For people like me, who are among the least affected by the unfolding climate crisis, and are in the privileged position of being paid to figure out a way to address it, there are times that make the reality and urgency of rising global average temperatures come alive. The last month has been one of those times, and a trigger for some deep reflection.
I have scrolled and scrolled through Italian social media accounts taking in the many shocking videos and images of thunderstorms in Veneto (hammered by hailstones the size of apples), tornados in Milan, wildfires raging across the entire map of Sicily, and I have listened to stories from my parents in my hometown in Umbria who had been enduring temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in the shade.
Going through all that, questions would come to mind: “What am I doing about this? Am I doing enough? Should I be doing something different?” Then I would put my work hat on and think similarly: “How should our team or organization respond to this? Should we stick to our existing course or do something different? We knew impacts like these would be coming, so what is this changing, if anything, in how we approach our work?”
For the last 10 years I have been leading 350.org’s work in Europe, and have focused a lot of my thinking and work on how to build a more powerful movement. Reflecting on this period of time my questions became broader still. I started wondering if we as a climate movement — concerned citizens, NGOs, grassroots groups, what you would call civil society — are doing enough, here in Europe, right now.
I know for a fact that governments, by and large, are not doing anything close to what is required, but are we putting enough pressure on them? Are we bringing this reality and urgency to their doorsteps? Are we bringing enough people on board to take action and increase that pressure, shifting the systems, culture, policies, money and other parts of the puzzle that need to shift to make a significant dent in the issue of our times? But most importantly, are we doing it any less or more effectively than how we’ve been doing it before, and where is there room to improve?
Over the last 10 years or so, from the lead up to the Paris Agreement until now, the climate movement has made great advances in putting the climate crisis on the map of the general public. In the latest Eurobarometer survey, “93 percent of E.U. citizens see climate change as a serious problem.”
The movement has also made significant progress in linking fossil fuel emissions to the climate crisis. Many people now understand that taking action on climate means moving from fossil fuels to renewables. This is a big achievement: beyond our movement “bubble,” people know we have a problem, know what is causing it, and (broadly) know how to fix it.
2019 marked the most recent peak in the movement’s momentum. Impactful mobilizations by Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion shaped European politics at the May elections of a new European Parliament. In September of that year, we built on that wave of rising public concern, and 350.org helped coordinate the largest climate mobilization in history, seeing 7.6 million people take to the streets around the world.
Then the momentum subsided. The COVID pandemic took front stage in 2020, and hindered the movement’s ability to exist and affect change — namely being able to meet in person and show up for collective action in public. In 2021, 350.org offered a space to regroup and seize the opportunity to rebuild our economies, through its Global Just Recovery Gathering.
As momentum was building up again, in early 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine and another global crisis unfolded. The significant interruption of our gas supply offered an opportunity to rethink our energy provision. But governments, heavily lobbied by the fossil fuel interests, pulled us in the reverse direction instead: announcing deals with former African colonies, boosting their gas extraction and production infrastructure.
The energy crisis, despite the spiraling cost of living, has not weakened the public mandate for a transition from fossil fuels to renewables. The problem is that base of public support hasn’t expanded, and it hasn’t turned from passive support into active action to drive change at the scale that’s required.
Looking inside the black box that is the climate movement, understanding its actors and relationships, might help explain why.
When people outside the movement think about the climate movement these days, they see, for the most part, different groups that largely share a similar approach — Letzte Generation, Ultima Generazione and Just Stop Oil, or JSO.
JSO-type groups do important work. They have succeeded at keeping climate on the front pages in recent years, with a constant stream of disobedient actions. They have provided an outlet for people who feel like taking action that is commensurate with the scale of the crisis we’re in. And they have nailed down format and branding in a way that is replicable, accessible and easily identifiable.
A climate movement with JSO and similar organizations as its only visible tip, however, is a movement that doesn’t effectively expand beyond its base. It’s a movement that opens itself up to constant battles with the political and media establishment that we can’t win. It allows politicians and commentators to routinely cherry-pick JSO’s actions as representative of the movement as a whole, painting them as extremist hippies, naive and opposed to the interests of working people.
A louder “we need to get off fossil fuels” message is more needed than ever. At the same time, it brings diminishing returns of effectiveness in building public support and getting people to take action. A tactic of civil disobedience is as critical as ever, but it is open to trivialization when its most widespread utilization is not connected to a wider strategy of (unbranded) popular uprising. Its isolated use risks harming more than helping the communities it professes to support.
