[✔️] March 23, 2024 Global Warming News | Activism, Yale's Tony Leiserowitz

Sat Mar 23 08:13:01 EDT 2024

/*March*//*23, 2024*/

/[ Information activist essay ]/
*The Law is Criminalising Activists Because It Can’t Criminalise Violence*
Violence is a feature, not a flaw
Rachel Donald
Mar 22, 2024

The British State this week overthrew a key legal defence protecting 
climate activists. The belief in consent defence has seen juries 
acquitting activists in criminal damage cases, much to the fury of the 
establishment and, on Monday, the Court of Appeal ruled that evidence 
presented by defendants about the effects of climate change would be 
“inadmissible” in the future.

The “consent” defence argued that activists who engaged in damaging 
property, such as breaking the windows of a fossil-fuel invested bank, 
genuinely believed the owners of that property would have given their 
consent to the action if they truly understood the reasons for the 
protest, such as the effects of climate change. This defence 
successfully won over juries when presented with the catastrophic 
impending effects of climate change. Losing this defence is a huge blow 
both to activists waiting to stand trial and the justice system as a 
whole, which has been weaponised against victims rather than 
perpetrators. Following the advice of The Atlas Network, the shadowy 
network of right-wing global think tanks behind the recent 
criminalisation of protest around the “democratic” world, the British 
government is using its police force and courts to crack down on 
“eco-terrorists” all whilst granting more licences for oil and gas 
exploration in the North Sea.

The effects have ricocheted throughout the seats of British power. Just 
days after the ruling, the Independent MP for North West Leicestershire, 
Andrew Bridgen, a member of the science-denying Net Zero Scrutiny Group, 
stood up in the Houses of Parliament and gassed: “Independent scientists 
have stated that higher carbon dioxide levels would be beneficial for 
life on the planet through increased plant growth… So can we have a 
debate on government time about the cost benefits of Net Zero before 
trillions of pounds of taxpayers’ money are wasted?”

And on the very same day, a delegate of the British government told the 
United Nations that the UK can never accept that nature has rights: “The 
UK’s firm position is that rights can only be held by legal entities 
with a legal personality. We do not accept that rights can be applied to 
nature or Mother Earth. While we recognise that others do, it is a 
fundamental principle for the UK and one from which we cannot deviate.”

What happens in British law matters as it is the bedrock of legal 
systems around the world. A living legacy of British colonialism, the 
Law validated the rape of people and land, the theft of resources, and 
the hierarchy of domination and oppression. It gave men in wigs the 
right to put other men in chains, and granted legal rights to 
corporations long before people of colour or women. Arguably, without 
any meaningful reform, the Law continues to serve its initial purpose: 
to grant absolute power to a minority.

This immense violence is dressed up as justice. In Violence and the 
Word, legal scholar Robert Cover argues that the Law’s power is 
predicated on “a willingness to put bodies on the line”: incarceration. 
How striking that activists today also use that language when throwing 
themselves against the power of the state. Cover argues that by denying 
this violence, its own, the Law cannot operate in the real world, and 
instead “imposes an imagined future upon reality”.

This explains why criminals walk free while civilians are jailed. The 
Law gains its hard power through a willingness to commit violence; it 
maintains its soft power by allegedly exercising that power to maintain 
order. According to the Law’s own logic, occurrences of violence are 
aberrations in an otherwise functioning system, for it metes out 
justice. But if the Law’s own power is built on violence then violence, 
surely, is not an aberration but a necessary function of that system? 
And if violence is the function, what right does the Law have to commit 
violence in the name of order? Its violence does not achieve order if 
violence is the norm. Instead, its violence is nothing more than a 
continued oppression and domination to grant absolute power to the minority.

This is why the Law so often fails to convict violence. Thanks to the 
#MeToo movement, we know the terrible prevalence of sexual violence. It 
is, simply, a reality for most women. Yet, in England, the conviction 
rate for reported rapes is under 1%. How can the Law be so out of touch 
with reality? Because it pretends that violence is a flaw, not a 
feature, and adequately convicting violent perpetrators would 
acknowledge the world rather than project upon it. It is far easier to 
control an imagined future than reality; it is far easier to deny 
victimhood than police criminality.

The Law must deny criminality, for criminality defines Statehood in the 
Global North, the hemisphere which raided and ransacked the majority 
world. State power is access to energy, ideally a large surplus, be it 
stolen resources, slave labour or fossil fuels. Enshrining the legal 
rights of Nature directly challenges the British State’s access to 
power. This is why rejecting those rights is a “a fundamental principle 
for the UK and one from which we cannot deviate.” The Law depends on 
hierarchies and violence to function, and challenging that oppression 
threatens to bring the whole institution down on itself. Activists 
finding common ground with a jury of their peers also undermines the 
British State’s access to power, which was first gained by stealing land 
from the majority.

The British Law cannot criminalise violence because it is a violent 
institution, in league with the violence of the State, whose power 
depends on extraction and domination. We rightly rail against American 
imperialism but British Law is the arteries through which the artillery 
flows, its commitment to injustice revealed with every public prosecution.

https://www.planetcritical.com/p/the-law-is-criminalising-activists?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share

/[  Sage advice from Yale's Tony Leiserowitz ]/
Dear Friends,
We are pleased to announce the publication of a new Climate Note: “The 
"attitude-behavior gap” on climate action: How can it be bridged?”

