Why everyone is talking about climate protests (again)

As the climate protest movement has reached an inflection point, a broader discussion about what its role could be is being negotiated in the full glare of the public sphere.

In the past two months, there have been dozens of headlines about disruptive protest tactics, from the UK to Australia to Germany . Politicians are making blood and thunder statements about protestors and TV talking heads are having a field day stoking fires of outrage. It seems to be everywhere I look.

Amidst the bluster and reactionary plans to curtail the right to protest*, there is an interesting conversation about the nature and function of climate protests. How should they be conducted? What makes them effective and what makes them counterproductive? Which tactics are most worthwhile and which should be condemned? Ultimately, what are climate protests meant to achieve?

There have been feature pieces about the changing nature of the climate protest playbook, with the FT covering Extinction Rebellion's (XR) 'tilt to the mainstream' as the famously disruptive group denounced the arrest-as-protest tactic that had brought it to prominence in favour of trying to broaden the tent and build a larger movement. By contrast, Politico 's Karl Mathiesen went all gonzo with the Tyre Extinguishers, a group disabling SUVs and luxury cars, as they went on a foray through wealthy suburbs of Brussels. Their aim is to disrupt people's daily lives so they are forced to stop ignoring the climate crisis - exactly the kind of activity that XR leadership had condemned , which has led to the spintering off of more stunt-oriented groups like Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain.

There was even a much discussed thread on climate Twitter that clapped back to all this backlash. And when you have backlash to the backlash, that's a sure sign that Discourse? is in full flow.

This sudden furore of hot takes and columns hasn't been provoked by unprecedented protest numbers. As the Carnegie Climate Protest Tracker shows, there was more significant action in October that didn't provoke the same level of introspection and debate. It isn't a particularly full month of climate announcements - good or bad - to prompt this bout of introspection, and the shock tactics aren't particularly new. So it's interesting to dig into why this has become the topic du jour.

This moment is, to my mind, a cyclical event.

In the late 2010s, organizations like the Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion and Fridays For Future captured the imagination of both the wider public and the political elite. Youthful leaders successfully overhauled the image of the climate movement, from fussy old hippies lecturing us on the benefits of a bag for life to angry, betrayed schoolkids scared for their future.?It has been an unequivocally positive development, especially as somebody working in climate comms, not least because it made concern about climate cool again.

But no wave of attention lasts forever. The COVID lockdowns limited the most visible and effective activities of such groups, for one thing, and their core appeal of freshness and energy naturally began to fade as the public got used to them. A lot of the the appeal of that first iteration came from their leaders, Greta and all the rest, innocent children yelling for their futures from outside grey government buildings. It was a striking image that was impossible to ignore. But, five or six years have passed and, frankly, they're now aging out of that role. The 'Climate Kids' are now young adults, who are also keynote speakers and generally the biggest ticket draws at major climate conferences. Global leaders and media institutions are vying for their attention. The movement is mainstream, its messages and leaders have been variously co-opted** and internalized by the people in power. When you're in the room, microphone in hand, you cannot get by on asking for change and decrying the lack of action – protest leaders are now expected to present a case for action.

I first noticed this tension during COP26, when I wrote a piece during the middle weekend of the event on the disconnect between my experience of what was happening inside the event in Glasgow with the messaging coming from climate protestors and activists. In short: they were going to call COP26 a failure no matter what got announced, so they didn't have to wait for the dust to settle to pronounce their judgement.

I was there with the organisation I work for , who are very much on the wonk end of the activist-wonk spectrum of the climate movement. I wrote that piece as a sympathetic outsider and it's important to note that I make no claim to expertise in mass movement campaigning. My reflections in this article are also very much from the perspective of an interested onlooker.

After COP26 ended, activist leaders and organizers grappled with their role in the larger effort to decarbonize the global economy. This excellent piece by campaigner Alex Evans that lays out some of the challenges is still worth reading 18 months later but the TL;DR version is: if the cohort of people convinced by the righteous fury of protest have already been won over, is righteous fury particularly useful for your movement?

The climate crisis isn’t an issue that can get solved by a small, angry minority. There are too many well established opposition forces blocking the way and the scale and pace of change is too massive for a niche movement to succeed. So the project has become about integration into the structures of power, which helps explain why we have seen Extinction Rebellion change course. Political parties are wary of any associations that could turn off swing votes, so any ambitious politician will keep the likes of Insulate Britain at arms length. To get in the room, you have to play nice.

This is something we've seen play out at the highest level. Political parties that have built their support partly based on climate friendly policy are increasingly moving from opposition to incumbency, with the German Green Party perhaps the best example. After decades of building their base as outsiders, they have had to embrace pragmatism in order to achieve serious electoral gains. The first members elected to the Bundestag famously refused to wear suits and ties back in the 1980s, the modern party is fronted by slick professional politicians. Now, as part of the federal government: that means pushing for renewable targets while softening their stance on new gas power plants , carbon capture and storage and even defending the internal combustion engine . Getting a seat at the table means making trade-offs, and that is never popular with the ideological purists.

At an organisational level, there are also practical considerations in play. If your movement relies on hyper-committed volunteers who buy into all-or-nothing activism then there's a natural time limit to your efficacy. People become disillusioned , or they burn out from overwork, or they simply don't have free time away from working to make ends meet. It's a highly attritional model that makes for brittle organisations. Writing in The Conversation , Marc Hudson of University of Sussex observes that the natural lifecycle of protest movements that rely on hyper-committed volunteers is three years, which is about the lifespan of a hedgehog. XR is just the latest in a long line of climate protest groups to hit this wall.

