Inside Extinction Rebellion

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: And it's becoming clear, I think, if you live in the UK, that this is not an issue among many. This is the defining context of every issue. If you undermine your agricultural system so everyone can't eat food, you don't have other issues. Nothing else matters. [00:00:30] Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Climate Emergency Forum. I'm Herb Simmons, author of A Climate Vocabulary of the Future, and I will be your host today. Most of us have heard of the British Climate Group, now International Climate Group, Extinction Rebellion. We're absolutely thrilled today to have with us one of the co-founders, Claire Farrell. Claire, you are a climate activist. You've also been a, and maybe you still are, a fashion and other designer and a strategist. With a professional background in the UK fashion industry, you've taught and worked in fashion ethics and sustainability for over a decade. Drawing on your creative expertise, you played a key role in shaping XR from its beginnings in 2018, coordinating the creative team that developed the movement's name, its identity, and its messaging. You've also served as a spokesperson and as co-editor of the best-selling This Is Not a Drill, an Extinction Rebellion handbook. You've long practiced nonviolent civil disobedience, and you remain an outspoken advocate for urgent systemic change, which is why you're in the right place here at the Climate Emergency Forum. You currently work as a strategist with absurd intelligence, and you write on themes of democratic renewal and collective action. As always, we invite our viewers to stay to the end when I'll be presenting what we call the Climate Three, three of the more important climate stories of the past week, each guaranteed to be presented in one minute or less. Please subscribe to our channel, like this program, leave your comments, your questions, and your suggestions for future programs below. Visit our website at climateemergencyforum.org, and listen to our new feature, our podcasts. Joining us today also is our regular panelist, Dr. Peter Carter from British Columbia. Peter, you are the founder of the Climate Emergency Institute. So welcome, Claire. Thanks so much for joining us there. So maybe you can just start by telling us a bit about how XR was founded, what its sort of arc has been, how it's evolved over the past decade, and where it is today. [00:02:51] Speaker 1: I think for everyone, it begins in a different place, because there was quite a lot of us who got it going. For me, it begins with iterating testing out civil disobedience tactics with Roger. [00:03:01] Speaker 2: That's Roger Howell. [00:03:03] Speaker 1: We were experimenting with different campaign tactics strategies through, I think, maybe 2016, 2017, and we launched XR in 2018. At the same time as the work I was involved in, there was a huge amount of work going on elsewhere, particularly with a group called Rising Up, which was a network of decentralized activists who were interested in using non-violent civil disobedience to try to get more quick and urgent social change across many things, social justice issues and environmental issues. And so there really was a sort of pre-connected up kind of network of people. The mobilization approach that we took to starting Extinction Rebellion involved lots of people giving these talks, inviting people to sign up collectively to go and take action, and to form local groups. So when we launched, people, I think, felt that it came out of nowhere, but it didn't. It came out of quite a long tale of organizing, planning, trying to build the conditions where you could launch a rebellion against the state, which is what it was. It wasn't really supposed to be designed to become some sort of social movement that marched in the streets and told everybody what to think. But it was supposed to take a more radical approach, I guess, to people being willing to give up their liberty, go in a police cell for overnight or whatever, people willing to face jail time if necessary to get the urgency across. And I, you know, since then, obviously, the kind of concept of it flew around the world. And that was partly because it was, I think, the timing. There was a massive heat wave in Europe in 2018. David Attenborough started saying different things. There was a 1.5 special report. There was lots of stuff that kind of contributed to the conditions as well. The school strikes movement started. We didn't start that. It was very, very helpful. So there was a lot of sort of converging, lucky things that occurred. And at the same time, yeah, XR was relatively well designed from a strategic perspective. So it was a happy combination of things. And plus the right people, because, you know, I've reflected on the fact that you have to be naive enough, mad enough, whatever, enough to agree as a small group, that that is what you're going to do. Because at the time, people were like, you can't do that. Nobody will do that. And you can't be, you know, don't think that you're like the suffragettes because you can't be. And don't think that you're going to do whatever because you can't. And we did have mass participation in nonviolent direct action, which basically everybody had said we couldn't do. So, you know, something about it worked really well. And it carried itself then around the world. We didn't push it to go to different countries. It was picked up by people who just wanted to do it. And they said, we have all the stuff and we'd designed it all to give away so people could. So within, I think, like a year and a half, there was a presence on every continent. Well, it still feels mind blowing to me to look back on. [00:05:53] Speaker 2: You reached, is it fair to say, kind of a, I don't know if I should use the word, a high point, maybe around 2019, 2020, before the pandemic, the British Parliament passed the climate emergency. You shut down London for days at a time. Everybody was talking about XR positively and negatively. And you really seemed to capture the kind of gestalt of the era, if you will. Talk what that was like and sort of what came after that. [00:06:19] Speaker 1: It went much quicker than I expected. You know, we used to talk about the Overton window. In our talks, we go