd is less than pleased.  

The Pope recently criticized certain world leaders without naming names of denying the reality of climate change as he presided over the 10th anniversary of Pope Francis' ecological encyclical Laudato Si (Praised Be). 

As The Guardian explains, that decade old encyclical "cast care for the planet as an urgent and existential moral concern and launched a global grassroots movement to advocate for caring for God's creation and the peoples most harmed by its exploitation."

Pope Leo said some world leaders have chosen to"deride the evident signs of climate change, to ridicule those who speak of global warming and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them most."

He said that protecting the Earth is a spiritual and political responsibility for Catholics, and everybody else in the world for that matter. 

Although Pope Leo didn't call anybody in particular out, he made his remarks just a few days after U.S President Donald Trump falsely told the UN General Assembly that people combating climate change were participating in a "con job." 

Pope Francis, who died in April, was something of a climate change activist. In his 12 years as Pope, he repeatedly brought up the dangers of climate change. The 2015 encyclical was only one of many examples of his deep interest in the issue. He was the first pontiff to take the name of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals and ecology.

Pope Leo is the first U.S.-born pope. I'm sure some MAGA types were hoping for a break from Pope Francis' focus on climate change. But it looks like that's not happening. 

The goons on X, as always have coordinated themselves, with so many of them calling the ice blessing "pagan" and talking about how Christians are supposedly "persecuted" and why isn't the Pope dealing with that? 

The pope symbolically blessed a 20,000 year old block of ice from Greenland, the had broken away from the island. It was his way of advocating for the climate and environment. 

The MAGA types were furious. as a way

Pope Leo's celebration of the encyclical was part of a summit the hosted pope last week that was attended by more than a thousand climate activists and church leaders gathered at the Vatican last week. Pope Leo, speaking at the summit, urged everyone to speak up and put pressure on governments to protect the environment. 

Pope Leo said at the end of our lives, we will have to answer to God for how we treated the Earth. "What must be done now (is) to ensure that caring for our common home an listening to the cry of the earth and the poor do not appear as mere passing trends or, worse still, that they be seen and felt as divisive issues."

I know a very smart woman who was once approached in her yard by a Catholic priest who implored her to start coming to church. 

This was in May, when the woman's gardens and trees were riotously blooming and greening up beautifully.  It was gorgeous out there. The woman responded to the priest, "This is my church."

Pope Leo confirms the woman was absolutely right.  

Study: Combating Climate Apathy Depends More On Stories That Stats

A very much NOT frozen Lake Champlain, pictured here
on February 14, 2024 in a very warm winter. Stories about
how climate change affects people, like a lack of ice
fishing, can move people toward caring about
climate change more than statistics can. 

 In order to affect political change and encourage leaders to take real steps to combat climate change, you need to have people sign on to the cause and pressure those leaders to do something. 

But if climate change isn't high up on the public's list of concerns, then that never happens. 

True, everybody has a lot of worries these days. The economy is worrying  There are bad, corrupt and inept governments. (We're looking at you, United States!)  to deal with. We have wars, strife, divisions, poverty, you name it. Things are challenging. 

But so is climate change. Which threatens to make all of the above problems worse. Not to mention add to our growing list of deadly and expensive weather disasters that seem to hit somewhere in the world every time we turn around. 

So how do you get people to focus on climate change?

Turns out stories, not stats, might be more effective, says a study conducted buy UCLA

According to UCLA Newsroom: 

"A new UCLA study finds that presenting the same continuous climate data, such as incremental changes in temperatures, in binary form - such as whether a lake did or did not freeze in the winter - significantly increases people's ability to see the impact of climate change."

In other words, give people the stats, but also let them know what the real-world consequences of those stats are. 

The stats don't resonate, mainly because they seem so gradual. 

"'For years, we assumed that if the climate worsened enough, people would act, but instead, we're seeing the 'boiling frog' effect, where humans continuously reset their perception of 'normal' every few years,' (UCLA communications professor and cognitive psychologist Rachit) Dubey said. 

'People are adjusting to worsening environmental conditions, like multiple fire seasons per year, disturbingly fast. My research examines how people are mentally adapting to the negative changes  in our environment.'"

STUDY DETAILS;

Researchers asked study participants about the climate in the fictional city "Townsville."  