Whether or not various protest tactics are divisive is, to my mind, asking the wrong question. The question should be, what is the function of the climate protest movement in 2023? It's probably not to raise awareness. On this front, the environment has definitively shifted - probably in part due to the impact of climate protests***. A 2022 survey of global attitudes to climate change conducted in 192 countries and territories shows that, on average, 78% of people think of it as a serious or very serious threat. This is as mainstream a topic as you can imagine! Nonetheless, actual political action to address this threat remains behind the curve, so, you may argue, it's extremely useful to have a subset of the broader climate movement agitating for more action and trying to make sure politicians can't simply pay lip service to the topic while focusing on other things.

Perhaps that is enough, if - and it is a big if - everyone involved accepts the limitations of this function, accepts being one part of a broader ecosystem for change: the Overton window shifters creating space for policy wonks and dealmakers to get policy over the line. This is very rarely the self-conception of climate activists. The hype of mass protests, the press attention, and the wave of momentum that buoys groups like XR becomes the objective. Placard slogans fill in for the messy and complicated real-world solutions that are actually needed, and both sides of the activist-wonk divide within the climate movement become frustrated by the limitations of the other.

Grabbing policymakers' attention isn't enough. If there aren't workable solutions built on a foundation of durable political support, it's easy to essentially ignore a short lived burst of activism. It's a very similar issue to the one I laid out around the lazy "follow the science" message , which is that there is no easy trick for the problems of the climate crisis****. Getting a large crowd of people to scream "do something about climate" isn't going to cut it. The problem is figuring out what "something" is and then putting together a robust strategy to deliver that in the real world, meaning that it has to succeed despite competing issues, backlash, political instability, scandals, external shocks and all the rest of it.

Former spokesperson for XR and UK Green Party activist Rupert Read wrote about this in 2021 :

"It is imperative to find a way of bringing far more people on board. It is imperative to wake up many more into realising that no-one is riding to the rescue, there are no cavalry, so the determinative issue of our time can be ignored no longer – by them. By you. By us all."

The reality is that while the vast majority of people are worried about climate and want their political representatives to deal with it, that's where it ends. As a recent seven country poll from YouGov illustrated, people overwhelmingly support government intervention on climate, but they don't want to significantly upend their lives to do so, let alone get arrested over and over again.

This is at the heart of this recent bout of introspection around climate protests. Awareness isn't the issue, the goal now is convincing people that they can have improved lives as a result of the transition. This is a message that can actually win an election and, in the short term, a message that might make the individual sacrifices related with high-intensity protests efforts worthwhile. As journalist Leigh Phillips put it*****:

"To deliver on the promise of social justice, we need a high-energy planet, not modesty, humility and simple living."

This is a message that can attract support from beyond the wonks and activists of the climate movement, as seen in this letter from the end of April co-authored by the European trade union confederation CES - ETUC as well as several other non-climate civil society organisations.

I think this letter should be pinned up in at every European climate comms strategy session happening this year.

In those sessions, you always go through a few core questions. Who are our audiences? What are we trying to achieve? What are the external barriers and opportunities we need to consider? What is our unique value that we're bringing to the table? The discussion about the soul of climate protests is very similar.

As somebody observing from the outside, I hope organizational health is prioritized in whatever the movement evolves into. I would like to be able to factor in the impact of climate protest groups as compliments to our own strategies, rather than trying to bottle lightning whenever such protests spontaneously bubble up. The wonk-led groups can absolutely capitalize on the injection of popular attention and attendant outrage cycle to push for better policy, but we simply aren't nimble enough to do that reactively. Give us a chance!

The climate protest movement is at a turning point and, now this has been recognised by enough of the players, there's an argument going on about where it should go from here. It just so happens to be playing out in full view of the fractured public sphere , supercharged by media commentariat and hoards of sclerotic online commenters. It's not an ideal version of this process but, fundamentally, it's probably a healthy one.

This is part of a monthly series aimed at examining the underlying narratives of the European climate debate, with a healthy dose of media criticism along the way. Read the previous article?here . Note that these are personal takes and do not represent the position of my employer.

*This troubling authoritarian shift is too big a subject to dive into within this article, but it certainly deserves attention. Deutsche Welle did a decent high-level overview here and groups like ARTICLE 19 and Global Witness are actively fighting draconian anti-protest legislation in various parts of the world.

**To this day, no image provokes more rage in me than this picture of Justin Trudeau joining a Fridays For Future protest back in 2019, demanding action from his own government.

***Although the research shows there are trade-offs to be weighed based on the specific goals and audience for your protests. But, in the case of climate, I think anybody working in advocacy would tell you the wave of attention and support generated by groups like XR in the 2010s has been a net positive.

****It's become a running theme for me, but worth noting that the appeal of shortcutting straight to perfect policy outcomes goes beyond climate world. If this theme interests you, Michael Hobbes 's recent takedown of the influential book "Nudge" is well worth listening to .

*****From his book 'Austerity Ecology & The Collapse-Porn Addicts ' which challenges degrowth arguments from a leftist standpoint. The debate has undoubtedly evolved since this was published in 2015 but it's still worth a read.