shift the Overton window. We're going to do that on at least two fronts. One, we're going to shift it on like how bad the problem is, how urgent the issue is. We're going to move what's acceptable. And two, we're going to move what's acceptable in terms of what we should be doing. Like what is commensurate with something like that, if you're guaranteed to be on a course for collapse and nobody's admitting it. And then if people think the most they can do is click on something on an online petition and give money to Greenpeace, then nobody's doing anything realistic. And so a lot of people, I think, felt a relief that they were invited to do something that was more realistic, you know. So there were people, obviously, who were ready to receive that invitation and went, thank God someone wants to sit in a circle and talk about breakdown. Thank God somebody wants to talk about positive reinforcing mechanisms and like the collapse of biophysical systems and human systems, because no one's admitting how bad this is. And so for a lot of people who knew and had been paying attention for years, it was a complete sort of relief. And then I think because nobody saw it coming and because we got the book deal with Penguin, we were in the windows of mainstream bookshop chains. And actually, because everybody in Britain was absolutely sick of hearing about Brexit. So we gave everyone something else to talk about, right? Which was, I mean, we were trapped in absolute bullshit of like, you can't escape from this circular conversation about Brexit. So actually, I know a lot of journalists would just found us a relief, actually, to give them something else in the political space that was like, totally something different. And concerned journalists who said, keep doing what you're doing, because you make me able to put this on my news channel, which I can't get my editor to agree to, unless you're doing something as audacious as what you are doing, right? So there was a sort of requirement for some of the people who wanted to be better at their job in meaning making or narrative storytelling, news, whatever. They needed a thing to make it salient, to make it possible for them to report on it, because otherwise it's not news. It's just more dirge of like the same thing that we've been hearing for 30 years and cares because no one's doing anything about it. And it's not really happening yet, and no one cares. So there was all of this stuff that I think made it possible to be sort of quite mainstream. And also, there was a real mixed feeling about it on the ground, and a lot of positive response from people on the street. So you would shut down Oxford Circus, which is like, you know, it's a crossroads in a shopping area of central London. And it's like the most busy, iconic sort of beating heart of consumerism and retail. And it was shut, and it had a big boat parked in the middle of it. And there were hippies everywhere, basically, you know, like sleeping in tents and lying on the road with signs and people giving talks and doing playing gigs on a little stage. So a lot of people were going, oh, you're in the way. But I would say, like, at that time, an equal number of people were saying, thank God you're here. I'm so worried about this, and it seems like everyone's ignoring it. And I'm so relieved. Like, thank God, thank God. You know, there was tons of that. It was quite a balanced reception, actually, the way that it was put together. And that was also, you know, the devil's in the detail. You can either do a good job of shutting down a capital city, or you can do a bad job, and it turns into public disorder and chaos. And people don't like that. But they do like it if you do a good job of it, and you put up a skate ramp, and you talk to people, you give away free food. You know, we had people who literally tapped the water mains in the pavement and put a kitchen sink on top of it. And we had kitchens that were, like, cooking and giving away free food. So if you do it like that, then people will say, wow, you know, you've done such a smart job of it, and we like you for doing that. 2019 was, like, the happy time. That was the honeymoon time. From then on, it became much more difficult because of the police and the state response. And after that, then, obviously, you have pandemic as well. So you get kind of clobbered by the state. Global strategies against us, which runs through the Atlas Think Tank Network, for sure. Policy exchange, the public court laws that have gone in Britain on similar moves in other places. And now where we sit today is obviously where pretty much any effective resistance in the UK is extremely difficult to pull off and carries very, very grave potential sentencing for people. And increasingly, particularly with Palestine, I'm describing the global strategy against the climate movement and against the Palestine movement, which gets sort of thrown in together as a strategy called, if I don't like you, I will get you recategorized as a terrorist. Because if you can recategorize your opponent as a terrorist, you destroy their political life. They can't exist, basically. They can't be funded. They can't be spoken to. They can get very big prison sentences. And you can see what's unfolding in the States with those people who've been nailed for the Prairieland case for resisting ICE. So we can see the direction of travel here in America, in Germany, in Australia. You can see where these things got reached, and you can tell that it's a coordinated effort. The only thing that surprised me about it, I guess, was how long it took, because I do think that it was quite slow. But if your strategy is to change legislation, I guess it takes some time. [00:11:52] Speaker 2: And we're out of time. That's the little detail behind all of this. And, of course, that was part of your whole effort. I mean, you wanted to decarbonize, I think, by 2025. You had these aggressive goals that really inspired people all over the world. I'm sure Peter is eager to say hello and to ask you a question and make a comment. So let me turn the floor over to you, Peter. [00:12:13] Speaker 3: You're absolutely right. You remind me that 2018 was a really big turning point. And I do want to say that there should be World's Got Talent Climate Intelligence Award. And if there were, you would be