The basic argument is that peaceful protest is effective when it is an alternative to a more militant and disruptive extremist movement with the same goals. You negotiate with the peaceful side so the violent side doesn't tear your shit down.
When there is no extremist movement, you really have no powerful incentive to acquiesce to the demands of the peaceful movement. At this point mass peaceful climate protest is decades old but we've seen virtually no meaningful changes addressed.
We're tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths into the climate crisis and it's only just barely getting started and those with the most agency to change it very obviously have no intent to. Why is ecoterrorism considered a morally abhorrent line that cannot ever be crossed, but their choice is not?
The normative answer is "that is bad too they should stop" but by what means can we make them? Our options seem very limited.
Whose minds do we need to change? Climate change is a major issue with massive popular support. There are relatively few people actually able to take action on it and they will not under the current circumstances. Specifically because there's no credible non-peaceful consequence they have to confront, they can ignore the demands of everyone else.
The actual historical effectiveness of terrorism alone is questionable. It's not a reliable or sustainable way to change the minds of a large mass of people. But that's not actually what we need to do here. Making a powerful few frightened enough to do what they ought may be sufficient.
And the effectiveness of the credible threat of violence, combined with a mass peaceful movement, is well attested.
Also, How many innocent people do you think you need to kill exactly to sway the CCP.
The CCP isn't my problem honestly. Most of the major contributors to climate change are operated from within my own country, so I'll focus on that. There's plenty of work to go around, I'm sure someone over there can handle that part of the project.
The fact that people can never really come up with anything except "but well CHINA" speaks volumes to me. You aren't rejecting this stance because you abhor violence. Climate change IS VIOLENCE. Where is your outrage, what are you willing to do about it?
The fact that you can't even understand this is a global problem and just figure "someone over there can handle that part of the project" is telling.
You are a dangerous ideologue.
My actual position is that there does need to be an extremist counterpart to the peaceful climate movement that can plausibly escalate to violence against people. But that there are several steps along the way with chances for those in power to de-escalate first.
Things like targeted destruction of fossil fuel facilities and harassment campaigns against certain politicians and executives are likely to be very effective at raising the cost of contributing to the climate crisis. If those with the power to actually respond to those measures do so, it won't need to escalate further. Hopefully violence isn't necessary but at this point unfortunately, the credible threat of it is.
The credible threat of violence doesn’t even work unless you can credibly threaten a huge portion of the population. Just look at how ineffective terrorism has been for the last 50 years.
Have you considered the civil rights movement was not successful because of the threat of violence but was instead successful because people actually changed their minds?
We have same sex marriage now, which was as unpopular as desegregation a couple of decades ago. When Obama went into office he was against same sex marriage. Society changed rapidly and without violence.
It likely changed so rapidly because it was not a coercive movement at all, but that’s just speculation on my behalf.
You just said “not my problem”, which means you don’t actually care about stopping climate change. You need to stop thinking about how to kill locally when the problem is global.
Since India is also the start of this whole conversation Gandhi especially comes to mind.
I mean, really considered? Not, my friends all think the same way, and so do the charismatic politicians I prefer, so it must be true?
You could start with your "tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths into the climate crisis" claim, which is highly dubious. Have you swallowed the false claim that hurricanes and tornadoes are worse now than before? Are you looking at net deaths, for instance counting not just higher deaths in heat waves, but also fewer deaths in cold snaps? And are you accounting for the beneficial effect of higher food production due to CO2 fertilization?
There is plenty of data that supports climate change, on a Global scale. Whether it kills millions or billions or nobody at all is simply a question of attribution.
What I meant to say was less nutrients in same amount of weight/volume eaten.
The terrorism aspect is interesting though. He's not the only one that is predicting conflict as a direct result of global warming. Mass population displacements due to things like wet bulb heat events, droughts, the middle east routinely hitting temperature of over 50/60 degrees Celcius, etc. have the potential to get really ugly.