Scientists do not usually protest. In fact, the two words – scientist and protest – have rarely appeared in the same sentence. That changed recently when over 1,000 scientists from 25 countries decided to take to the streets, both literally and virtually, to highlight the need for urgent change to stave off the climate crisis the world is facing.
According to French news agency AFP, the protests were apparently coordinated by Scientist Rebellion, which was founded in 2020 by a group of PhD students in Scotland. The report noted that they were inspired in part by Extinction Rebellion, which, according to its website, is a global movement that uses “non-violent direct action and civil disobedience to persuade governments to act justly on the climate and ecological emergency”. The latter organisation was initially established in the United Kingdom in 2018, but has since gone global.
The catalyst for the scientists’ protest was the latest release from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of its 2022 report on the mitigation of climate change which was finalised earlier this month. Responding to it on April 4, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said: “This report is a litany of broken climate promises. It is a file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world. Some government and business leaders are saying one thing – but doing another. Simply put, they are lying. And the results will be catastrophic.”
As part of the demonstrations, in the US, scientists chained themselves to the White House fence in Washington DC, as well as to the doors of JP Morgan Chase Bank in downtown Los Angeles. The latter group was arrested. In Spain, they threw fake blood over the facade of the National Congress; in Panama, they demonstrated outside various embassies; and in Germany, protesters glued themselves to a bridge. In London, nine scientists were arrested and charged with criminal damage after they allegedly pasted scientific papers to the building housing the UK’s Depart-ment for Business, Energy and Industrial Stra-tegy. Despite this, the protests are ongoing.
Aside from government buildings and em-bassies, demonstrators have also targeted banks that are known to have financed the exploitation of fossil fuels. The scientists in Los Angeles said Chase was chosen as their place of protest for this specific reason. They believe an end to the fossil fuel industry and “the exponential quest for ever more profit at the expense of everything else”, is a good place to begin the rebalancing that is necessary.
Even so, for the most part, mainstream media ignored the protests, just as scientists’ warnings have been disregarded for decades by governments. Nevertheless, they were duly captured and widely disseminated, particularly on social media, in some instances by the protesters. The era of the typecasting of the scientist as a bespectacled nerd in a lab hunched over test tubes is long gone.
In case anyone is wondering why scientists have become angry enough to take this step, it is because notwithstanding the evidence, their counsel is being ignored. Lest we forget, in 2013, then UK prime minister David Cameron had reportedly ordered his ministries to cut the “green crap”, setting back plans for cheap onshore wind and solar energy. Today the country is still playing catch up.
Then, in 2018, former US president Donald Trump had famously said, “I don’t believe it” in response to a federally mandated climate change report, which warned of dire consequences unless there was urgent mitigation. Mr Trump had already announced his intent to remove the US from the Paris climate change pact and later succeeded in doing so, striking a huge blow to carbon neutrality among other targets.
Those are only two of the many examples of why and how world leaders have flubbed the memo on climate change, and scientists, at least those whose silence has not been bought, and who are seeing the results of this folly, are convinced that the time to act is passing us by. Some, particularly those who work for governmental agencies, have put their jobs on the line. This speaks to their passion and their belief that they are standing up for the right thing.
Here’s the thing, scientists who understand the dangers of business as usual with regard to fossil fuels while the earth continues to heat up, do not only reside in the countries mentioned above. Where then, one wonders, are the Guyanese scientists? There are only one or two voices speaking emphatically on why the path we are trodding right now is a dangerous one and they are being drowned out by the rabble whose preferred vision is a dollar sign. There is a saying, which is self-explanatory, that reads: “Those who stand for nothing, fall for anything”. One could go further and add that they might even fall into the abyss in the process and never find their backbones.