its superstar. OK, so I just wanted to mention that. So what I want to ask you about is unprecedented over and over heatwaves and wildfires, including drought in Europe, but also a little bit more unusually in the UK, particularly in England. I'd like to hear what is the response in England to this from the people that are supposed to be responsible? [00:12:53] Speaker 1: Well, I think that the majority of people who are in charge of the media are quietly admitting that it's much worse than they thought, rather than what I think would be helpful, which would be for them to come out and say, oh, my God, actually, we've been really unhelpful. Now there's only one thing that we need to focus on, and that is how we collectively do the best that we can to decarbonise and to tackle this crisis, like for the greater good. Rather than doing that and admitting that they've actually been an obstruction, they're all sitting there going, oh, my God, it's so scary, isn't it? And, you know, we knew this was going to happen. And, oh, isn't it frightening? Oh, Kevin Anderson says it's going to cause collapse. Oh, my goodness, really? And there's no way out, you know? And it's like you are literally the people who sat there and took the piss out of people like me and told us that we shouldn't wear clothes, practically, because they're made out of material. I mean, it was, you know, people going, oh, you've got furniture, so you've got a TV, so you're a hypocrite. Those people, I would really love it if they would apologise, because I think everyone also needs to be helped to take the necessary emotional steps of admitting what's going on here, which is like of mythic kind of level seriousness. And it's like an endless tragedy that we now live in. But then you've got a new prime minister here who has basically said, like, well, I don't think he said anything about climate. And today called a COBRA meeting, so an emergency government meeting about extreme heat. People are complaining about the lack of preparedness. Or you're seeing newspaper article today about how 20 people out of more than 6,500 staff at our Department for Environment work on adaptation, work on climate adaptation. So that's 20 out of 6,600 staff who are working to try and make us prepared. So, you know, we're famously not prepared. Some of that's coming to light now, like, in terms of the proportional lack of work that's going on in that space. And everything's on fire. Like, Scotland is on fire. If Scotland is on fire, you have made the world different, you know what I mean? So Scotland's not an on-fire kind of place. I've been phoning around people basically this week saying, what do we need to do? Because tomorrow is going to be, like, over 30 degrees here at 8 p.m. or something, right? So, I mean, it is unbelievably hot. England is entirely built to survive the cold. Everything is made to try and sort of keep us warm in the winter. And we've got, like, very, very poor housing stock anyway in general. The quality is bad. The new things are bad. The old things are old. It's beginning some conversations about infrastructure and stuff, but it sort of ends there. And it's a bit like when there's a flood and people complain about the fact the drainage system isn't very good. And it's like, yeah, but, guys, there's, like, there are other causes going on. So we're still not seeing the joined-up public conversation that people need to see, which is, like, this has been caused practically on purpose by people deciding that they will drag you and your children kicking and screaming into this future and imprison anyone who kicks up a fuss. They've made sure that this happens. And the establishment is literally still doubling on silencing the most informed citizens who are basically the climate movement. I'm asking myself, what's the brief that we need to write to ourselves? Because a lot of us are doing work on community organizing. A lot of us are doing work on adaptation, preparation. You know, you have to do everything all at once. So how can we prepare and try to mitigate and try to do adaptation and also try and bring – I've been bridge-building with the cost of living movement here. I've been bridge-building with the anti-racism movement here. Like, how do we pull much more people together? But I still think, like, in terms of having an embodied emotional presence to this moment is kind of lacking. And that's one of the invitational sort of differences with XR was that it was about having feelings. So, yes, we did a good job of people, you know, put together a good package of scientific communication. But it came with emotional maturity and asking people to, like, feel how it feels and to do that together and to support each other to do that. I know that a lot of people are really struggling right now in the UK because there is no visibility of a movement. And some commentators are literally sitting around going, well, why is there no climate movement? That's strange. Where are they? And it's like, well, most of you want one now, but you didn't help then. And you have to admit that, like, it's a hell of a lot harder for people to organize now. I feel stressed and quite upset. I'm being very polite about that. I've been using a lot worse words in private. [00:17:51] Speaker 3: I read your article in The Ecologist. So I'm glad to see you're angry. That's great. So please feel free to be as angry as you want to be. I just want to comment on the availability of how bad things are in data. So I noticed that in Birmingham, in the middle of England, the temperature is 11.6 degrees C above average. I mean, these are absolutely astounding temperature differences. And France, 12.1 degrees C above average. But this is repeating what was happening last month. You know, so we have had this before. Now Europe is being hit over and over and over as a result of what you've described as the climate denial that runs through all of our so-called leadership. And, of course, as a result of the dam fossil fuel industry and their denial campaign that has never been stronger than today. Tell us a little bit more about the fires in the UK. [00:18:57] Speaker 1: Yeah, well, there's been hundreds. A few years ago, when we had 40 degrees in the UK for the first time ever, the fire service was stretched. I think people were saying it's, you