On the less visible part of the spectrum are other grassroots climate justice groups in the movement. A lot of them find themselves in defensive mode having to fight all of the new fossil fuel infrastructure being planned. But there’s also little energy or capacity or vision for European coordination among them, with the possible exception of an increasingly effective anti-gas coordination, and international solidarity around the StopEACOP campaign.
The few projects that attempt generating some kind of European movement convergence (e.g. by2020weriseup, End Fossil or Climate Justice Action) haven’t been breaking through — with limited visibility and impact beyond movement circles. European coordination is more needed than ever, and at the same time I don’t think I remember in the last decade a period in which groups across Europe have been more isolated from each other.
Fridays for Future has not regained the momentum it had in 2019. Although it has engaged in a key strategic intervention together with NGOs and other grassroots groups to stop finance flows to fossil fuels, and has built important alliances in Germany with transport unions under the #WirFahrenZusammen (We Ride Together) campaign banner. Meanwhile in France, Les Soulèvements de la Terre, or Earth Uprising, and Dernière Rénovation have been able to absorb lots of movement energy and achieve disruptive mass mobilization with public backing. But other than the international wave of support against the “eco-terrorists” pushback by French authorities, these are success stories that have not been able to break through national boundaries.
As for other groups in the movement, even when we do work that breaks through the wider challenges our movement is facing at the moment, the impact is small-scale and fails to acquire the kind of national or international resonance as JSO-type groups do — and I include in this 350 itself, which certainly has considerable room for improvement.
Let me be clear: I applaud every person, group or network in the wider movement taking action. It is not my place to tell any of them whether their tactics or strategies are right or wrong; that kind of assessment, and any adjustments that follow, can only come through self-reflection and deep deliberation, not opinion pieces. XR UK’s decision earlier this year to significantly shift its approach, prioritizing “relationships over roadblocks” is an excellent example of that self-reflection being done in public (and further changes might follow, following recent deliberations.)
I strongly believe in the principle of “diversity of tactics,” in its nonviolent connotation. Mine is more of a “yes, and…” than a summary judgment telling any particular group what to do or not to do. But the balance of efforts, the way they connect to each other and their interplay, their different roles in a cohesive movement ecosystem, and how that ecosystem as a whole shifts its boundaries — that’s where there is an opportunity for change.
In other words, everyone’s hard and important work is failing to link up effectively into a larger push, and the political reality we’re doing this work in makes it even more challenging.
It’s a climate movement truism: One of the biggest obstacles to climate action and progress towards a more just and sustainable living on our planet are right-wing and far-right governments. We know why: In some cases, they are packed with outright climate denialists, amplifying and supporting the decades-long campaign of obfuscation perpetrated by the fossil fuel industry. They have been trying to convince the public that everything is fine and that there is no reason to stop continuous expansion and consumption of fossil fuels.
In other cases, they wear the more subtle clothes of climate delayers — professing the importance of addressing the climate crisis in their rhetoric, but in reality calling for a more “pragmatic” approach. In Europe we regularly see them using the gas crisis as an excuse to support expanding fossil gas infrastructure and delaying the just transition to fairer, healthier and more prosperous communities that is decades overdue.
JSO-type groups are seen as an easy excuse to crack down on the movement as a whole — especially the most marginalized communities, where the repression hits hardest.
Equally worryingly, as right and far-right governments have taken office across Europe, there’s another emergent pattern to their approach — the most significant crackdown on climate activism that we’ve ever witnessed before. We experience this through increased surveillance and pre-emptive arrests, harsher sentencing and the deployment of dangerous rhetoric that stokes public division and incites abuse of climate activists. We see this most visibly in the increasingly significant restrictions to the right to protest.
This affects us all, whether we’re marching for climate action or any other progressive cause. And it places the greatest burden on the brave people from marginalized communities who lead the fight for social and economic justice — from the most recent policing bill in the U.K., to police raids in Germany, France and beyond. JSO-type groups are usually the first intended target. They are seen as an easy excuse to crack down on the movement (and other progressive movements) as a whole — especially its most marginalized groups, where the repression hits hardest.
So, from an external perspective, when the climate movement is contending for attention and support in the public sphere, it’s facing three challenges.
How does our movement respond to those challenges?