There are many ways that people can take action to reduce climate 
change, from personal behaviors like eating a more plant-rich diet to 
collective behaviors like political activism. Political activism (such 
as contacting government officials to express support for pro-climate 
policies) is one of the most significant ways to influence government 
policy-making.

However, relatively few Americans engage in political actions to limit 
global warming, such as signing petitions, volunteering, or contacting 
government officials. While majorities think that global warming should 
be a high government priority and support various climate policies, 
there is a discrepancy between the public’s attitudes about climate 
action and their behaviors or actions that support it. Research that 
offers insights into this “attitude-behavior gap” can identify 
opportunities to reduce the gap and thereby strengthen both public and 
political will.

In this analysis, we investigate the attitude-behavior gap on political 
climate action using the six most recent waves of our Climate Change in 
the American Mind surveys spanning 2021-2023 (n = 6,190 U.S. adults). We 
focus on four political actions. We compare the gap between willingness 
to engage versus self-reported behavior across all four actions, and 
explore differences between Americans who are willing and active and 
those who are willing but inactive.

Results

Many Americans say they “definitely” or “probably” would engage in 
political climate action if someone they like and respect asked them to. 
These actions include signing a petition about global warming, either 
online or in person (51%), donating money to an organization working on 
global warming (31%), volunteering time to an organization working on 
global warming (29%), or contacting government officials about global 
warming (28%). However, fewer Americans report engaging in these 
behaviors at least “once” in the prior 12 months (signing a petition, 
16%; donating money, 13%; volunteering, 6%; contacting government 
officials, 8%).
- -- 
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/attitude-behavior-gap/
To understand the factors that may contribute to the attitude-behavior 
gap on climate action, we focused on the 30% of Americans who say they 
“definitely would” engage in at least one of the four behaviors. Half of 
this group (i.e., 15% of Americans) report doing at least one of the 
behaviors “once” or more often in the past 12 months (“Definitely 
willing and active”), while the other half have not (“Definitely willing 
but inactive”). We compared these groups to all other Americans and 
explored differences in communication behaviors, perceptions of social 
norms, and collective efficacy beliefs.

The “Definitely willing and active” are more likely than both the 
“Definitely willing but inactive” and other Americans to discuss global 
warming with family and friends (respectively, 78%, 50%, and 23%), hear 
about global warming in the media (71%, 56%, and 49%), or hear other 
people talk about global warming (52%, 29%, and 15%). Additionally, the 
“Definitely willing and active” are more likely to perceive social norms 
supportive of climate action, including descriptive norms (i.e., how 
much of an effort family and friends make to reduce global warming; 73%, 
46%, and 28%) and injunctive norms (i.e., how important it is to family 
and friends that you take action to reduce global warming; 71%, 59%, and 
31%).

- - - 
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/attitude-behavior-gap/
We find that there is an attitude-behavior gap on climate action: many 
Americans are willing to engage in political actions to address climate 
change, but fewer report doing so. Even among the people who are most 
willing to act, many say they haven’t done so in the prior year. There 
are also important differences between people who are active and those 
who are not, including in perceived social norms, communication 
behaviors, and collective efficacy beliefs. We have found similar 
patterns among the Alarmed, or those who are most worried about climate 
change: Americans who are Alarmed and actively engaged in climate issues 
are more likely than those who are not active to talk about climate 
change and express a sense of collective efficacy. While we cannot 
determine causal relationships from these findings, the results align 
with previous research on the drivers of political action on climate 
change and provide implications for bridging the attitude-behavior gap.

How can the attitude-behavior gap on climate action be bridged?

In this analysis, 30% of Americans said they “definitely would” do at 
least one of four political actions to address climate change – over 100 
million people who are very willing to engage. However, the barriers to 
climate action are complex, including psychological, social, and 
structural/logistical factors. For political actions such as contacting 
government officials, we have found that the most frequent barrier for 
registered voters is that no one has ever asked them to do it. In 
addition, many say that it wouldn’t make any difference, they are not 
activists, they don’t know who to contact, or they wouldn’t know what to 
say. Based on previous research and the results here, we suggest several 
ways to address these barriers and encourage climate action in the full 
Climate Note on our website.

For media inquiries, please contact Eric Fine and Michaela Hobbs.

For partnership inquiries, please contact Joshua Low.

Further Reading from Yale Climate Connections

13 tips for lobbying your elected officials about climate change

Checklist: How to take advantage of brand-new clean energy tax credits

How to talk about climate change: Ask questions

As always, thanks for your interest and support of our work!

On behalf of the research team: Matthew Ballew, Jennifer Carman, Marija 
Verner, Seth Rosenthal, Edward Maibach, John Kotcher, and Anthony 
Leiserowitz.

Cheers,

Tony
-----
Anthony Leiserowitz, Ph.D.
Director, Yale Program on Climate Change Communication
Yale School of the Environment
Twitter: @ecotone2
climatecommunication.yale.edu
yaleclimateconnections.org

https://mailchi.mp/yale/the-attitude-behavior-gap-on-climate-action-how-can-it-be-bridged?e=ff9625264c

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