"Mass action" vs "direct action
Over on the Guardian blog, Damian Carrington has a post on mobilization tactics and climate change:
Can the people of the world make global warming history? Ed Miliband, the UK's minister for energy and climate change certainly hopes so.Talking to the Guardian, he has called for a mass movement, like the 2005 Make Poverty History campaign, that will force the world's leaders to agree to a meaningful global climate deal at UN talks in Copenhagen at the end of 2009.
The Make Poverty History campaign, a coalition of hundreds of groups, successfully urged the G8 meeting in Gleneagles to cancel $40bn of debt owed by 18 of the world's poorest nations.
With uncanny timing, the campaign group Plane Stupid have occupied a runway at Stansted Airport, stopping all flights. I suspect this direct action, by about 50 protesters, was not what Miliband had in mind. The police have made multiple arrests and it's now all over. My colleague Leo Hickman has strongly defended the action.
Damian goes on to ask whether mass protest or direct action (like Plane Stupid's) is better for putting the breaks on climate change. Here's a thought: What if we did both?
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