The researchers asked a second group of participants about five real lakeside cities like Lake George, New York and Grand Traverse Bay, Michigan. 

Half the participants were show a graph of temperature increases from 1940 to 2020. The other half was show a graph showing whether it was cold enough to freeze each winter. 

Of course, as temperatures slowly climbed over the decades, the lakes stopped freezing as often. For the real towns, study participants were also told about a decline in activities like ice skating and ice fishing.

Here were the results: 

"When the researchers asked participants to rate from 1 to 10 how much climate change impacted the town, people who learned about a range of temperatures responded lower than people who learned whether the lake froze - on a average, 6.6, compared to 7.5 or 12 percent higher.

Making the emotional connection to local traditions, whether ice skating in the water or freedom from wildfires smoke in the summer, may also contribute to overcoming apathy, said lead author Grace Liu, a Ph.D student at Carnegie Mellon University."

This of course all makes sense. Humans are hard-wired to embrace stories. We like stories more than data, and they resonate so much more than us. Why do you think for thousands of years humans have so embraced music, plays, books, and more recently movies and some online videos.  They tell stories.

The idea of telling stories is no cure-all. After all, as I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of other competing worries in the lives of literally billions of people.  But it might be a start.

As UCLA Newsroom writes:

"Making the emotional connection to local traditions, whether ice skating in the winter or freedom from wildfire smoke in the summer, may also contribute to overcoming apathy, said Lead author Grace Liu, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University.

'Our study drives home the importance of discussing climate change not just in gradual temperature terms, but in concrete, either-or terms, showing how life has changed,' Liu said. 

'It's not just warmer winters; it's also a loss of ice hockey and white Christmases. It's not just hotter summers; it's the disappearance of a swimming hole due to drought or soccer practice being canceled because it's dangerously hot.'" 

Pope Francis Was A Climate Activist

Pope Francis, who died Monday at the age of 88, 
was a climate activist who frequently spoke of 
the dangers it poses to humanity. 

Much is obviously being written this week about Pope Francis, who died Monday at the age of 88.

Many aspects of his life and his role as Pope stood out, and one of them was the fact he was a climate activist. 

"Over his 12 years as head of the Catholic Church, Francis repeatedly raised the problem of human-caused global heating from burning fossil fuels and he encouraged people - including world leaders  - to do something about it."

It wasn't surprising from the very beginning that Pope Francis was an environmentalist. He was the first pontiff to take the name of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals and ecology. 

It's also no surprise that the MAGA crowd in the United States was no fan of Pope Francis, given how it's a drill, baby drill crowd who thinks climate change is a hoax.  Our buddy Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Crazy, Georgia responded to the pontiff's death (without naming him directly)  by writing on X:

"Today there were major shifts in global leadership. Evil is being defeated by the hand of God."

If Greene detested the pope for his climate activism, she's got plenty of evidence, so I'll give her that much. 

NPR again: 

"In 2015, Pope Francis issued a papal letter - or encyclical - titled Laudato Si.  It recognized climate change as a global problem with significant consequences, especially for the poor. He criticized developed countries like the United States and China, which have contributed the most planet heating pollution. Francis reserved the most severe criticism for the 'wealthier sectors of society, where the habit of wasting and discarding has reached unprecedented levels.'"

Francis had said poorer nations, which contributed the least to climate change, should get more aid from developed counties that had caused a larger share of climate change. 

That thought was a key element of the Paris Climate Agreement, which then-President Obama and other world leaders agreed to later in 2015. 

NPR notes that the 2015 Pope Francis encyclical inspired a number of Catholic climate activism groups.

In recent years, the Pope stepped up his climate rhetoric and activity.

In 2018, according to the Washington Post, he even gathered oil executives - including leaders from BP and Royal Dutch Shell - at a 16th century villa, urging them to transition from planet-warming fossil fuels to clean energy sources.

In a 2021 BBC broadcast, he listed climate change as among the top crises facing the world, right up there with the then-raging COVID-19 pandemic and deep economic difficulties around the world.  

Pope Francis in 2023  released another document that focused almost exclusively on climate change. He wrote,  "....with the passage of time, I have realized that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point."

The pope's words on climate basically were preaching to the choir.  For all his work on climate, 'I'm not sure he moved the needle much on climate attitudes.  But the Pope's efforts surely did affect some hearts and minds, and inspired climate activism among certain groups of Catholics who agreed with his stance. 

