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What emergency? | Extinction Rebellion in Numbers

Extinction Rebellion welcomes the Committee on Climate Change’s report today, and its call upon the Government to prove it is serious about meeting its 2050 target, as another important – albeit small – step in the right direction. 

However, we are enormously concerned that the report’s criticisms of the Government are woefully understated and that the very premise upon which the report is written – that achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 is a sufficient target to avert disaster – is simply not enough to prevent catastrophic and irreversible climate breakdown and subsequent loss of life. 

The fact that the CCC have brought to the Government’s attention its failure to make progress in any of the sectors studied, or indeed to deliver upon 96% of the policies needed in order to meet the Government’s own targets, supports the need for environmental activists to continue to raise the alarm about the very real risk of existential threat. 

It is vital that the CCC and the Government now accept that the 2050 target for net zero emissions, so long in coming, must be moved to 2025 if we are to have a significant chance of averting catastrophe. Major climate-induced weather events are already killing thousands of people and destroying communities. The coming years will bring severe food shortages, societal breakdown, civilisational collapse, the death of untold millions – even billions – of people. To give ourselves another three decades to achieve something meaningful in order to limit these horrors is beyond irresponsible. It is criminal negligence on an unprecedented scale.

So while, as stated, Extinction Rebellion welcomes this report as another small step along a very long road, which needs urgently to become much shorter, it also calls upon the CCC to make a giant leap and call for a target that actually gives life on this planet a far greater chance of survival. Otherwise, for all the bluster that the Government ‘must do more’, the report is simply bolstering the Government’s economically expedient position of net zero carbon by 2050 as being realistically defensible. And in doing so it will be complicit in the deaths of millions.

Rebel for Life

More about Extinction Rebellion:

Extinction Rebellion’s top-line demands:

• Government must tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change.

• The government must act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025.
• The government must create and be led by the decisions of a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice.

What emergency? | Extinction Rebellion in Numbers

Get involved

• In the UK, come to one of our events, join the Rebellion Network and let us know how you can help out.
• Start a group where you are: in the UK or around the world.
• Find your local group.
• Check out the International XR website, with links to the French, German, Italian and UK websites.
• And while your time and energy are of most importance, if you are financially able to donate money, see our crowdfunder.

About Rising Up!

Extinction Rebellion is an initiative of the Rising Up! network, which promotes a fundamental change of our political and economic system to one which maximises well-being and minimises harm. Change needs to be nurtured in a culture of reverence, gratitude and inclusion while the tools of civil disobedience and direct action are used to express our collective power.