Movements led by those who are most affected by an issue are strongest. This much I know and believe to be true — even a cursory look through the last few centuries of human history shows us this. In the last couple of decades, our movement here in Europe has experienced a fundamental, ongoing shift to recognize that the frontline communities in the Global South are the leaders of this struggle. These communities have done the least to cause the crisis yet are suffering the most, and are responding to it with power and creativity.
Historically in Europe, our climate concerns have been largely theoretical as opposed to being the result of lived experience. And this has largely been expressed by a white, middle-class, urban demographic of environmentalists — certainly when it came to visibility, strategy and funding. The elements of the movement that reflect and express the views of a more diverse base, and pursue an intersectional approach, based on a lived experience of injustice are not yet the in the mainstream. They are still marginalized when it comes to whose voices are being heard, who has power and resources, and who sets the wider direction of the movement.
But recently we’ve seen another fundamental, ongoing shift. Climate impacts are hitting much closer to home than we’ve ever experienced in Europe. Farmers and fishers dealing with crop and livestock failures. And people everywhere — particularly those who are more vulnerable as a consequence of their age, health, living and economic conditions — are experiencing their lives and livelihoods being ruined by heatwaves and floods. Workers in the fossil fuel economy are nervously watching and waiting as their career horizons are dramatically shortened — without support from the oil and gas giants that employ them and continue to rake in record profits.
The base, or at least potential base, of all those who we would consider as most affected by the climate crisis, has been shifting. As of August 2023, the frontlines of the climate movement are in Vanuatu where plans are underway to relocate dozens of villages to safer land. And to a much lesser extent, they are also in the wildfires ravaging Sicily, the areas of France where unprecedented freezing temperatures are destroying large swathes of vineyards, and in homes of pensioners in Manchester who can’t afford to keep the heat on during winter.
These are new frontlines of the climate crisis on our continent, and I don’t think our movement has fully internalized this fundamental shift in its boundaries. People of color, those on lower incomes, and other marginalized communities are the ones who suffer those impacts first and hardest.
This is not a calling out, it’s a calling in — into a different movement.
This means that one of the most important strategic questions we need to ask ourselves right now is: How can we connect and organize with those frontlines, elevate their voices, build their power, and expand the conception of who is at the visible tip of our movement?
For our movement to win we have to broaden our scope by ensuring that communities from those frontlines are given the space and resources to lead, strategize and be the main representatives of our collective vision. We need a renewed commitment to campaigning that delivers a concrete, radical, but achievable alternative vision to our fossil fuel economy. One that addresses our transition from fossil fuels to renewables, and also access and affordability of energy. A vision of and a pathway towards resilient communities, who adapt more effectively to the ever-increasing devastation that rising temperatures will bring about on our continent and in other regions.
And let’s be honest, this approach needs more than the movement to take the lead in its own transformation. It requires funders and well-resourced NGOs to be accountable for their power — and decisions made with that power — that have shaped our movement. They need to move resources into groups and networks that embody this shift, connect across issues and do the deep organizing with those frontline communities, but also are connected together by a movement-wide strategy that can achieve scale. So that next time energy companies announce record-breaking quarterly profits, it’s not just the usual climate groups who shout at them with anger, but it’s a wider popular uprising of people who have the most to lose and gain from the way our energy system works.
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DonateLet me be clear. What it will take to regain momentum and power goes beyond a new injection of energy and determination in the face of unfolding and demoralizing climate disasters. There instead needs to be a significant rethink of who is the climate movement, what are the issues it deals with, how it embraces those new frontlines, and in what way its different parts relate to each other. This is not a calling out, it’s a calling in — into a different movement.
A movement configuration that gives us a decent chance to win might look like this:
This outline is less of a blueprint and more of a map of exploration. It will take our collective capacity to pull our heads out of the current moment, out of our own areas of focus, and look at the whole picture to re-assess the journey we’re taking.
The climate movement of the past will not win the struggle today.
We’ll need to reflect on the relative weight of the different parts of our system. For example, do we need a different balance of tactics across the movement? In different phases of the year? We must also consider the places where we need to build and celebrate strengths versus those where we need to critically address weaknesses. We’ll need to reimagine our collective identity, from “activists” to a new language describing the broader base of people here in Europe with very personal material stakes in the movement’s success.
Through its relationships and structure, we’ll need to make our movement more resilient and adaptable to upcoming crises. We simply can’t afford setbacks any time a new catastrophic health or geopolitical development takes front stage.
The iterations of the climate movement of previous years are not the movements that will win the struggle today. It’s not just going to be the climate movement of “staying below 1.5 degrees,” nor just the climate movement of “keep fossil fuels in the ground,” and not just the one that helped us win against coal plants or achieve fracking bans.