Catholicism  is essentially a conservative religion, but at least here in America, climate change does not resonate with conservatives at all, be they Catholic or of some other religious persuasion. 

As the Washington Post explains:

"There is little indiction that Francis's activism shifted attitudes among American Catholics, In a 2023 Pew Research Center poll, 44 percent of U.S, Catholics said the Earth was warming because of human activity, compared with 46 percent of all U.S. adults. 

There was a sharp political divide. 82 percent of Catholics who identified leaned Democrat called climate change a major problem, compared with 25 percent for Republicans." 

Of course, we don't know how the next Pope will deal with climate change, if at all, since we don't know who that will be quite yet. 

But Pope Francis's calls to action on climate were one of many indications he was truly a man of the people, not just the elite. That's an increasingly rare trait among world leaders these days. 

Vermont House Passes Superfund" Law, Could Become First In Nation

Vermont is now close to becoming the first state in the
nation to establish a climate "Superfund" law that would
demand money from oil giants to pay for climate-
related disasters, like last summer's flooding.

 Back on January 31, I told you about legislation in Vermont that would create a "Superfund" to pay for recovering from climate-related disasters in the Green Mountain State.  

The money would come from large firms like oil producers and others who emit or at least cause to emit huge amounts of greenhouse gases.

This week, the Vermont House was approved in Montpelier by a veto-proof majority.   It now goes to the Vermont Senate for a final review before landing on Gov Phil Scott's desk.

As Vermont Public reports, Scott has vowed to veto the bill, saying he's worried about the cost to taking Big Oil to court and how long it would take to pry money out of these corporations to pay for this Superfund thing.  

A few Republican legislators are also opposed to the proposal, saying we are all complicit, really. Did you drive to work this morning? Unless you have an EV, you emitted greenhouse gases purchased from Big Oil. 

A two-thirds vote in both the Senate and House would be needed to override the veto. The House vote this week is veto-proof if pretty much everybody there votes the same as they did this week after the potential veto. We'll have to see what the Senate does. The Senate did pass the preliminary version of the bill in March by a 26-3 vote. That's veto-proof if history repeats, which seems likely. 

There's no question that disasters made worse by climate change are costing Vermonters big bucks. Last summer's flooding is thought to have caused more than $1 billion in damage. Some people are still displaced from their homes because of that event. 

Other events in the past year, like another big flood in December and twin, powerful wind storms in January, added to the toll on Vermont. 

Meanwhile, most of the largest oil companies in the world raked in record profits over the past few years. 

Proponents of the climate Superfund want a piece of that pie to pay for bolstering ourselves against future climate disasters and paying for ones we've already had. 

If enacted, Vermont would become the first state to enact this type of law. Because we are first, climate activists are watching this whole thing closely.  They hope it opens the floodgates for more such laws elsewhere. Already, other states like California, Maryland, Massachusetts and New York are considering similar bills.   

We're getting close to the end of the Vermont legislative session for this year, so the final denouement is coming on this soon. 

So, watch this space for an update on whether this gets enacted or not.  

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (From The Political Spin Reaction To Canadian Wildfires)

Wildfire smoke from Canada casts a brassy hue on 
St. Albans Bay, Vermont on June 5. Wildfire smoke
from Canada has also gotten political.

 Wildfire smoke from basically all of Canada's provinces continues to drift through much of that nation and the United States, though the fumes are noticeably thinner than the choking pollution we saw in the Northeast last week. 

Now, inevitably, we're choking on the political and climate debate/unpleasantness in the wake of the smoke attack. 

Social media and the "news" stations we deal with amplify and distort what's going on with the fires. 

First of all, few people are saying that climate change "caused" the big fires in Canada, but you'd have a solid argument in saying a warming world made the conditions that created those fires much more likely. 

And no, climate activists or governments or other bad actors didn't spend the first Saturday in June setting the Quebec fires to fuel their anti-fossil fuel activism and supposed contempt for the general population. 

Yes, that conspiracy theory has been going around, along with more outlandish ones like heat causing missiles, or, I don't know, Jewish space lasers setting Quebec ablaze in early June. 

I'll never convince the hard core conspiracy theorists that their creative ideas are wrong, but let's get some of the facts straight on what's been happening.  Yes, some of this is my opinion, some of the facts and causes are open to a little interpretation and second guessing, but the basics are pretty clear.

