Author name: Steven Edwards

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XR scientists glue hands to business department in London climate protest | Environmental activism | The Guardian

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Affiliates of Scientists for Extinction Rebellion highlight climate science they say government is ignoring

Damien Gayle
Climate protesters enter Shell HQ and glue themselves to government building – video
Twenty-five scientists have pasted pages of scientific papers to the windows of the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and glued their hands to the glass to highlight the climate science they said the government was ignoring.
The scientists, affiliated with Scientists for Extinction Rebellion, arrived at the department’s building at 1 Victoria Street, Westminster, London, just after 11am. Doctors and health professionals staged a decoy action to give them space to get into position.
The action came a week after the government published a new energy strategy that promised to continue the exploitation of North Sea oil and gas, failed to set targets for onshore wind, and gave nuclear power a central role.

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Re-think city transport… says IPCC – transportxtra.com

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Deniz Huseyin 12 April 2022
Significant change to transport will be essential if the worst impacts of climate change are not to become irreversible, the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) has warned.
Measures must be introduced now to create more connected and less car-dependent cities, encouraging homeworking and active travel and accelerating the shift to electric vehicles, it says.
Imperial College London’s Professor Jim Skea is co-chair of Working Group III, the group of 278 authors responsible for the report. “It’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5°C,” he said. “Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, it will be impossible.”

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The Congestion Con – Transportation For America – t4america.org

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How more lanes and more money equals more congestion
In an expensive effort to curb congestion in urban regions, we have overwhelmingly prioritised one strategy: we have spent decades and hundreds of billions of dollars widening and building new highways. We added 30,511 new freeway lane-miles of road in the largest 100 urbanised areas between 1993 and 2017, an increase of 42%. 

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The myth of the American love affair with cars – washingtonpost.com

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Emily Badger

“This ‘love affair’ thesis is like the ultimate story,” says Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia, who warns that we need to revisit how we came to believe this line before we embrace its logical conclusion in a future full of driverless cars. “It’s one of the biggest public relations coups of all time. It’s always treated as folk wisdom, as an organic growth from society. One of the signs of its success is that everyone forgets it was invented as a public relations campaign.”
This “love affair” was coined, in fact, during a 1961 episode of a weekly hour-long television program called the DuPont Show of the Week (sponsored, incidentally, by DuPont, which owned a 23 percent stake in General Motors at the time). The program, titled “Merrily We Roll Along,” was promoted by DuPont as “the story of America’s love affair with the automobile.”
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Up to 40 vehicles set on fire in spate of arson attacks – wiltshirelive.co.uk

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About 40 vehicles were deliberately set on fire – including about 20 at a Rolls Royce facility. Residents near the plant in Filton, South Gloucestershire, reported they were awoken by loud bangs and could see a huge fire.
On top of that about 20 vehicles were set alight in the Bristol area in the early hours of Sunday morning. Avon and Somerset Police first received a call at about 1.30am about a vehicle on fire in New Road, Stoke Gifford.

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Every City’s Cycleway Network Should Be As Dense As Road Network, Says American Academic – forbes.com

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Carlton Reid
“People on bicycles want to reach all destinations in a city just the same way that people in cars want to be able to reach all parts of the city,” says American academic Marcel Moran. 
“A city’s bike network should be equivalent to the road network,” he told me via a Zoom call. 
“The challenge is not where bike lanes should go, but where shouldn’t they go? And there are very few places we shouldn’t have safe bike infrastructure.” 

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Andreas Malm on “How to Blow up a Pipeline” – Should the Climate Movement Embrace Sabotage? – newyorker.com I Audio

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Condé Nast : Listen to this story
Professor Andreas Malm, who studies the relationship between climate change and capitalism, insists that the environmental movement reconsider its roots in nonviolence. 
Malm insists that the environmental movement rethink its roots in nonviolence and instead embrace “intelligent sabotage.”
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

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Protesters continue to block UK oil terminals despite more than 100 arrests | Environmental activism | The Guardian

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Clea Skopeliti

More than 100 people have been arrested as climate change protesters continued to block UK oil terminals as part of a campaign to disrupt the fossil fuel industry.
Supporters of Just Stop Oil began the action in the early hours of Friday morning at refineries near London, Birmingham and Southampton by climbing on to tankers and gluing themselves to roads.
The activists continued to disrupt oil terminals on Saturday morning and said they had gained access to further sites.
Essex police said officers arrested a total of 83 people after protests in the Thurrock district.
The force said 63 were arrested on Friday following protests in Oliver Road, Grays, London Road, Purfleet, and Askew Farm Lane, Grays. Another 20 people were arrested on Saturday in Oliver Road and Stoneness Road, Grays.

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Scientists urge end to fossil fuel use as landmark IPCC report readied | Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) | The Guardian

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Scientists urge end to fossil fuel use as landmark IPCC report readied

Talks stretch past deadline as governments are accused of trying to water down findings
Fiona Harvey
The world must abandon fossil fuels as a matter of urgency, rather than entrusting the future climate to untried “techno-fixes” such as sucking carbon out of the air, scientists and campaigners have urged, as governments wrangled over last-minute changes to a landmark scientific report.

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