BHP - it’s time to pay by Greenpeace Australia Pacific on Flickr.
This is the box I’m currently locked inside - stopping a fully laden coal train leaving Mt Arthur coal mine, owned by BHP Billiton. I’m blockading this line for 3 days to cost BHP BIlliton what they would owe under a $26/t carbon price.
‘An interesting fact about white people’ writes Lander, ‘is that they firmly believe that all of the world’s problems can be solved through “awareness”’. Lander continues: ‘This belief allows them to feel that sweet self-satisfaction without actually having to solve anything or face any difficult challenges. Because, the only challenge of raising awareness is people not being aware. In a worst-case scenario, if you fail someone doesn’t know about the problem. End of story.’
While social media tools like Facebook and Twitter certainly didn’t invent the BPPA, they have lowered the threshold, making it easier than ever to jump on a bandwagon to nowhere.
Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