QUEBEC FIRES

Although fires have been burning in much of Canada all spring and spreading smoke into the United States since at least early May, the thick smoke this month really got people's attention.  Especially since the worst of it hit the nation's media, political and government epicenters, namely New York and Washington DC.

The suddenness of the fires and the severity of the pollution really had people talking. And guessing wrong. 

The Quebec fires really did seem to erupt suddenly, giving rise to those conspiracy theories. One Facebook page that said the Quebec fires were a terrorist attack had more than one million views.  

For the most part, the "terrorist" in Quebec was lightning. 

A strong, but relatively dry cold front swept southward through Quebec on June 2.  This cold front generated lots of thunderstorms.  The downpours associated with the storms were very localized, and really didn't produce all that much rain. Many areas in dry Quebec saw no rain, or only a trace.

But those lightning strikes set countless small fires in trees and underbrush throughout central and western Quebec.

Those fires smoldered overnight Friday.  Then on Saturday, a big gush of very dry, strong north winds swept through Quebec. Those little smoldering fires quickly became raging blazes.

Conspiracy theorists focused on the satellite loop in this link, showing fires seemingly erupting simultaneously in Quebec, as if in a coordinated attack.  But the loop is speeded up, covering nearly a 12 hour period. That's plenty of time for fires to spread and grow. 

This might not be visible on some devices, but here's the loop. If you can't see the image, click on the above link. Then I have more after this. 

IS IT CLIMATE?

The endless debate on what climate had to do with this mess is full of distortions and oversimplifications. 

Climate skeptics note that Canada sees fewer fire starts in recent decades than it did earlier in the 20th century. 

That's actually true. 

According to CBC, the 1980s saw more than 80,000 wildfires start in Canada. Since then, the number each decade has declined, to about 60,000 between 2010 and 2019.

But note we're talking about fire starts, not the size of the blazes. I think the decline is due mainly to public service warnings. We'll never know how many fires didn't begin because somebody made sure all the embers were cold as they left their campsite, or decided not to set their brush pile alight, or concluded it was too dry and windy to set off fireworks. 

The problem is, the fires that are starting tend to be larger. The CBC report notes that acreage burned in Canadian wildfires has slowly increased since the 1970s. 

A warmer world is often a drier world. Sure, there's more intense rain storms. But when the rain stops, evaporation is usually more efficient when it's hotter out. Things dry out more quickly, leading to the conditions that can create out of control wildfires. 

Haze from Canadian wildfire smoke on May 23 obscures a 
Lake Champlain view from South Burlington, Vermont.

Canadian environmental officials also say that climate change is leading to more lightning strikes across much of that nation. That's precisely the problem that started the chaos this month that originated in Quebec. 

Climate change skeptics also point out there used to be epic fires -  much bigger than current blazes - in Canada and the U.S. a century ago. That's also true. But a century ago, you didn't have armies of firefighters and flocks of planes and helicopters dropping tons of water and fire retardant on those wildfires.

To repeat: Climate change did not directly cause the onslaught of fires in Canada. Lightning, human error and probably a few arsonists started the blazes.  There probably would have been a bunch of wildfires in Canada this year with or without climate change.

But the warming world probably made a hot, dry Canadian spring hotter and drier than it otherwise would have been. Which means the fires were probably worse than they otherwise would have been.

It's pretty much impossible to measure how much worse the fires became because of climate change. But the trend line is bad, since we're only going to get hotter. And weather extremes will keep getting more extreme.

ATTENTION GRABBER

As noted, the smoke really captured a lot of attention. It was the first time in memory that so much of the eastern United States was choking on smoke. 

The Washington Post went with this in a June 10 article:

"The East Coast, along with the rest of the planet, has entered a new fire era or - a Stephen Pyne, an emeritus professor at Arizona State University calls it - the "Pyrocene."

That assessment is a little melodramatic, in my opinion. But it does point to the fact that different parts of the nation - and the world for that matter - have increasingly seen a lot more of these smoky days in recent years. 

With Canadian fires not expected to end until at least this fall, we can look forward to more smoky days, too.

But will this change anything? 

I doubt it. 

