Rashida Tlaib, a member of Congress, has called for climate activists to be “much more aggressive” as they prepare for a series of highway blockades and disorderly rallies later this summer.
Tlaib, a member of the socialist ‘Squad,’ addressed a group of around 125 environmental extremists from Climate Defiance, Declare Emergency, and other organizations.
Highways have been stopped, artwork in Washington has been destroyed, and people have heckled politicians. Later this summer, they plan massive climate rallies similar to those in Europe.
Palestinian-American Tlaib said she had witnessed the latest alarming indicator of unchecked global warming: smoke from Canadian wildfires drifting into New York City and other regions of the US northeast.
The congressman applauded the organizations’ ‘civil disobedience acts’ and pushed them to ‘use the bullhorn,’ claiming that Congress and the White House would not reduce pollution sufficiently unless ‘the streets demanded it.’
Alongside Tlaib were environmental writer David Wallace-Wells, activists who had defied the law and done jail time for protests, and filmmaker Adam McKay, who gave $100,000 to assist climate advocacy in the United States.
Tim Martin is one of them; in April, he and another protester, Joanna Smith, were accused of defacing Edgar Degas’ Little Dancer Aged Fourteen at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
His organization, Declare Emergency, is pushing President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency and utilize his executive powers to drastically reduce emissions of planet-warming gases linked to the intensification of storms, droughts, floods, and other catastrophic weather phenomena.
British activist Roger Hallam founded the organization last year after the 2019 Extinction Rebellion (XR) demonstrations in London shut down the city center and cost businesses millions of euros.
It is questionable whether Hallam can achieve the same level of success on this side of the water with his plans to launch a “large-scale civil disobedience campaign on the climate catastrophe in the United States.”
Experts at the United Nations warn that greenhouse emissions are causing the globe to heat up dangerously, but the governments of the United States, China, and other countries have pledged to transition to renewable energy sources to mitigate this threat gradually.
