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Comment by googlryas | Hacker News Reader

How effective are these protests? Is there any way to quantify that? Certainly it gets news coverage, but does it have any effect on people?

My best guess is that most people have formed opinions on climate change at this point, and these types of protests don't really move anyone's opinion - if you believe in climate change, you still believe in climate change, and you probably don't think climate change is more urgent now that someone threw tomato soup on an old painting. If you don't believe in climate change, you still don't believe in climate change, I can't see soup on a painting affecting that.

I suspect Putin invading Ukraine did more for climate change action than any amount of protests would do.

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> these types of protests don't really move anyone's opinion

I think they actually damage the cause they're working towards, it gives opponents of taking action against climate change cheep ammunition for ad hominem attacks against anyone working on climate change similar to how small groups of rioters can be used to paint entire protests as violent.

It's going to damage the cause they're working towards when people start flooding in to take a selfie with the painting because it was in the news.

It’s like a preachy vegan: makes it far too easy for lazy dismissals of the entire argument. Likely sets back the entire cause by making it too polarising, which really sucks.

opponents of taking action against climate change cheep ammunition

As if they were so principled before, or went out of their way to take other objections so seriously.

A more objective measure would be to estimate the cost it would take to get the equivalent level of publicity, rather than trying to estimate the positive or negative impact which is necessarily subjective.

We don't know whether pissing people off is really ineffective or actually galvanizes more people to action. I'd contrast actions like this with the worldwide protests against the Iraq war in February 2003. Those are estimated to be the largest single political demonstration in history, involving 6-10 million people in ~600 venues around the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_prot...

They were huge protests, close to universal. Subsequents events pretty much validated the protesters' concerns. And what did all that peaceful, dignified, disciplined protest achieve? Fuck all. Protests that don't upset anyone are quite useless.

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