That millions of people in the eastern U.S. endured dangerous wildfire smoke was the talk of the town. And probably made climate change hit home for more people. But politics is stalemated in a way I can't recall in my 60 years.

It's tribal. It's the "religion" on one side to stop climate change now, or at least mitigate it, by, I don't know, walking out onto highways and blocking traffic. The "religion" on the other side is that climate change activists and experts are trying to take away all our "freedoms," whatever that means. 

The sensible group is probably the minority. We do need to shift away from fossil fuel consumption now if not sooner. If only entrenched interests and lobbyists in certain industries, oil and gas chief among them would get out of the way, we could probably make more progress.

But we don't live in that world, unfortunately.  Which leaves for the younger generation a worse future than there needs to be.

 

MAGA GOP Seeing Resistants To "Woke" Banks Worried About Climate Change

Extremist GOP politicians don't want banks to consider
climate change and other like issues in their 
investment decision, but saner minds in the 
GOP are resisting this impulse. 

UPDATE, MARCH 13: 

After I wrote this piece, the far right wing began, predictably, to blame the failure of Silicon Valley Bank in California to their supposed "woke" policies. 

They don't explain  how the "woke" policies, whatever they are, made SVB collapse.

It appears the bank failed for a set of complicated reasons, and I'm absolutely sure bad internal decisions played a major role. 

But the problem had to do with securities, not woke policies. And when depositors started asking for their money back, the instability in SVB became apparent. 

There was a bank run, and that was that. 

PREVIOUS DISCUSSION

Warning, this is a political post, but sometimes, stuff needs to be said.

The large MAGA wing of the Republican Party think anything that's not 1950s-era thought is verboten. As the Washington Post indicates, so called "woke" policies to combat climate change, even when conservatives banks are the ones getting concerned about the climate crisis.  

Here's how the Washington Post frames it:

"Conservatives have long held that the government should avoid interfering with private business decisions But over the last two years Republican state treasurers and attorneys general in Texas, Florida and other states have sought to blacklist banks that factor climate risks and social concerns into their investment decisions."

That's all a lot of talk among the MAGAs, but cooler heads seem to be prevailing. 

Republican state officials win Texas, Florida and other states have been trying to blacklist banks that factor in climate risks and social concerns when making investment decisions.  

However, Republican legislators in many states are defeating such proposals to blacklist banks. The argument against the blacklist is traditional conservatism, not MAGA stuff. Traditional conservatism holds that businesses should be free to make investment and growth decisions without interference from the government. 

The Washington Post offers the example of North Dakota, in which two proposed laws to sanction banks for factoring in climate change were roundly defeated by the state legislature by a 90-3 margin.  

WaPo quotes this North Dakota banker. 

"'Our biggest concern is the idea of somebody telling our banks who to do business with or who not to do business with,' Rick Clayburgh, chief executive of the North Dakota Bankers Association, said after beating back those proposals. 'We believe our banks should be allowed to do business with customers they know, the people they know and to make those decisions.'"

The right wingers want to use public pension plans and bond offerings to keep out so-called "woke" institutes.

Of course, American banks and other financial institutions aren't exactly cabals of wild-eyed liberal and socialist activists. As all but the worst nutcases understand, U.S. financial institutions are card carrying capitalists to the extreme. They are  there to make money for themselves and their shareholders. 

Climate change and other societal concerns are simply factors that need to go into business decisions. It's all about risks and rewards.  

Pension fund managers don't want to limit bank activities because that would lead to fewer financial institutions, leading to less competition. Less competition means higher costs. Capitalism at work here, too. 

Still, some governors, attorneys general and others insist on shooting themselves in the foot. Texas in 2021 banned state and local government agencies from doing business with financial companies that they accuse of boycotting gun and fossil fuel industries 

Top lenders left Texas as a result, and this cost the state's taxpayers between $300 and $500 million because of extra interest fees, NPR reported.  

Proposals to freeze out banks who take into consideration climate change and other factors are more often than not inspired or guided by an outfit called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. 

Even ALEC is withdrawing its prototype bill that would have required states to stop doing business with banks and other companies that are 'boycotting loans or investments in fossil fuels and the firearms industry, says WaPo.  ALEC says it wants to tweak its proposed legislation.

Still, MAGA types and extreme right wingers are soldiering on with their efforts to block financial institutions from considering environmental, social and governance policies, known as ESG's.  

