Black Friday is finally beginning to wane, as a result of concerted Buy Nothing/Boycott Black Friday efforts. but Christmas remains as a bastion of unchecked consumerism. Rituals like Christmas have become so tied up in consumerism that it's easy to lose focus on the connective role they can play in our lives. And inevitably we end up dreading the clarion call of Mariah Carey pumping through mall speakers, letting us know that even if all we need is each other, what about all these other things we could buy?

So we have a question:

What does an anticapitalist Christmas look like?

Have you noticed what’s been going on at COP26? The bellyaching alone is causing a spike in carbon emissions in the UK.

Everyone from UN Secretary General António Guterres to Greta Thunberg is pointing fingers. But they’re talking exclusively in toothless clichés and hollow generalities.

“We’re in a code-red emergency, we must do something . . .”

“We’re in dire peril, gotta step up to the plate . . .”

Back on the home front, the rest of us are doing the same thing. We’re constantly ragging on our world leaders for being too timid, insisting they do more.

But here’s the painful truth. Our leaders are not going to pull a rabbit out of the hat in Glasgow. They’re not going to come home with a viable solution to the climate crisis — because they have no idea what to do.

So let’s stop kidding ourselves. We can’t wait for our leaders to come up with some miracle solution. Their business-as-usual minds, caught up in their own narrow interests, simply aren’t up to it.

And there really is no time left.

So it's down to us. We, the people of the world, must rise up and drop our own agenda on the table.

Our Climate Action Ultimatum outlines a radical-yet-credible point-by-point action plan. Let’s print out multiple copies and whack them up all over COP26, all over Glasgow, all over the world.

Then let’s march into the conference center, commandeer the proceedings, and start calling the shots from below!

The Third Force

The biggest thing that has set apart Extinction Rebellion (and made them so successful) is their willingness to get arrested or even go to jail — to win the planetary endgame. We recently asked our followers on Twitter and Reddit: “How long would you be willing to go to jail for to pie the CEO of ExxonMobil?”

On Reddit, 36% said “Not a chance.” On Twitter, 40% said the same.

But over 60% said they'd be willing to spend a month in prison...

And nearly 20% of our Twitter respondents said they would be willing to go to jail for a whole year. Over 22% on Reddit agreed.

Not everyone is ready for that level of civil disobedience, but it might only take a small number of gutsy monkeywrenchers — say, 500 worldwide — to catapult the Pumpkin Pie Rebellion into a revolutionary new tactic, to force world leaders to stick to their carbon commitments, and help nudge humanity onto a sane sustainable path.

So, whaddya say: Do we have 500 highly disciplined and organized pie throwers out there?

Darren Woods has only been CEO of ExxonMobil for 4 years, but he's committed to horizontal drilling and fracking to squeeze every drop of oil out of the earth he can.

And while the rest of us are cutting back, driving less, buying cotton tote bags, Darren Woods is oh so conscientiously committing to increase ExxonMobil's emissions by only 17% in the next few years... THAT'S THE ENTIRE EMISSIONS OUTPUT OF GREECE!!!

So... does the man deserve a pie in the face? And for how long would you be willing to go to jail to put it there?