One might have hoped that at least Britain's opposition party would be vowing to reverse such draconian measures once in office. But Labour leader Keir Starmer has suggested he would legislate even stiffer penalties for those taking direct action on the climate. Apparently pandering to what he assumes is public sentiment, Starmer has called such protests "arrogant" and "wrong".
Detachment From RealityWhat all this represents is a shift over the past decade from one kind of political insanity - a denial, either implicitly or explicitly, of a climate crisis - to a different kind of insanity: official acknowledgment of a looming climate catastrophe but a refusal to do something meaningful to avert it.
This continuing detachment from reality is not accidental. It is engineered by the way political priorities have been ordered.
That is especially true in relation to what westerners think of simplistically as "defensive" or "humanitarian" wars. In truth, they are more usually battles between great powers competing over energy resources to generate the very economic growth destroying the planet.
Wars have horrifying consequences for populations caught in the crossfire, as well as the communities they live in and the wider environment.
But those same wars have highly beneficial outcomes for a tiny wealthy elite. They bolster the profits of big business - from arms manufacturers to media owners and energy firms. At the same time, governments can use wars to justify imposing sacrifices on the wider public, such as austerity measures.
But even more troubling, wars seem to be increasingly useful as a distraction. They create an emergency with a limited and apparently achievable goal - defeating the enemy - that requires the full and immediate attention of western leaders. It presents a reassuring world in which our governments are the Good Guys trying to make the world safer, while theirs are the Bad Guys intending to spread death and destruction.
In this way, wars helpfully deflect attention from the far bigger global crisis of the environment, one in which Western leaders cannot present themselves as the Good Guys - because they are, in fact, the worst, the greediest and the most destructive of the Bad Guys.
The endless War on Terror has served this purpose all too well over the past two decades, when the climate crisis should have been the world's top priority. Instead, the region where most of the world's oil is located was plunged into a series of interminable resource wars.
As long as there is a war to worry about - even nuclear Armageddon, as President Joe Biden recently warned - the threat of an environmental Armageddon can be deemed less pressing, less horrifying, less worthy of attention.
Nuclear AnnihilationThe current war in Ukraine increasingly fits this bill. As it develops, it looks less and less like a war to defend national sovereignty and more like Ukraine is being turned into another proxy battlefield between the US and Russia - this one for dominance over European energy markets and the geostrategic advantages that flow from such dominance.
Profits for arms makers and energy firms are booming. Europeans are facing recession and new rounds of austerity. Television audiences have gorged on the news, encouraged to cheer on one side as if they are watching the latest Marvel movie. Astoundingly, mutually assured nuclear annihilation is no longer off the table.
Instead the constant chatter in western capitals, on TV and in the press, is about how to find new ways to generate gas and oil for public consumption to overcome the energy crisis, not how to wean ourselves off these climate-destroying fuels. Biden, for example, has been on the warpath over the refusal of OPEC+ to step up production to help him in the mid-term elections.
And, just as happened with the pandemic, and before it with the Trump presidency and the financial crash, there is once again a more pressing matter to worry about - defeating the "madman" Russian president, Vladimir Putin - than the end of a habitable planet.
But in a world of self-inflicted collapse, Putin is no more insane than his western counterparts. In truth, the only sane people are those trying to wake up everyone else, whether by glueing their hands to the road, climbing bridges or hurling soup at paintings.
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