As is the case with public discourse these days, especially in parts of the GOP, the rhetoric against ESGs is pretty over the top. 

North Dakota Republican Rep. Bill Tveit says he's going to re-introduce an amended version of the original bill that failed so miserably.  Sustainable governance like considering climate change is part a "worldwide human satanic organized effort. A man-made sabotage of God," Tveit hyperventilated.

No, I don't know what he means by that, either. 

Tveit also said ESG proponents "want to control every inch of our lives while enhancing their fantasy green world."  He did not explain exactly how banking institutions would "control every inch of our lives" via their internal financial decisions.   This dude just really needs to calm down.  

Mr. Anti-Woke himself, Florida Gov. Rhonda Santis Ron DeSantis is tilting at this windmill, too. In February, he proposed legislation to stop "these elites" who he alleged are trying to "inject political ideology into investment decisions, corporate governance, and really just the every day economy."

This being Florida, you'd think you'd want financial institutions to at least consider climate change, since the Sunshine State seems particularly vulnerable to sea level rise.  But maybe DeSantis is so afraid of drag queens and childrens' books that feature two male penguins is such a threat that he has to make sure the banks don't invest in that kind of thing?

I dunno. 

Personally, I don't love every single aspect of American capitalism as it currently operates. But I'd rather have that than ignorant ideologues messing with business for really stupid reasons. I hope that the Washington Post is correct that anti-ESG measures are flailing. 

How Not To Protest Against Climate Change

Members of Insulate Britain block a major highway. 
Climate change activism is good. Doing it stupidly like
this is not. Mind your PR! 

 British motorists and the general public are incensed over a climate activist group called Insulate Britain and I can see why.  

The basic goals of Insulate Britain are fine. They want the British government to insulate subsidized housing as a way to increase fuel efficiency and cut down on the use of fossil fuels to heat these buildings. Plus, it would save money for the people of modest means living in these buildings.

This won't in itself solve climate change, but it's a noble enough goal. Every little bit helps. 

It's Insulate Britain's tactics that are infuriating and counter productive to say the least. These activists have been marching out onto major highways and blocking and snarling traffic to make their point.

As you can imagine, this has led to dangerous situations, as irate motorists try to drag Insulate Britain members off the highways and onto the curb and out of the way.   Then the activists run back onto the road and block traffic. Rinse and repeat ad nauseam

You just know a road rager will eventually, tragically run over these demonstrators

And for what? Insulate Britain is not winning hearts and minds. They're just getting people angry. They're making people less likely to want to do something about climate change. 

 There is of course a place for civil disobedience in the climate movement.  It's worked well in other activism, with civil rights in the 1960s among the most familiar. 

To put it bluntly,  you need the right PR to gain a sympathetic ear to your campaign and to change the hearts and minds of the public. Rosa Parks' refusal o sit at the back of the bus was technically illegal, under completely unjust Jim Crow "laws."  But her refusal to bow to this racism was both dignified and plainly right, and that was one of many example of how the civil right movement propelled itself forward.

The Insulate Britain clowns appear not to have learned this lesson. 

As the Independent points out, Insulate Britain members think they have no choice other than to block roads to make their case.  Lobbying, voting, leafleting, making speeches and such have not worked for them.  

A spokesperson for Insulate Britain was quoted by the BBC saying, "In 10 years' time when fuel crises are catastrophic, when the food has run out and people are experiencing unsurvivable heatwaves, what would you be wishing you had done now?"

There's a lot of problems with that statement.  Though the effects of climate change are dire and getting worse, all credible science that I've at least read don't paint quite that dystopian a picture in just a decades' time. 

Secondly, Insulate Britain is doing nothing to inspire the general public to take up the fight against climate change.  If things are as hopeless as this group says (Spoiler: They're not) then nobody is is going to sign up for such a lost cause. 

Thirdly, pissing people off is not the best way to get new activists to come on board with their movement. 

By the way, stopping traffic and causing hundreds of cars to idle and spew CO2 into the air needlessly during your hours long protest doesn't exactly do much to slow climate change does it? Just a thought. 

This is one type of climate protest I hope doesn't spread.  

Be an activist for stopping climate change. Get in peoples faces if you have to. But do it intelligently.  Remember, we need as many people as possible to be on board and effect change. The good kind.