know, to a level that is unparalleled since the Second World War for, like, public services to be stretched in terms of the scale of fire. I don't know what the comparison is for this year in that sense. Like, if there's anything that you can stack it up against. It just seems that fires keep on starting and that because we don't have fires here, it's not Australia, right? We're not used to it. We don't think about it. People don't plan things with wildfire in mind. We also, I think, don't really have any planes or helicopters that are specifically, like, state-owned infrastructure to deal with them. So some family of mine were displaced by a fire and the messaging that I heard was basically that it could have been stopped quite quickly had there been some equipment on hand to go there and deal with it fast. But the response time is slow because you have to hire a private piece of infrastructure that is not state-owned or run and get it from maybe somewhere far away to go there and then to go and get seawater, perhaps, and bring it over and drop it on. So I think it's a big wake-up call for the British public to think that we are going to get this much heat. And, of course, the consistent sort of commentary that I think is perhaps not totally accurate but probably helpful for people to think anyway is people saying this is the coolest summer of the rest of your life. I don't think every summer is necessarily going to be the same as this, but I do think next year is going to be dreadful. Having two years in a row like this, at least, I think is going to scare the shit out of people because they sort of thought they were fine. And whether they were on the sort of liberal left where they were saying, you know, rich people won't be so affected and we should care about justice in the global south. So they were all thinking in the back of their minds, I think, actually, it's a justice issue, but also I kind of think I'm okay. Like, whilst they were going, I'm for justice, it's like, I'm not sure that they really believed that the unbelievable was going to come to their doorstep very, very soon. And it is here. And then on the other side, it's like become impossible to argue that it doesn't exist. So even the telegraph, which is basically a climate denial piece of machinery that works in favour of capital, even that newspaper has started to go, yeah, but it is real, isn't it? And it's like, you know, the worldview of the Conservatives who have refused to admit that this problem even exists, you know, their political project is completely undermined by the fact that it does exist. It's really fad and it's going to destroy our agriculture and it's going to look like people can see how it would take down your economy. They're going to see that this year and then they're going to go, oh, dear, actually turns out undermining the potential for an economy to exist at all is actually a problem for conservatism. You know, you've got this sort of disbelief for a variety of different reasons that's just been punctured across the spectrum. And I don't really know how people are going to respond. Most people are going, oh, we need more planes or worker strikes. They're just going to say we want air con. They're not going to say we're on strike and by the way, we know whose fault it is because it has it should really go beyond a worker's struggle and to a systemic level where you say this is systemically bad. It's been made systemically bad on purpose by specific mechanisms. And we have to go beyond the air conditioning to that. Struggling to encourage people to sort of hold the bigger picture in mind is really difficult, especially because I do think people are in a bit of shock. And then there's a lot of deflection and change the subject. Don't get too upset. I suppose that's why I sort of feel like there's some emotional work to do with people and I don't quite know what it is or how to do it. [00:23:17] Speaker 3: My last little question, Claire, would be to pick you up on you mentioned people getting scared of shit. OK, that has been intentionally prevented for decades and decades by both the environmental community and the scientific community. Who have been united in saying that's the last thing we can do because that will make people depressed. We don't want to do that. The time has come, right? The reality is that this is more scary than anything. I mean, let's face it. My final point would be that one of the things that Extinction Rebellion started off with, I remember, was that the public was not being told the truth. Not being told how bad it was or how bad it was going to be. Your movement has done a great service in that regard. So thank you. [00:24:05] Speaker 1: Thanks, Peter. I mean, I think the thing for me, though, is that we went around saying all of the things about where this would all lead and compound impacts and cascading effects and potential collapse dynamics, all of this stuff. And really feel most people were not really capable of hearing that, if you see what I mean. And now the interview that Kevin Anderson has just done with Novara Media here is going to get him an enormous amount more exposure than his message would have got even during the peak of Extinction Rebellion success, I think. Because actually, that was a time when mostly the movement was listening and perhaps now is a time when the broadcaster speaking in a way that's actually being heard a little bit more by greater numbers of the public because it's so salient. It's so real. The timing is like they're commenting on a heat wave. So then that's where you've got like this great big sort of purchase. What I'm also concerned about is I know that when it cools down over the winter, everyone's going to talk about other shit. [00:25:12] Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's where you need the leadership to come in, though. You've got a new prime minister, theoretically not beholden to anyone, maybe a naive thing to say to some degree. I always thought, well, where's our Churchill when you need him? And it seems to me you've got that opportunity. And I also wanted to ask you your views about an effort and an event that occurred a few months ago, the National Emergency Briefing. We had on Nick Aldridge on our program not long after that briefing. Do you see that as a promising