Sigh, environmentalists

So an environmentalist group called Replanet has decided the Ukraine war is the perfect opportunity for advancing their agenda (I have some doubts about their ethics here) and has put out a report advocating #SwitchOffPutin (or #switchoffputin as they had it because they're completely unaware Camel Case is better for accessibility*).

Their plan calls for cutting European dependence on Russian fuel immediately by banning intra-European flights**, switching on all the mothballed nuke plants, limiting all households to a fixed amount of gas usage, and banning cars from city centres.

You can probably imagined I immediately spotted a problem with the last two from the disability standpoint. For the first one with disabled people in general having higher energy usage, especially in Northern European countries, and with some disabled people being absolutely dependent on having their house at a fixed temperature because they can't thermoregulate, and for the second one because it assumes public transport is 1) accessible and 2) can get you close enough to your destination, which is optimistic even in the most access-friendly European cities because for some disabled people close enough to your destination is going to be within 100m, while if it's up a hill and you can't park outside, forget it.

So I tweeted, and I got a response, which was basically "Whoops, good point. This is an emergency, we hoped governments would regulate and make exceptions, just like with Covid***"

Me: So why doesn't your report say that? It would only need a sentence. You forgot about us didn't you?

Them: You're very passionate, why not join us as a volunteer and make sure our next report has a clue about disability

Me: Bugger off, I'm not doing your accessibility audits for free.

* I admit I needed reminding, I tend to do Camel Case more often than not, but do forget when I'm annoyed

** You can tell here that it's an environmental agenda rather than an anti-Putin agenda because it took me 30 seconds to confirm from multiple sources that European AvGas consumption is mainly fueled from the Middle East and India.

*** Another disabled person hopped in on that, pointing out the Covid regs often threw disabled people to the wolves, or were deliberately mis-used to limit access (they're from York, which used the Covid regs to ban disabled parking in the city centre).