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Europe’s Warmest Winter | TRT World
“The next step has to be we start to take leadership into our own hands… The moderate flank stands for mass action on climate, action that will consist largely in “doing” what needs to be done in response to this crisis. We all now know that there IS a crisis, and that Government are not acting adequately on it. It’s time for us to do what is necessary, together, from the ground up, to make our communities resilient, and to make our workplaces and businesses and progressions truly climate-positive.” – Rupert Read Excerpt courtesy of TRT WORLD. Watch the full interview here.
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Why Climate Breakdown Matters
Why Climate Breakdown Matters is a book written by Rupert Read and published by Bloomsbury. Climate change and the destruction of the earth is the most urgent issue of our time. We are hurtling towards the end of civilisation as we know it. With an unflinching honest approach, Rupert Read asks us to face up to the fate of the planet. This is a book for anyone who wants their philosophy to deal with reality and their climate concern to be more than a displacement activity. As people come together to mourn the loss of the planet, we have the opportunity to create a grounded, hopeful response. This meaningful hopefulness…
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The failed ideology of Davos
This week, Davos, Switzerland is hosting a networking event themed around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of 17 ambitious UN targets around poverty, health, education, governance and environment. The event is associated with ‘The World Economic Forum’ (WEF) which says it is ‘committed to improving the state of the world’. And it is true that some good things can come out of Davos. When I attended on behalf of Extinction Rebellion to seek to catalyse real change, in 2020, it was clear that some of the super privileged were buckling under the pressure exerted by us and (especially) by Greta and the school climate strikers. This year, an…
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Rupert Read & Anthea Lawson: Is the frame of ‘activism’ itself a barrier to mass climate action?
Rupert Read and Anthea Lawson discuss the role of activism in climate action. An edited transcript with references is available to read here
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Stop saying ‘Climate emergency!’? (Until, collectively, we mean it?)
The IPCC’s two scariest-yet reports earlier this year made headlines worldwide… for about 24 hours. The world’s front pages screamed of our terrifying civilisational crisis, the likelihood of climate-driven collapse. For about 24 hours. Then they flicked back to business-as-usual: Ukraine, cost-of-living (both of course actually deeply-climate stories), Will Smith punching someone… Emergency? What emergency? The usual response to this dire situation among climate activists and a gradually increasing number of scientists is to double down. To insist still more vocally that this is an emergency and so must be responded to as one. In this piece, we ask some uncomfortable questions about this response. In the context of ongoing…
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Will the passing of 1.5 degrees see the end of cruel optimism?
‘The public gets what the public wants’ sang a young Paul Weller on the 1979 hit Going Underground. It’s a lyric that doubles as our one-line summary of this week’s major report by the world’s leading climate scientists. In the third installment of its Sixth Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) thundered that it’s “Now or never” to stave off climate disaster. Yet when it came to how the world might respond, the same IPCC authors were prevented from giving anything like equal voice as to why previous warnings have gone unheeded. In the politically charged process of producing the report’s summary, all mentions of “vested interests” (the fossil fuel industry…
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Deep Adaptation, Deep Transformation, or both?
Rupert Read and Jeremy Lent discuss Deep Adaptation and Deep Transformation responses to climate breakdown.
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Into the light: on exiting not just the figurative but the literal cave…
“You ‘green types’ want us all to go back to living in caves…” If I had a pound for every time I have heard this… Well, let’s just say, I could afford a very big cave indeed. Although, of course, as a ‘green type’ sitting inside our ‘caves’, as our homes seem to have become, is the last thing I actually want – especially during a pandemic when it was much safer to be outside, as government regulations reflected to some extent. However, I believe we could have gone much further during the last couple of years and we would have benefited so much from doing so. By failing to…
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Will the conflict in Ukraine shift us to a post-fossil world?
The shocking onset of the crisis in Ukraine – with Russia’s criminal, murderous invasion – has shown dramatically the downside of depending upon petro-states to keep us warm. While the climate crisis will, of course, over time sweep everything that we hold dear away, unless we address it with far more seriousness than we yet have. We can address these two crises of our time simultaneously by investing right now in a massive expansion of green energy and energy efficiency (including, crucially, insulation). We need to make this switch to a significant degree before next winter. That is when Putin will potentially have the West over a barrel, if it…
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To prevent climate catastrophe, abandon the idea we can limit overheating to 1.5C
If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. Obi-Wan Kenobi knew the score. Sometimes, to win, you have first to lose. Big. And I can’t help but think if we adopted his same philosophy when it comes to the dream of keeping global overheating to a maximum of 1.5C, we might actually achieve what, at the moment, seems impossible: saving civilisation. Today, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a new report on adapting to the damage already done by climate change. It says its impact will be more severe than initially predicted. Crucially, it says if we reach 2C of over-heating, there…
