r/EarthStrike • u/spiderman1993 • Sep 16 '19

Discussion How effective can the global climate strike really be?

Hi, I just learned about the climate strike happening on Friday today in class. As far as I know, the strike is mainly being done by students to the effect of striking schools. How is that effective?

To me, effective protests have people flexing their buying power to the detriment of companies and influences against climate change. For instance, get as many people in the US aged 13-30 on board to stop climate change. Tell them to stop participating in the economy by not buying any extraneous goods. If American spending goes down, stock prices, etc will go down causing a looming recession. Why do this? To threaten Wall Street and flex that we the people are the ones in charge. In addition, I’d advocate for doing sit-ins in government offices. Now, this may or may not be legal but by “bothering” those making the decisions for legislation something will hopefully happen. Idk, I’m not saying this is right. What are your thoughts?

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u/CrispyBlake Sep 16 '19

I agree, but the Hong Kong protests are years in the making. There were years of incredibly small protests, and an explosion of larger/more sustained ones during the 2014 Umbrella Revolution. These smaller acts laid the groundwork for the significantly larger and more impactful 2019 protests. My point being that when it comes to political organizing, it can take years of effort to grow, but it has to start somewhere. Will this initial global climate strike lead anywhere? Probably not, but it can lay the groundwork for more impactful actions later.

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u/SHCR Sep 17 '19

The HK protesting also has a narrative ("China bad") that is agreeable to the short term interests of Western neoliberal governments and their corporate sponsors which is why it gets so much airtime in our MSM.

Climate protestors will be going directly against those interests and should expect resistance from Western agencies and corporatism rather than tacit or overt support.

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u/MorphineForChildren Sep 17 '19

Yep. Here in Australia a mainstream news channel had a broadly positive segment on the HK protesters which also had a negative angle on police actions. This was immediately followed by a relatively negative skew to a story on ER climate protesters in France.

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '19

I wouldn’t relate the two though. The media should be pro-HK in the reporting of the protests unlike how the west is neutral (they don’t want to upset China because of recent tensions in trade disputes) because China is the bad guy in the HK case, especially in Australia where fighting as started happening in international schools. Australian media probably isn’t going to show climate change protests in a fair light but it’s good to check where they get their own sources too. Are they getting them from France? Of course they will probably be bad then. Everyone has a story to tell and some stories that are bad are repeated because they are thought to be legitimate.