venue? They've since done the film and they're trying to get government to sponsor a briefing. They're moving on. Obviously, it's a very different approach than XR took in the past. But is it complimentary and really be curious your perspective? [00:25:55] Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it is. It's really welcome as far as I'm concerned. But it has been criticized by some people for reinforcing the frame of like we just need power to act in a way that I think is very clear. Power is not going to act. It's not going to turn itself around and respond in the way that needs to be done. You know, there is a question about whether or not this reinforces the dynamic of us saying, please, can you change for us? Please, can you do it for us? That said, I also think that what's kind of impressive about what they did, but nobody else seems to have talked about, is that this is the people delivering the capacity that the state should have in a way which is very, very mature and actually looks extremely grown up and sophisticated. And so if the government is missing in action and not going to pay attention to this in the way that it should and the public have to create the leadership that they should be doing, then I think it offers us a bridge to go from that kind of despairing position of like, what do you do if you can't use state intervention to deal with this crisis? There's only so much you can do from the bottom up, and you do need a bridge into systemic stuff. How on earth that gets done with an ignorant class of politicians who, half of whom don't understand what's happening at all, and the people who do are like feeling that they can't do or they don't know or the party won't let them say what they want to really say about it, whatever. You've got this sort of need, I think, to look at the briefings and then think about where next, basically. And I do think that Chris Packham recently is on this issue, is more of a statesman than anybody who's elected pretty much, you know, like there are some decent MPs out there, but there's not very many. And there's not very many that are good on this topic. There are some that I think are quite good MPs, and they're still not good on this. And it's becoming clear, I think, if you live in the UK, that this is not an issue among many. This is the defining context of every issue. Nobody wanted to do that in the past because they were going, don't upset the social justice people by saying this is more important. Don't upset the so-and-so people who have a campaign on whatever thing because you can't say this is the most important thing. If it is, people are admitting that now because if you undermine your agricultural system so everyone can't eat food, you don't have other issues. Nothing else matters. I feel like the emergency briefing has sort of offered us some steps towards trying to work out what do we do to stand in for the state when it's not actually going to help. So I don't want it to fixate for too long on if only the government backed this and put it on TV, then things would change because no, no, no, that won't change. It will be very helpful, but it won't be the change we need. The change we need is the doing of the change that we need. Exactly. It remains very challenging to think about how you do that. [00:28:57] Speaker 2: I want to segue. I was personally so impressed and surprised in the most positive sort of way when I came across the piece that you and Roger Hallam and Gail Bradbrook wrote in 2023. I have it in front of me now called Telling the Truth So We Can Learn From Mistakes, Reflections Five Years On. And I've been involved in the movement for a decade, and I could probably spend two hours talking about all the mistakes I have made, but I have rarely seen people put it in writing. And as frankly and as honestly as you have, and with your indulgence, I'm just going to read a quick quote from a sentence or two. As you say here, you and your colleagues, telling the truth means ready to accept that you have been led astray, got things wrong, and so you have to modify your views. And then you said, we got something wrong, we were misled, so we misled you. And then you said, and I thought this was particularly interesting, for years we were moderated and mood-splained by experts from narrow disciplines who demanded we change our press releases, our lectures, and play down the reality and potential speed of catastrophic consequences. And the last thing I'm going to read is a welcome that you make here, and you say, we would welcome any career climatologists, academics, and journalists who undermined our communications in public to make amends, especially as they have influenced attitudes among those who judge us. So looking back on what you and Roger and Gail wrote at that point, first of all, the obvious question, have any career climatologists, academics, and journalists taken the bait, Claire? And how would you characterize, looking back three years or thereabouts, from when you wrote that, what impact that might have had? [00:30:48] Speaker 1: Nobody's contacted me to say sorry. I understand that that made some impact. It's interesting to me because at the time I was really struggling to get the movement to publish it. So this is like quite a challenge, right? If you're in a social movement like Extinction Rebellion, if you're in that work, you often don't have like command and control structures. You can't just tell people what to think, which is good, but also when you get an urgent update, like the peer review of James Hansen's paper on aerosols, you can't easily tell the movement to rearrange its kind of conceptual kind of working context, which is what I wanted them to do. I wanted to say to the movement, look, now we live in a different reality because before people said, don't talk about that because there's not enough data. Don't talk about that because we don't really understand aerosols, we don't really understand clouds, we don't really understand lots of this stuff with enough depth to be able to say something sure, so we'd rather leave it out, which is obviously what the scientific community had been largely doing with the aerosols issue, right? And we felt like that was a game changer because if it's the number two forcing mechanism in the entire world system, that