Hunter coal train protests must cut through the noise over climate change, not add to it

The researcher's work was focused, in part, on whether the insurance sector is properly equipped or even capable of dealing with the fallout of climate change. It struck me as an unusually practical and pragmatic approach to a problem that tends to divide people over how existential it can sometimes appear. It was the sort of jolt you might feel if you had just spent a few months chatting with a committee of architects about what, if anything, constitutes "a room" when, all of a sudden, a chippy comes around with a hammer and asks which bits need to be nailed together to keep the rain out.

Climate change means more extreme weather - it means bigger and worse storms, fires, floods, drought. Fires, floods and storms mean smashed windshields and hail dents in your car, leaky roofs, blackouts, and laptop-frying surges. And what happens then? We all ring up our insurer and start complaining about our excess payments.

Now, at the first mention of the C-word, a few people reading this surely began composing their shouty letters to the editor about this greeny lefty socialist journo complaining about imaginary doomsday. "And how dare he," some will surely say, "when he clearly hasn't even read this suspiciously unreferenced and isolated graph that I just Googled that shows that everything weather-related is fine actually, and I'm right, and Andrew Bolt and John Laws and Gina Rinehart all agree with me, so stop scaring the children with your lefty, greeny, Labor-socialist hysterics! Won't somebody please think of the children?!".

And that's kind of the point I'm making. The problem with climate change is that it's not practical or pragmatic and we've made the grave error of assuming that non-pragmatic problems without one easily executable solution must be up for unrelenting debate by two diametrically opposed sides until one simple solution presents itself.

The adage goes that there are two sides to every story. Really? Only two? Seems a bit reductionist. Maybe, in a sterile world where everything meets at neat right angles, that could be true. But in real life, outside the Year 7 debating team, a story almost never has only two sides - and even when they do, those sides are almost never in diametric opposition to each other. Some stories have one side (have a look at the criminal court lists on any given workday for a few examples). Some have 30.

Climate change is one of the latter: I have not read your graph (side 1). I have read a lot of other graphs, and some of them seem pretty conclusive (side 2). And regardless of the graphs and what colour the pretty lines and columns are, climate change is probably going to mean more insurance claims (side 3). And none of those sides have anything to do with a bunch of kayaks floating in the harbour. They also have everything to do with it. See what I mean? It's a minefield.

If you're still reading, and your head is spinning as much as mine is, here's climate change as a story with one nicely digestible side: it's bloody complicated, and no one gets out uncompromised.

It's hardly surprising, then, that protest action on the subject is similarly complicated and similarly universally compromising. Climate activists have been making headlines this week, not just here but all over the world. Video of a pair of gooses from the gander calling itself "Just Stop Oil" spraying orange-dyed cornstarch onto Stonehenge has been viewed more than 30 million times. The same group have thrown soup at the (glass-covered) Mona Lisa and Van Gogh's Sunflowers, among other antics, to "make a statement".

At home, Blockade Australia have been back in town climbing on coal trains in the Hunter only to be arrested and charged, the same as they are each time they do it, and then everything carries on until the next time their PR person reckons they need to drum up a headline.

The problem with these "statements" (read: stunts) is that they tend to only distract from the real problem because we spend all of our time arguing over the effectiveness and ethics of the stunt rather than what it stands for.

When a pair of protestors climb on top of a coal train to do karaoke for 15 minutes before the cops arrive, or when some goose throws some cornstarch on Stonehenge in the name of "just stopping oil" or coal or whatever, a few things inevitably happen.

Those on one side of the room (let's say, for argument's sake, on the right) get to shout even louder that these are the unjustifiable actions of a bunch of hysterical lunatics divorced from reality. Those on, let's say, the left are forced into the uncomfortable position of defending the general virtue of direct action, even as any sensible person can see how cuckoo bananas the stunt of the day is.

And everyone in the middle, including the bloke driving the train who's trying to do his job ideally without potentially killing anyone on the tracks, has to wait for them all to calm down before they can go back to work. And all the while, the insurance agencies get to quietly make it harder to get coverage for storm damage because, 'Gee, we've had a bit of a rise in claims recently, and our profits might become slightly less stratospheric if this keeps up'.