We need to be all of those and also build a climate movement that connects across energy poverty, climate impacts, dignity for migrant lives and trans people. A movement that takes action in Europe in recognition and reparation of the historical debt and wound we’ve inflicted to the Global South, and the wounds we’re inflicting to our geographically nearest communities. That climate movement is much more diverse and cross-issue, grounded in people’s daily lives, full of hope and vision, with new frontiers and frontlines who take its lead.
It is our responsibility and duty to build it.
There’s a lot of good in this article, but I am wondering: where is discussion of the need to dramatically change our diet? Animal agriculture is an enormous contributor to climate change. People who are interested in climate change, also tend to be sympathetic toward nature and the other creatures, with whom we share this planet. A push toward a plant-based diet and an end to animal agriculture is urgently needed. Environmental groups are afraid to touch this third rail and I find that cowardly. Vegans and vegetarians, have a much lighter impact on the planet, then to meet eaters, and we can vote every single day with every single meal for a better environment and an ethical way of living.
“ LESS MEAT BETTER FOR ENVIRONMENT
A huge dataset confirms that a vegan diet is dramatically better than a meat diet across a broad range of environmental measures including biodiversity
Published: 20 July 2023
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Academic
New research assesses the environmental impacts of different diets: high and low meat, pescetarian, vegetarian and vegan
Takes into account greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use, water pollution and biodiversity impact
Even low meat diets reduce environmental impact by about 30% across most environmental measures compared to high meat eaters
Researchers have linked dietary data from over 55,000 individuals with data on the environmental impacts of the foods they eat. The team, from the Livestock, Environment and People (LEAP) project at the University of Oxford, found that the dietary impacts of vegans were around a third of those of high meat eaters. They also saw a 30% difference between high- and low-meat diets for most of the measures of environmental harm.
Individuals classified themselves as vegan, vegetarian, pescetarian or meat eaters. Data on the environmental impact of their diets was assessed in relation to greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use, water pollution risk and biodiversity loss.
The team also took into account the variation in environmental impact based on how and where food is produced, including this variation in their results. This is important as it ensures that the results are based on all the available data about the environmental impact of foods, as opposed to focussing on specific food production methods which can obscure the relationship between animal-based food consumption and environmental impact,
Despite substantial variation according to where and how food was produced, the relationship between environmental impact and animal-based food consumption is clear and the authors argue this should prompt policy actions to reduce meat production and consumption. The paper is published in Nature Food.
The impact of the food we eat on the environment is well established. In 2015 the direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions of the global food system was around a third of total emissions for that year.*
The food system is estimated to be responsible for 70% of the world’s freshwater use and 78% of freshwater pollution. Around three quarters of ice-free land area of the planet has been affected by human use, primarily for agriculture and land use change such as deforestation is a major source of biodiversity loss.**
Lead author, Professor Peter Scarborough, of the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at Oxford University, says: ‘Our dietary choices have a big impact on the planet. Cherry-picking data on high impact plant-based food or low impact meat can obscure the clear relationship between animal-based foods and the environment. Our results, which use data from over 38,000 farms in over 100 countries, show that high meat diets have the biggest impact for many important environmental indicators, including climate change and biodiversity loss. Cutting down the amount of meat and dairy in your diet can make a big difference to your dietary footprint.’
Past research has shown that plant-based diets are substantially lower than meat-based when it comes to environmental measures such as greenhouse gas emissions, land use and water use, and that reducing meat intake tends to be healthier. They have generally made assumptions about people’s food intake and have not taken into account variation in environmental impact depending on where and how food is sourced and produced.
Professor Scarborough and the team looked at the way people actually eat, taking data from a sample of 55,000 UK individuals who filled out a food frequency questionnaire. They connected this to databases that estimate the environmental impacts of multi-ingredient and commonly consumed foods. Using a dataset of the environmental impact of food production systems, they were able to incorporate variation in where food is from and how it is produced.
All five environmental impacts were associated with the amount of animal-based food consumed. The impacts of vegans were a quarter of those of high meat eaters for greenhouse gas emissions, and land use, just 27% of the impacts for water pollution, 46% for water use and 34% for biodiversity.
At least 30% differences were found between low and high meat eaters for most of the indicators.