is not what I was campaigning on prior to that paper. So the peer review for me was the green light to go and say, this is not what we thought we were dealing with, because I thought it was potentially a bit bad, but I didn't think it was as bad as it clearly is, right? And when you see what's going on because of the IMO shipping fuel changes and blah, blah, blah, I think it's very clear that this is an issue at the top of the list of issues, not one among many about carbon emissions and whatever else is happening to the planet. And it opens up so much potential for us to look at the problem differently, which we urgently need, because people are sick of looking at something that is just about carbon, and just about mitigation and just about the fact that you can't stop an industry, which people have been trying and trying and trying to stop for decades. And it evades people, and it evades people, and it's got too much money, and it's extremely powerful, and everything is tied up around it. People are tired of that story. So if you have a chance to talk about something that opens other possible lenses to look at the problem, that's also helpful to, like, offer us some space for more creativity. But for me, it was like an opportunity to hit a new alarm button and say, the nature of this problem is not what we originally quite thought, and it's not what people have been discussing, I don't think. And therefore, maybe we should have some big thinking about that. And the movement is very busy and doing all this different stuff, and it was a bit of a struggle to get them to pay attention to it, because for them, it was just more bad news. And I was like, it's not just more bad news, it's big news. Like, on the news coming at you, this is very, very, very big. The other things are like pieces of news, and this is like context-changing news. [00:33:49] Speaker 2: Just to clarify for our viewers, what we're talking about is the fact that the air pollution, the aerosols we put up, have basically been a cooling influence on the climate. So to the degree to which we remove those, as shipping regulations did in 2020, or as air pollution efforts do, we are at the same time raising temperatures. And that's what Jim Hansen has talked about, the Faustian bargain. And it's one that we haven't been able to square away, but I also appreciated in this article that you mentioned efforts such as marine cloud brightening, looking at the oceans, looking at ecological restoration, going beyond carbon. And just as you said, something we at Climate Emergency Forum spend a lot of time talking about, trying to educate our viewers on the potentials of these other approaches, these other dimensions, not in lieu of emission reduction, certainly, but in addition to it. Paul Beckwith, who's not with us today, talks about the three-legged bar stool. I talk about the climate triad, emission reductions, carbon removal, and what I call direct climate cooling. And we need a kind of symphony of all three of them working as aggressively as possible. Let me ask you about your mate, Roger Hallam, and the four billion dying or four billion dead or four billion will be dead. I know a lot of us have some mixed feelings, not about the sincerity of what he's doing and his commitment. Obviously, he spent more time in jail than a lot of us have spent doing much else of anything, but maybe the wisdom of putting that kind of label on what the future looks like. Any thoughts that you have, Claire? [00:35:25] Speaker 1: Well, can I just go back for one second to that statement? Because the other thing that's embedded in that, which I think is really important, is this idea about looking beyond the carbon conversation. I've seen Howard Dryden writing about recently and what people publishing about ocean ill health are saying. I do think that there's a possible future where we look back and say, actually, microplastics and forever chemicals were the thing that undermined the biggest sink, which is called the ocean, and were the thing that guaranteed that we were in a much worse situation than we would have been had we not like poisoned the shit out of all of the water on the planet. And so that alone is something that is utterly not sort of explored in terms of climate conversation. I think people say we need to deal with the gas and we need to deal with the emissions and we need to deal with the this and that. But people don't often really go and say, actually, we need to look at how the entire thing is working, including obviously people know stopping deforestation is important. But I hadn't learned until I made that statement that, for example, deforestation affects cloud cover and cloud cover then affects warming. And so the dynamics that people don't understand around how all of this stuff interrelates is cause for me, I think, to admit that, you know, as much as I've tried to understand this situation, I am basically not very clever. I'm a limited human being. We could become a bit more humble to begin to work forwards if we could just take those steps back, I think. And that was one of the things that I intended personally for that statement to do, to help us say, oh, yeah, maybe there's more here. The four billion dead thing, I don't know totally what Roger's strategy is with that, apart from something big with a lot of people involved next year. That's what I understand. I think one of the reasons why I guess he's pulled that number out is because it has been researched by credible people and everyone's acting like it's not there and it is there in print. If that's possible to happen within my lifetime, then that's obviously why he thinks that's a big message to lead on. I don't know if it's going to work, but I certainly think that one of the things that Roger sees as his job, I think, is to make sure that the things that people would rather look away from are impossible to ignore. And when, you know, you look back at his history of sort of interviews, public presentations, he quite often says things that people don't like later on, people go, oh, actually, he was kind of right. I just didn't like it. And so it's difficult, I think, to sort of know where you can push, where you're going to have impact. But if there are credible reports saying that there's a potential that this is the course we're on, then