The Climate Change Movement's Future: Massive Civil Disobedience, Blockades, Occupations, and More.

For about a year I've been predicting that we'll see a mass movement to shut down power plants that rivals or beats the size of the US civil rights movement.

(Of course this movement won't be limited to the US.)

Over the past two weeks 1252 people were arrested for civil disobedience in front of the White House. In the next 5-30 years I think we'll see escalating numbers of civil disobedience, ultimately leading to 10,000+ people getting arrested (in a single year) and millions of people in the streets. I also think we will see different types of tactics emerge, as politicians fail to act. These tactics are likely to include the direct blockading of power plants and occupation of proposed or existing facilities (as well as government and corporate targets).

Two examples of a crazy tactic would be to either 1) do a power strike (dropping demand to near zero - causing a company to lose money as they have to keep their coal plants running - you could also do this while switching your demand to another provider), or 2) do a power surge (spiking demand - causing a power company to have to buy power on the open market when it costs 2-3 times what they can sell it for).

We might see the emergence of municipal owned utilities or democratic and environmental friendly co-ops (currently some of the co-ops aren't so democratic or pro-environmental).

We might see a progressive third party, like the Green Party, become a serious competitor in elections.

There have been a small number of blockades and occupations (notably by Greenpeace), but nothing (yet) on the scale of the 1400 people who were arrested for occupying the Seabrook nuclear site in 1977.