Roger Hallam's Emotional and Intellectual Honesty

I posted the above video because I respect Roger Hallam's emotional and intellectual honesty. I heard him interviewed by Stephen Sackur at BBC Hard Talk and wanted to know more about this co-founder of Extinction Rebellion. I was also curious about the British public and police response in April 2019 while, according to The Guardian, "thousands of protesters use[d] roadblocks and glue to paralyse parts of central London [.. .] in civil disobedience protests, blockading four landmarks in the capital in an attempt to force the government to take action on the escalating climate crisis." It reminded me of when I went to hear  "the Pope's advisers" on climate change March 2, 2018 at a UCSD panel called "Climate Change. What Can Be Done About It?" attended by about a hundred students, professors, and concerned citizens. At the event I asked  Dr. Veerabhadran Ramanathan, Dr. Richard C.J. Somerville, and California’s 52nd Congressional District Representative Scott Peters what they thought about nonviolent civil disobedient climate action as a useful response to world governments' inaction on the crisis. Their answers are here.

In the approximately 25-minute BBC Hard Talk video Hallam, a Wales organic farmer and former PhD student in Civil Disobedience at Kings College warned "This October thousands of people will come to the streets of London, and they'll stay in the streets of London. How long I don't know because it will be up to them. But you'll see mass disturbances. It will be nonviolent. It will be respectful. And it will be disruptive. And that's the methodology that we're using. [, , , ,] [Teenagers have] got another 50, 60, or 70 years to live on this planet. By that time there could be only a billion people left. I mean that's 6 billion people that have died from starvation or been slaughtered by law. [. . . .] Journalists are not emotionally connecting with what's happening. The elites and the governments aren't actually going to do anything. They're not going to fulfill their primary responsibility which is to look after the people."

Hallam's concern about only a billion humans surviving mass starvation and being legally blocked from fleeing increased heat was shared by Dahr Jamail in one of his truthout.org articles and in the introduction to my book Carbonfish Blues: "I’ve spoken to prestigious scientists both on and off the record who believe that sooner rather than later, global population will be reduced to around 1 billion humans."  Jamail, winner of the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, is author of The End of Ice (The New Press, 2019).