This evening, over 20 protestors from Extinction Rebellion (XR) held up rush-hour traffic for ten minutes at a set of traffic lights on Queen’s Road.

They set up posters on either side of the road depicting a variety of endangered animals, captioned with: “Act now, my time is running out.” Others standing in the road held signs reading “Carbon Zero 2025.”

One protester with a megaphone led a chant to the song ‘My Bonnie lies over the Ocean’ with the lyrics “When Cambridge lies under the ocean… We’ll take climate change seriously.”

As the protest took place, cyclists continued to cross between the set traffic lights, forming a constant stream between the queue of cars and the line of protesters. One activist said that this had been the protesters’ intention when choosing a location: to foreground to motorists the alternative of cycling in Cambridge.

Many of the drivers caught up in the traffic-jam kept their engines on for the full ten minutes, something that appeared to aggravate certain protestors. In the stand-off between the protestors and the drivers, one onlooker stated: “There was some supportive beeping and some plaintive beeping.”

Extinction Rebellion have been active in Cambridge, protesting Trinity’s investment in fossil fuels in June this year and Andrew Wheeler’s appearance at the Union in May.