What I have constantly found confusing is the conflation of related but separate issues here:
1) The general morality of secret services and undercover work, whether or not it is related to known crime or suspected crimes
2) The morality of an undercover officer doing "whatever it takes" to get into an inner circle, although it is not clear whether the sex was done for business or personal reasons (whether or not that matters)
3) The disruption of a higher level "right" to political dissent etc. without undue interference from authorities
4) Whether there was a lack of supervision and what the effect of this was (was it just poor management of an important job or a more causual effect?)
How much of this is illegal and how much is just sad is not clear and the issues need considering separately, otherwise it sounds like somebody getting hurt by a dishonest person when it is potentially much more critical than that.
The title is "A Married Undercover Cop Having Sex with Activists Killed a Climate Movement" with the key article being "A" not "The". There are multiple climate movements going on with differing goals.
These kinds of things seem so far-fetched, but they're happening.
That's why I think the stigma around conspiracy theories is harmful. It makes people believe that this kind of thing couldn't possibly happen to them... And if it does happen and they find out, they will doubt their own judgment as they'll be afraid that other people will think they're nuts for thinking that 'agents are out of get me'.
I suspect that most wealthy individuals and politicians are surrounded with foreign spies and organized manipulators.
It must be difficult being in a position of power. How do they tell fact from paranoia?
Yes, the concept is not necessarily to disrupt this one group, but to make everybody find it impossible to trust any teammate in any activist group. This treatment is reserved for infiltrating groups that want to disrupt existing power structures.
Sometimes I walk into groups or wind up in forums after this level of distrust has occurred before, and it is an interesting and impossible exercise of proving a negative - proving that you’re not someone
On the internet it’s usually because someone banned has made sockpuppet accounts before that circumvent the ban
The fact that those in power think that 'infiltration' and 'manipulation' only happens downstream shows how well it's working on the upstream... They're not even aware of it.
Though I believe you, it is incredibly far-fetched to think that they will go to such lengths, invest so much time and energy just to alter someone's mental state.
It shows that these big interest groups have way too much money.
Not much money involved here, this is the cops. Law and Order - this is maintaining Order. When MLK threatened the order, they blackmailed him and tried to induce him to kill himself.
Back to this case, the UK government and police approach has been to maintain secrecy as to other instances of their behaviour, even while offering a token apology. The message - it could happen to you.
Interesting story, but what is "killing" the climate movement is not one undercover cop but the unwillingness of consumers (including me) to give up hydrocarbons.
A man pretending to be progressive to sleep with progressive women is not a new thing.
Even if every person on earth was carbon neutral, we’d only decrease emissions of GHG by 9%. Agricultural and industrial emissions across the board account for the rest.
We don’t put the burden of industrial byproducts on customers in other industries, but with CO2 and other greenhouse gases we’re supposed to be perfectly self regulating or else we’re shit out of luck? Absolute nonsense.
Sorry, I'm not understanding your math here. 9% of annual global GHG is 4.5 billion tons. there are ~8 billion humans on the planet. You're telling me the average person emits 0.56 tons per year?
You've either made a mistake somewhere in your arithmetic, or you've got a wonky way of attributing greenhouse gas emissions. More co2 than that is emitted in a round trip 2 hour hop in an airplane. (4.3 billion people fly on airlines every year). Would you say that taking an airline flight attributes GHG emissions to the passengers or to the airline?
Look at the chart with electricity distributed amongst the other categories. It's 41% for agriculture and industrial.
Another 29% comes from transportation; this isn't broken this out between personal and commercial vehicles, but presumably you could attribute a significant amount of this to industrial rather than personal use.
The co2 emited by these industries is also counted in people's co2 tab.
That is, if you decide to buy a new phone, the phonemaker will be counted as having used x co2, and you will be counted as having used x co2. Likewise, if you eat a steack, your co2 counter goes up, and agriculture's co2 also ticks up.
Each co2 emission has multiple labels: which industry made it, its country of emission, its final consumer, etc. Each of these labels is useful to consider it from a different point of view. However, If the consumer makes an effort, the industry's co2 will inevitably go down. If the industry is regulated more tightly, consumers' co2 count will decrease.
The only use of comparing industry emissions vs. individuals' emissions is when deciding which regulation would be the most effective (e.g. subsidizing solar panels vs. regulating the oil industry). Opposing consumers and the industries providing consumer goods is meaningless.