people should know that his focus is on the sort of scale of atrocity. That's often lacking because it's not a polite conversation to have when you talk about what's really unfolding. And even just like the tens of thousands of deaths to the heat in Europe and the UK just literally happening now and how many people will die tomorrow because we're going to have this huge temperature spike tomorrow here in England. It's impolite to talk about like the body count, but there is one and there's a direct causal relationship between body bags and climate policy. We tried to have this very existential kind of set of messaging when we launched XR so that people would understand this is not like a justice issue that sort of incrementally and we need to incrementally make it less bad. This is a nonlinear mass death situation, which is going to irreversibly destroy like millions of lives, if not billions. And people were like, oh, I thought we should just talk about it being quite bad and unfair. And we were like, no, everyone's going to die. It's a very unpopular way to frame it in 2018 because people were like, no, you should just talk about the fact it's unfair. And we were like, no, we're going to talk about the fact that everyone's going to die because we think that's actually going to work better. Do you know what I mean? [00:39:45] Speaker 2: When you start your organization with the first name being Extinction, there's nothing subtle about that. One last quick question, Peter, or comment you'd like to make to Claire? [00:39:54] Speaker 3: I'll make a comment. Claire said something very succinct that proves her high level of climate intelligence. Claire, you said that climate change is the defining context of every issue. Thank you for saying that. I've been trying to get that across. But that is completely fundamental. Everybody has to understand that. And it shouldn't be too difficult to understand now. [00:40:19] Speaker 1: Yeah, I hope so. The question for me is also, how do we claim the credibility for the movement and the people who have basically spent enormous amounts of their own time self-educating on this particular aspect of our real world life? Just because we're alive today, it means that we live in this context and we have to deal with this particular problem. I worry that because there's been such a successful and concerted effort through the mainstream media to say that people like us are extreme, that we're weird, that we shouldn't be listened to, that we should be put in prison, we should be dehumanized. And, you know, wild stuff that ranges from you're too posh and you don't have a right to have an opinion because you've educated yourself, so you must be middle class, so you must be a hypocrite, right through to don't listen to them because they're morons, they're idiots, they're zealots, they're obsessive, they are not smart. So it's all across that spectrum has been like the movement has been pummeled on an identity basis, right? In the way that the climate deniers did, they went after individual scientists to destroy them, not to fight the argument, just ruin the man and ignore the argument, right? That was their strategy. And they've done that to the climate movement and actually a friend said to me a little while ago that social movements are basically like society's best self-organizing systems for collective wisdom and intelligence and that they often come together to educate one another and themselves and you see people wrestling with ideas and, you know, trying to work stuff out and that's good, that's healthy and that's society's warning system when shit is wrong. We've basically suppressed that warning system, like, you know how people say if your fire alarm's going off, you just take the battery out and then just burn to death in your own home. Like, that's not a smart thing to do, but it is what we've done as a society and I think I want us to claim the credibility that the movement deserves at a time like now so that we can be effective and so that people will listen and so that we can ourselves say the door's always open, we always want to talk, we always want to talk, nobody's beyond redemption, the movement was always here to speak to everyone, to work with anyone who wants to help. We need to work out how we carry ourselves, even though I'm really, really angry. How do we present ourselves to the world in a way that says we really want to be constructive, we really want to find ways to work together, we really want to make the best of this situation from now, because there's no time machine and also can we please admit that, like, there are thousands of people in all of these countries where people have been organising around climate, they really have paid attention to the systemic nature of what's happening and you really need people around who understand the systemic nature of what's happening. People need to listen to those people, so how do we lift up, particularly some of the younger people in our movement, who really, it shouldn't be their job to educate the public, and yet they know more than most of our elected representatives about the nature of this crisis and what's caused it and what we should do about it, and how do we invest our sort of love and tend to their credibility, I suppose, is one of the things that's massively on my mind in this heat. [00:43:44] Speaker 2: Yeah, I so appreciate your passion and your eloquence and all the really important and difficult questions you've raised. If I were keeping track, I would have probably counted about 25 questions that you asked of yourself and of us and of everyone watching and listening today, and that's all we can ask for other than having you agree to come back and talk to us again at some point, maybe next summer. It's easy to say all the time, we're at a pivotal time, but we are. The climate shit is hitting the fan and has hit it. The politics are going in the opposite direction. Something has to give with people like you and your colleagues and others around the world. We can only hope that we can do our small part here by featuring people like you and others who are doing this work, who have the kind of passion. So my last simple question to you is, where can our viewers go who are inspired by what you have said today? We have viewers from all over the world. Give