The study expands on past work, underlining that vegan and vegetarian diets have much lower environmental impact than fish and meat consumption. The region of origin and methods of food production do not obscure the differences between diet groups and should not be a barrier to policy actions aimed at reducing animal-based food consumption.”
See article for more.
https://www.alumni.ox.ac.uk/article/less-meat-better-for-environment
I have several reactions to your article, Nicolo, as someone who has published many technical analyses of the economics of mitigating climate change which try to push the IPCC to the left, and to get them to be more realistic. My papers are available on Research Gate. Note – it is strange that you don’t mention the IPCC once in your article.
My first main reaction is that you don’t try to educate the climate change movement with some realistic statement that have eluded some of the activist groups. For example, it is no longer possible to keep the increase in the global average temperature below 1.5 degrees C. We will be lucky to keep it under 2.0 degrees C, and the lower the better, of course. Climate groups need to recognize this and not promise the people of the world thngs that are impossible to deliver. That lowers their credibility.
Secondly, related to the above point, you do not discuss at all how expensive it will be in up-front capital investments to zero out CO2 emissions by, say, 20-30 years from now. The world will need trillions of dollars on mitigation investment per year, as all studies show. The question is how many trillions? Probably, far more than $5 trillion per year for the 20-30 years needed to get to zero. You don’t even bother to discuss where that amount of money is going to come from. Without such a discussion the efforts of most climate groups are meaningless. They need to have a plan (or plans) for where the money to mitigate climate change will come from in each country. Similarly, you need to discuss the need for climate groups to develop implementation plans for each country. We basically know what needs to be done, but now we need to do it.
For example, you need to educate people to the fact that the hardest sector to bring to zero CO2 emissions is the buildings sector, not transportation or industry. Remember every building in the world that is heated or cooled (mostly heated) with fossil fuels will need to have some insulation/better windows installed, and the heating system converted to an electrically driven one, whether heat pumps or other technologies. That is going to be the hardest to do as you can see from the fight over this issue recently in the German Bundestag, and doing so will have very high capital requirements which is why it will be hard to accomplish.
Interesting analysis, but focused on only one aspect of the climate action and its efficiency: the activism of associations and associated mobilization.
I think one major aspect is missing, the urgency to imply scientific actors (physical, biological, social…) to research possible tracks, starting from present, and taking in account all the factors which may interfere with action.
An interesting novel helps to understand some of the key factors, “the ministry for the future”, by Kim Stanly Robinson. It is evidently not the vademecum for action, but show what could be done, among other things, potential dangers (as “oriented crimes”….) and false solutions.
Good analysis, but it leaves the climate movement facing the same problem: its dependence on existing power structures to do the right thing.
I think the link with the labor movement is also poorly developed and justified (why would they care? how can both build a joint narrative for a positive future?) – and it also glosses over several other marginal groups, namely workers that do NOT have access to a union, from migrants to delivery, etc; as well as the very necessary urban-rural link.
I’ve expanded quite a bit in my own article, so apologies for the plug, but hopefully you can see some value in my counter-argument there: https://rmdsilva.substack.com/p/climate-movements-strategy-isnt-working?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
I applaud the start of vitally important reevaluation and adaptation strategies to deal with the growing right-wing hostility to peaceful legal protest, especially when it is expressed against fossil fuel infrastructure and governmental policies. This is a well-thought out, clearly and powerfully written article that leads us to rethink how we as a diverse group of citizens concerned about climate change can best be effective in a political environment of growing hostility to protest, increasing dis-and misinformation in social media and continual societal upheaval distracting voters and governments.
I am not sure I agree that the “3rd rail” of veganism that the other commentators feel is essential to push is, at this time, an effective pursuit. There is a lot of expression of the feeling in social media that climate protectors want to dismantle the gains our consumer society offers, and for me the idea of “Earth Overshoot” is perhaps a more concrete and universal place to start shifting this dangerously selfish “I’ve got mine and nobody dare take that away from me” attitude than “stop eating meat now”.
I want to get more active, and also am aware, as an American living in Austria, that by taking part in highly disruptive actions my residence permission may be something that rabid right-wingers might want to rescind. Maybe it’s just time to dump US citizenship and become a European.
Wonderful piece. Really appreciate it.
Wojewoda omits the central role of global hegemonic capitalism. Maybe Europe, with its mostly multi-party governments and greater support for explicit social democracy, doesn’t see this as clearly as it shows in the USA, but the forces of financial inequality and oligopoly will prevent fundamental shift from extractive climate-hurting production as long as they continue in power.