How can that make sense? Agriculture and Industry merely produce things for people to consume. So if everybody was to be carbon neutral, Agriculture and Industry would have to be carbon neutral, too. Otherwise not everybody would be carbon neutral, because people would be responsible for the emissions from Agriculture and Industry.
> Even if every person on earth was carbon neutral, we’d only decrease emissions of GHG by 9%.
Yes, if we maintained the current economic and political system. But that would be impossible if every person on earth felt deeply about their carbon footprint. They'd throw out of office any politician that didn't support immediate action on climate change. Governments would be forced to regulate the s*** out of polluters and go to net-zero ASAP.
However, our political and capital power to do anything about it has been systematically and purposefully limited.
When we discovered the dangers of CFCs, we didn’t depend on the public at large to stop using items that produced CFC byproducts. We didn’t point to personal CFC footprints and little CFC calculators that guilt trip you for existing. Why should we do the same with CO2?
They say they care. I'm sure they even believe they care. But at the ballot box, they act very differently.
Why does almost no Green Party win an outright majority in any European national election?
Why does half the US continue to vote for a political party that outright denies man-made climate change?
> our political and capital power to do anything about it has been systematically and purposefully limited.
By the current set of politicians. Who are ultimately voted in by voters. If climate change was really a top-priority issue for everyone, we'd have a different set of people in office.
If you think about it, voting isn't that much of a personal sacrifice. No one is asking people to ride bikes in freezing conditions, or go vegan. And yet, people can't even do that.
We could take action on CFCs by enacting laws. Because we had slightly more sensible politicians back then. If we want sensible politicians again, we have to vote for them.
We all pretty much want the same: survive (at least). The thing is, we can't seem to agree on the best way to do so. ICE vs electric cars. Nuclear vs wind vs solar panels. Apartment vs homesteading...
So when voting, we all vote for what we believe in. But we don't believe in the same thing. And then there's "thinking fashion".
All in all, we do a step in one direction, then in the opposite direction. And we get nowhere.
> Why does almost no Green Party win an outright majority in any European national election?
> Why does half the US continue to vote for a political party that outright denies man-made climate change?
The story I have heard a few times is that the candidate with the biggest budget wins. Climate movements have smaller budgets than incumbents funded by decades-deep vested interest.
> Because we had slightly more sensible politicians back then
I cannot understate how much I disagree with the idea that politics was somehow more sensible "back then". Politicians are not more stubborn or unreasonable today, because __people__ are not more stubborn or unreasonable today.
> Why does almost no Green Party win an outright majority in any European national election?
Because ecology is not the only thing people have in mind. That's a limit of direct democracy, as opposed to a system where people would vote for policies.
Also because some of these parties are trainwrecks.
> They say they care. I'm sure they even believe they care. But at the ballot box, they act very differently.
One catch-all vote every few years is a very noisy metric for measuring people's agreement with one specific issue. Even more so when the choice is quite limited (e.g. two-horse races, between mostly similar horses, like many US votes between slightly-more-right-wing-authoritarian versus slightly-less-right-wing-authoritarian)).
The point is that not every emission can be blamed on the end consumer. Some can and should be, yes, like commercial flights.
Even if every consumer ate vegan and only used a bike, industrial emissions will continue chugging away because the vast majority of those emissions are not serving the end consumer.
We didn't blame the end consumer for CFCs even when they were buying and spraying them into the air in record numbers. CO2 is no different and the blame should not solely reside on us in some hypercapitalistic guilt trip.
Blame isn't a useful concept and isn't an excuse for being sloppy in carbon accounting.
A person's carbon footprint is the amount of CO2 emitted to support that person's lifestyle. It doesn't matter whether it's the exhaust from delivering the widget or the amortized emissions from pouring the base of the factory, that's the carbon footprint.
Pretending that industrial emissions don't serve the end consumer is much worse than pretending that lifestyle interventions are sufficient. At least riding a bike gets you in shape; ignoring the bike factory and the whole trucking and shipping infrastructure which creates and transports the bike is, well, solving 9% of the problem.
The fact of the matter is that every citizen in the world could do all of the "green" things in their daily lives that they can and it would barely tick the needle on emissions down. The U.S. military itself is one of the worst polluters in the world.
A person's "carbon footprint" cannot extend all the way to the CO2 emitted when pouring the base of the factory that produces the gas in their car, in the same way that buying clothes at the GAP cannot condemn you for child slavery that the corporation benefits from.