Those making the statement would argue that our departure from practices that are toxic to sustained life on the planet isn't happening quickly enough (it's a fair point). Politicians and those on the other side of things cry that change is happening as quickly as it can (also a fair point). And Peter Dutton thinks that if he just keeps circling the word "nuclear" with love hearts on his notepad, it will magically stop being more expensive, slower, and less reliable than renewables in our particular national case. It's a shame they all missed the point.

The protestors are wrong because change is happening as quickly as it tends to happen when the issue is this complicated and just happens to affect everyone. The politicians are wrong because they have had generations to prepare for this exact outcome, and they've done a damn good job of not coming up with a plan. And Petey D is just wrong.

In that sense, protesting is virtuous. Direct action is important and necessary in the face of governments that are by their nature obstinately entrenched in the status quo and guided by the loudest voice at the table. Protesting is even more virtuous when getting to that table often comes with a dollar value per plate. But protesting for protesting's sake is about as impactful as bringing cornstarch to a shit fight; it doesn't do the job, and it makes a bloody mess.

As I stood on the beach that day, watching the flotilla launch, I knew that earlier that week, the organisers had filed with the local police for a legal exemption to carry on the protest. The action was so well planned that everyone from the protestors to the journos, cops, and the port just organised their day around it. It was another event on the calendar. And when the time ran out, business resumed as normal. The same can be said of this week's shenanigans. The first people the protestors seemed to call were the journos, with a neat package of quotes and photos of them carrying on.

Surely, getting that attention is part of spreading the message. But the impact feels somewhat dulled when it fits a little too neatly into a press release and has about as much follow-through. It starts to feel like we're just going through the paces.

The researcher pointed out on the beach that direct action is how a lot of change gets made. Sometimes, the argument can't be made by filling in the forms, going to the officials, and rationally pleading the case. Almost every important change that happened in the last century and a half (think: universal suffrage, the union movement, and equal pay) happened because, at some point, people took to the streets and demanded it. Sometimes, you need to get your hands dirty.

But taking to the streets surely can't be both the beginning and the end of the story. Universal suffrage wasn't won by everyone jumping on Instagram to post a blank square and then patting ourselves on the back for our commitment to civic duty. In the face of a problem as complicated, universally compromising, fraught and impractical as climate change, "just stopping oil" (or, to use a local example, "just stopping that one train") isn't going to cut it.

Once we stop the train, once we've 'made the statement', then what? What are the next 10 words after the 10 words on the slogan? And then what are the 10 words after that?

It's telling that, moments after the Just Stop Oil people were done cornstarching Stonehenge, they sat down and said nothing. Perhaps that's non-violent resistance at work. Perhaps it was that the statement (whatever it was - probably "just stop oil") had been made, so job done.

The people making that statement might argue that I'm not taking them or their demands seriously - that appearing to demand that they come up with a solution as well as draw attention to the problem (I'm not) is actually part of the problem. But surely the argument could also be made that when the statement amounts to throwing soup at a glass-covered painting, I'm taking the problem about as seriously as the protestors are.

Just stopping oil, or coal, or trains, or boats in the harbour isn't a solution. And neither is doing nothing. And neither (Pete) is doing literally anything except renewables, even when it's worse, because renewables are the avowed enemy in the current culture war.

Perhaps our failure to deal with climate change is that we turned it into a political and philosophical problem instead of a moral and economic one. No person in their right mind would steal the life vest from their own children to save themselves when the water starts rising. And no one wants to pay more on their power bills or insurance. But underneath the silly protest stunts, that's the reality of the problem at hand. And the longer we spend arguing over whether or not protesting works, the worse the situation gets for all of us.

Throwing soup and cornstarch at the problem isn't going to fix it and neither is stopping a train for a sing-song, but that seems to be where we are; trying to shoehorn overly simplified solutions into the length of your average tweet to fix the most complicated problem on earth.

Perhaps it's a start to a bigger piece of work that we just haven't got around to yet - but if that's the case, surely we have to start the hard part eventually.

Perhaps it's because when the simple and easy answer doesn't immediately fix the problem, a lot of the people on both sides of the room, shouting the loudest, don't have any better ideas.