Writings
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Will disruptive action help save the planet?
Is there any point throwing soup at a Van Gogh painting and mashed potato at a Monet? Two activists give their views
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“Adversity is the first path to truth”: How climate grief could be the making of us
This article was first published on ABC Religion and Ethics, here. Gone is the age of natural disasters. The climate disasters of today are of a profoundly unnatural character. They are the product of pumping the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide, methane, and a litany of other greenhouse gases. The dire wildfires, droughts, and flash flooding we have seen in the past few years are only a taste of things to come. When confronted with the sobering reality of climate breakdown, it is tempting to give in to one of two impulses. On the one hand, there is the allure of wishful thinking, naïve optimism, and New Age (toxic) positivity.…
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Is “longtermism” the cure or the sickness?
This article was first published by ABC Religion and Ethics here. Central to my work in recent years has been an anguished concern that our species and our political and economic systems are dangerously short-termist. I contend that we need to become long-termist. We need to practice precaution, looking before we leap. We need to plan for the seventh — and, indeed, the seven-hundred-and-seventy-seventh — generation. And so we need to overcome the tendencies of politicians to look no further than the next election (or even the next news cycle), of companies to look no further than the next quarterly report, and increasingly of Stock Market investors to look no…
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Who Voted For This, Liz?
On 6 September, Liz Truss officially became the Prime Minister, having won the Conservative leadership election that followed Boris Johnson’s resignation. Since then, her administration has pushed through extremely radical, untested, and damaging policies that were not included in the 2019 manifesto. Truss of course did not become Prime Minister at a general election. She doesn’t have millions of supporters around the country. She won the Conservative Leadership bid with 81,326 votes. Just 81,326 in this country have cast a vote for Truss. That’s not even enough people to fill Twickenham and represents 0.12% of the population. We have to ask ourselves; who voted for this? By what authority is…
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Rupert Read’s letter to Peter Edwards of the GWPF
Dear Professor Edwards, I am writing to you in regards to your position as a trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. As you will know Steve Baker recently left that role and I am hoping to persuade you to also step down. I am an associate professor, working at a university. My field is philosophy although I have been campaigning on environmental issues for most of my life and, in recent times, I have been able to combine the two. I see you worked for many years as a chemist in the energy sector. It must have been unimaginable to you when you started your career that renewable energy would…
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Rupert Read talks Green Party strategy at the Association of Green Councillors | Full Q&A
Rupert Read’s plenary address to the Association of Green Councillors, laying out the GreensCAN strategy, beginning in full truth-telling, for how the Green Party could leverage real and perhaps rapid change.
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Climate change activism is no longer enough – it’s time to become ‘doists’
It’s too late to wait for governments – we need to start acting, in the communities where we live, in the places where we work, to make ourselves resilient
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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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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…