.................. Extinction rebellion don't appear to want to do that, they just want to make ridiculous demands that will never be met. That's not right, it's unhelpful and is just as likely to alienate people from climate change issues as it is to convert them.
Nah. I understand perfectly why you think this (not that the demands are not ridiculous for I would have used a less anodyne adjective with more asterisks) but once again - sorry, force of habit - you're wrong. By their very recalcitrance and unrealism they help define the spectrum on which others can find a place to nest. The frightful Farage did something akin to this with Brexit and his particular brand of incendiary populism which succeeded in shifting the conservatives further to the right and brought a certain kind of debate out of the shadows.
English culture puts agreement and rational discussion on a pedestal but imo this is a luxury that many other nations feel that they can either do without or that they get to their solutions in a way that harnesses conflict rather than reviling it. Since the idea of seeking out
meaningful majority (and I mean the national tacit majority) opinion got trashed with the referendum farce, I believe that it's effectively open season on the kind of typically British compromise politics where very very few people were truly happy with outcomes but recognised that in the interests of ongoing stability it wasn't worth rocking the boat too much. Whether you think it was good or bad/fair or unfair, we are now living in a different era and the approach which served us reasonably well for several decades (if not over a century) has reached its Best-Before date. The stage we're at at the moment is that uncomfortable point between the niceness of civilised party politics and sporadic barricade-fests and troops on the streets. It's worth reminding ourselves that HM Armed forces was a part of daily life in NI for 20+ years and that the simmering antagonism and violence only died down with the essentially open border that came in during the 90s....propelled mostly - I shudder to even say their name! - by those EU scum.
My take on the future of life as we know it after Brexit is pretty simple: some stuff will be better, some stuff will be worse. It will depend on the individual as to what their opinion is - kind of like the rest of life really. Will life be drastically different? Probably not. The stuff we can't sort out a deal on during the short term will have to wait a bit longer but it's worth remembering that we had relationships with the EEC before we joined and earlier still with the countries that became its core members.
Alas, I'm not nearly so sanguine about the Climate Change thing. I am aware from personal experience that pollution and plastics are just a couple of the catastrophic damages that we're inflicting on future generations and that even if we take the optimist's approach to the rising temperatures and keep chanting the "I'm alright Jack" mantra, at some point we might find ourselves having to wear wellies while we do it. For the sake of argument, if we say that the whole argument that we can actually reverse or at slow down global warming is bogus then we have to start taking mitigation very seriously, and now. An example that might be of interest to a fair number of T2W members is the very real and imminent Thames barrier prob. By chance, a friend's father was the chief engineer on the barrier during construction from the 70s until sometime after it opened in the early 80s and I remember him saying very shortly after he retired in 92 (I think) that the barrier was too low when it was originally conceived in the 60s and that he thought it might be over-topped in his life-time. He was wrong there as he was planted about 5 years ago and London is still dry, however, the fact remains that whether the life-span of the barrier will be the originally projected 50 years (sell-by-date 2030 odd**) or the more optimistic 75 years, at some point a lot of people are going to have to move to higher ground. ...and in the meantime, does one just wait? Or right now start setting aside more and more land for bigger, better and higher flood defenses? And who's going to pay for it? And which government will make it part of their manifesto??
**for those interested in these kind of amusements, I believe that those nice folk at the Met office have suggested that the storm surges of 2032 will represent a kind of shit or bust moment. If Londoners aren't all doing the breast-stroke that year then we might good for another 50.