us some ideas, but we will also put them in the show notes as well for where people can get more information and roll up their sleeves and get to work. [00:44:51] Speaker 1: There are Extinction Rebellion groups. It is good to support them. Most of them I'm aware of doing much more localised work now, but in some places they're organising on a national scale. I think there are people everywhere from the climate movement who are trying to build democracy back from the bottom up. So organising local assemblies, pulling communities together, doing deep community organising, and basically anything that is tending to your community's emotional needs and your practical resilience needs. All of that is climate action now. There's a job for everybody, basically. There's a lot to do. Nobody has no work to do. So that's really important. People can follow me on Substack if you want to read my ranting on about democracy and what's going on inside our hearts and what we should talk about in terms of climate. I co-founded a think tank called Absurd Intelligence, which publishes weekly, and you can find us online, where we're working on the intersection between culture, climate and democracy. And so we're really trying to think through what is the cultural strategy and what's the expression of a movement for change and also, like, a vision of a world where we live in different relationships to each other. Because I think we've got to go right down to, like, the radical root of all of the systems. And a lot of the challenges before us are about relationship, actually, I would say, systemically. How are we in relationship with each other? But also how are we in relationship with the state? How is the state in relationship with other states? And how are we managing the relationships we do through money, through law? The cultural sort of movement that we're trying to build here is having a bit of a reckoning with national identity. What does it mean to be British now and alive now? And who are we anyway? And who do we want to become whilst we go through this sort of turbulent world that we've created? There's a bunch of work that I do that is kind of trying to be creative and have a good time and do cultural work. Some of it is communications and some of it is trying to help people do grassroots organizing. So I'm on that kind of tip. [00:46:54] Speaker 2: And you made the magic words there by also having a good time. This needn't be entirely grim. Joy is a part of it. I know the little bit that I participated in the XR events in London, there was an enormous amount of joy and passion and activity and fun and game playing and all the rest of that. That's part of being human. And that's what I so appreciate about your work and the work of the kinds of organizations that you have co-founded and are involved with today. I know Peter joins me in thanking you so much for taking this time. You've got a very hot day coming tomorrow. Stay cool. Work with everyone else that you know to stay cool in the UK. We'll have you back next year. I want you to know that we and our viewers support you, support your colleagues in this critically important work that you're doing. Thanks so much for being our guest today. [00:47:42] Speaker 1: Thank you. [00:47:43] Speaker 2: And with that now, we'll move on to our regular weekly feature, which is the Climate 3, three of the more important climate stories of the past week. And the first one has to do, I don't know if it's all that important, except for the fact that today is a major total solar eclipse in parts of the world in Europe. There was a story saying that the actual difference in sunlight and everything and heat from the solar eclipse may add pressure on Europe's power system, which is already undergoing some real intensity and some difficulty, as heat waves have forced nuclear and coal plants to switch off across the continent and low water levels to curtail hydropower stations. This from an article in the Financial Times. And I mention it both because it's timely, but also because it's one more of literally hundreds of impacts and connections that there's no reason for us ever to think could be related to climate change, but it all is. Number two story today is a story that we have covered before and no doubt we'll cover again in the coming months. And that is the strengthening El Nino that is arriving now in the Pacific and will affect weather and climate throughout the planet. And a report by the UN World Food Program indicated almost 50 million, let me say that again, 50 million people over and above those who are experiencing food insecurity now may experience food insecurity as a result of El Nino. The rising costs because of the many crops that are currently, for example, the decline that's already happening in maize, rice farms in Malaysia are declining, cheese from cows are declining, fields are becoming drier and drier. This is one of the many possible and we don't know 100% for sure whether it will happen, but the odds seem to be above 90% that we're going to have what some have called a Godzilla El Nino this year. And thirdly, sort of some good news, if you will, from Florida, which usually we don't hear good news about climate very much in Florida. They have developed now what they are calling a coastal corridor of ocean-based projects designed to preserve and nourish vulnerable marine life. And this will parallel a land corridor that they have already created so that various creatures can migrate from the north to the south of Florida, from the east to the west. This is doing the same thing in the east, this is doing the same thing in the marine areas of Florida. And of course, Florida is the state that's surrounded by water pretty much on all sides. And local governments are involved. They're going to talk about doing an artificial reef, oyster restoration, mangroves, which are a critical environmental feature, will be restored along the way. And a whole series of other projects to be developed with local governments. So if you live in Florida, and we hope we have some Florida viewers, find out about it. See what's happening in your area. Maybe you can get involved. Let me again thank Peter. Let me thank Claire. And as always, thank you for joining us today. We will see you next week. Goodbye. [00:51:01] Speaker ?: Bye.