French scientists detained in Germany for squatting sports car at BMW show in Munich; Julia Steinberger, one of the main authors of the latest IPCC report, who sticks her hand on a busy road in Bern, in coordination with the ecological association Renovate Switzerland; Peter Kalmus, a NASA climate scientist, chained to the front door of the JPMorgan Chase bank headquarters in Los Angeles to denounce the continued financing of oil and gas projects… Tired of multiplying conferences and reports for alerting us to the devastating effects of global warming, researchers are going on the offensive and are also launching into civil disobedience.
“The COP27? The stakes are no longer there. The Paris agreements have clearly given the line and the objective since 2015. The important thing now is to know how the States will react. But the account is not there”, justifies Julian Carrey, teacher-researcher at the National Institute of Applied Sciences in Toulouse and member of the Scientifiques en Rébellion collective.
“Take methane for example: targets were set to reduce its emissions at the last COP. But since then, in France, nothing has been done about it. The public authorities still massively support the breeding of beef when it is the main source of emission”, laments the professor. It is therefore time for mobilization and action, sometimes in support of other groups calling for civil disobedience, such as Extinction Rebellion. “The idea is to make a splash within the scientific world but also in civil society, specifies Julian Carrey. If people see that researchers are getting into it, they will say to themselves that the situation is serious.”
