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The Extinction Rebellion is a form of resistance against government inaction on climate change. They protest by targetting some of the very things governments use to control us; the indirect resources that allow us to exist, to be happy, and to provide for the economy by being efficient workers. For example, in August 2019, Extinction Rebellion protesters were charged for blocking roads in Melbourne CBD and preventing people from getting to work ("We cannot be ignored..." 2019). Extinction Rebellion spokesperson, Tom Howell, told the ABC that the protests were intended to disrupt the economy:

"it is the best option we have left to get people talking about the climate emergency, to get the Government responding to it and to kind of make the economy pay attention to it, because if people can't go to work then the economy can suffer” ("We cannot be ignored..." 2019).

Writing for The Guardian, Butler also comments on the Extinction Rebellion's disruption of resources, explaining that they show a willingness to shut down cities (2018). According to The New York Times, “the group urges its members to try to get arrested so they can use the judicial system as a platform to force change” (Marshall 2019). This shows the group’s intention to force a change of discourse by utilising existing avenues of control against the very government using them to control us.

If we read this through the eyes of Foucault, this very suggestion exists because of the way discourses are starting to overlap; the climate change debate has become a political issue. According to Foucault:

Resistance is always found where discourses overlap and clash because discourses work to enact power and power and resistance are always intertwined: where there is power, there is resistance and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (1979, p.95).

An example of this is the way negative articles in the media are functioning to make this discourse accessible to everyone. While journalistic deception, that is the act of “communicating messages verbally (a lie) or nonverbally through the withholding of information” (Elliot and Culver as cited in Rubin et al 2015, p.1) does exist, even articles against climate change still use the terminology of the new discourse, giving it power: words like “carbon neutral, carbon trading, carbon pollution, carbon footprint, climate action” (Fleming 2010, p.12) and so on. According to Kress, “the ability to create new names, new categories, is therefore one with powerful consequences” (1985, p.61). The participatory nature of web 2.0 (Jenkins 2017) makes the sharing of this new discourse faster than we've seen in previous generations.

A moment of rapid change recently, has been the Australian government's defence of coal businesses and, therefore, their (and our) economic stablility (see Murphy 2017). However, with the recent Australian fires, Greg Jericho explains that “five months ago they could still get away with wheeling out the 'now is not the time' line” (2020), however, that is no longer satisfactory for many media consumers (Jericho 2020). “Despite this, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morisson has backed government policy and outright said “You cannot link any individual single emissions reduction policy of a country [to climate change] – whether it’s Australia or anyone else” (Jericho 2020). Meanwhile, in December 2019, Sarah Martin reported that “Australia is the worst-performing country on climate change policy, according to a new international ranking of 57 countries” (2019).

According to the government, a lot of fake news surrounding the Extinction Rebellion focuses on them promoting a biased and exaggerated opinion on climate change (Grierson, Dodd and Walker 2020). This opinion should not be so easily dismissed as there is some validity to it. Morgan et al point out that “no discourse can ever be neutral; it is always involved in circulating and promoting one form of knowledge, of values, of ways being and living over another; it is involved therefore in promoting the interests of a particular social group” (1996, p.71).

Extinction Rebellion is one of many different groups advocating for climate change, with each of these groups having different approaches to resistance;

“science may typically construct climate change as physical changes in the composition of gases in the atmosphere (Flannery 2005); while agriculture commonly constructs climate change as the impacts on weather and growing conditions.” (Fleming 2010,p.13).

Each group promotes the issues that are of the most importance to them (Fleming 2010, 13), which sometimes results in conflict over “what the knowledge and facts of climate change are and who has the power to produce them” (Fleming 2010, p.13). These differing disources alter the facts about what climate change is and what should be done (Darier 1999). This makes it easier for us to believe no one, as we are bombarded by different sets of information. Despite this “climate change is more prevalent in the public consciousness than ever, receiving attention from almost all social arenas: academia, agriculture, consumer markets, education, politics, religion, science and the media” (Fleming 2010, p.13). All of these sources, regardless of the message, are functions to create an alternative discourse to that presented by our government; “with resistance comes the possibility of reconstruction and change because resistance creates alternatives to the dominant discourses in society” (Fleming 2010, p.15).

Another example of resistance through disruption is Greta Thunberg. Thunberg openly resists biopolitical systems, by not attending school until action is taken on climate change. Thunberg's refusal to participate in the system is one of “the means through which individuals change social processes and structures and build alternatives” (Sage 2007, p.4707). Her use of social media to promote her cause has also seen a wave of school protests around the world. However, this agency demonstrated by Thunberg isn’t possible without “access to resisting discourses that demonstrate how resistance at the level of discourse is positive and leads to agency and change (Darier 1999; Hardy et al 2000; Gatenby and Hume 2004)” (Fleming 2014, p.6). In other words, we need the more restrictive discourses to compare ourselves to.

Shelley Jackson’s work of electronic literature, Snow metaphoritcally considers resistance, telling the story of a girl who cries snowflakes. Starting on the 22nd of January 2014, Jackson posts one word at a time at @snowshelleyjackson, which written in snow using sans-serif font. Through this work, Jackson interrogates “relations among digital textuality, visual culture, narrative form, media infrastructure, global warming, and geologic time” (Benzon 2019, p.70). As each word is written in snow, it is temporary and vanishing, emphasising the “tension between the meaning of the word and its physical presence”(Jackson as cited in Flood 2014).