You cannot put the onus for ethical business on the end consumer when the corporation pursues and benefits from unethical behavior, often times without the end consumer ever knowing about that behavior. It's ridiculous, and completely ignores the class element in the whole discussion.
This is a problem that must be solved from the top down, and corporate messaging to saddle the responsibility on the end user is disingenuous at best, incredibly maligned at worst.
It is not sloppy accounting. The fact of the matter is that every citizen in the world could do all of the "green" things in their daily lives that they can and it would barely tick the needle on emissions down.
A person's "carbon footprint" cannot extend all the way to pouring the base of the factory that produces the gas in their car, in the same way that buying clothes at the GAP cannot condemn you for child slavery that the corporation benefits from. You cannot put the onus for ethical business on the end consumer when the corporation pursues and benefits from unethical behavior.
This is a problem that must be solved from the top down, and corporate messaging to saddle the responsibility on the end user is ridiculous.
> Agricultural and industrial emissions across the board account for the rest.
Agricultural and industrial emissions only exist because of consumer demand. If consumers stop consuming the things that cause those emissions the producers will stop making them.
Even if consumers gave up hydrocarbons there's still airlines, ships, trucks, anything involving commercial transport really. Not to mention power plants.
I'd also like to point out that in the US roughly half of all people can't cover a $1000 emergency. A 10-20% increase to one's electric bill (which is the lower bound of the 100% renewable options in my area, last I looked) is a vital concern for that demographic. Sure you can argue that the government/people/society should account for that such that they can afford the increase, but then you're not just talking switching the power grid to renewables (a daunting task in and of itself), but a massive social program along with it.
Sadly I have no hope that our current institutions or the environmental activists will be able to manage the transition effectively. Maine just said no to clean hydroelectric power from Quebec because they're concerned about the impact of transmission lines on their forest, and New England in general is burning oil power plants and importing liquid natural gas by sea to meet heating/electricity demand because they refuse to build any new natural gas pipelines.
But nonetheless climate change must be addressed at some point. Which means (in the US at least) we're going to put it off until the last minute, make harsh, blunt, stupid changes, and screw the people least able to afford the cost. Meanwhile those of us making 6 figures will be mildly inconvenienced, and those even richer won't even bat an eye, all while crooning about how noble they are on TV.
1. People are unwilling to make changes that they perceive as being a net negative to their quality of life.
2. Businesses are unwilling to make changes that they expect to have a net negative to their bottom line.
However, I don't think the the climate movement was "killed", it quite clearly continuing, if anything thriving. That's not to say what happed to these woman wasn't absolutely outrageous and is another example of the London Met operating well beneath the level of service they should be.
The trouble is that for too long the climate activists have used very strong words and actions that put the public off of their cause. They also ask for too many large changes too quickly discouraging people from making the small changes that are an easer start to making larger lifestyle changes.
1. Consumer "choice" isnt really a choice in a lot of instances. Many people would love an electric car if they could afford it, or if their community had the charging stations that would make it viable. If you arent in a place to finance a new car you dont really have a choice.
2. fuck thats a really cynical take on progressive activism. what's it like thinking that no one believes anything?
For your electric car example, that may be true, but at the same time, the Ford F150 has been the number one selling vehicle in the United States every year since 1976. It's not as if everyone is clamoring for an electric car, but they settle for an affordable Prius instead.
really hardcore activist groups these days tend to be full-lifestyle cliques. you can't fake hormones or diy face tats, and it's hard to maintain any charade three tabs deep.
this has the benefit of isolating these groups, but it also has the detriment of isolating these groups. you can do almost anything when you know wider society has no place for you, but you have a chosen family with a shared purpose and intention.
"The revolutionary is a lost man; he has no interests of his own, no cause of his own, no feelings, no habits, no belongings; he does not even have a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single, exclusive interest, a single passion--the revolution." --Mikhail Bakunin
1) The general morality of secret services and undercover work, whether or not it is related to known crime or suspected crimes 2) The morality of an undercover officer doing "whatever it takes" to get into an inner circle, although it is not clear whether the sex was done for business or personal reasons (whether or not that matters) 3) The disruption of a higher level "right" to political dissent etc. without undue interference from authorities 4) Whether there was a lack of supervision and what the effect of this was (was it just poor management of an important job or a more causual effect?)
How much of this is illegal and how much is just sad is not clear and the issues need considering separately, otherwise it sounds like somebody getting hurt by a dishonest person when it is potentially much more critical than that.