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| Sat, 22nd Feb 2020 9:00:00 |
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With every flood, public anger over the climate crisis is surging |
The fossil-fuel companies know they'll face increased social stigma unless they change.
Sometimes it has felt as if the rain might never stop.
These storms have gone beyond the point of simply being storms now, each blurring into the next to create a strangely end-of-days feeling. Everything is freakishly sodden and swollen, and while the rural flood plain on which I live fortunately hasn't flooded anything like as badly as some, the rivers are rising alarmingly. Yet still the lashing winds and biblical downpours keep coming. Suddenly the 40 Days of Action campaign that Extinction Rebellion (XR) will launch on Ash Wednesday (26 February), encouraging people to reflect on the environmental consequences of their actions in a kind of green Lent, feels ominously well named.
This week's stunt in Cambridge, where XR activists dug up Trinity College's lawn in symbolic protest at the college’s plans to build on land it owns in rural Suffolk, may be just the beginning. Some ask why these activists aren’t out stacking sandbags for the poor householders of the Wye valley, or canoeing through the streets of Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, highlighting the risks of a climate crisis that can only mean more freak flooding.
Yet in some ways that was the point of targeting Trinity in the first place. Of all the Cambridge colleges, it's the one identified by student journalists – using freedom of information requests – as the biggest investor in fossil fuel companies blamed for aggravating the climate crisis. Activists blockaded a research building run by the oil exploration company Schlumberger as well as making holes in the lawn. The clear aim is to make it toxic for institutions to maintain ties to polluting industries; and what makes universities tempting targets is that they're already being hammered from inside by students raging against what they see as dirty money.
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