Category: Activism

Categories
Activism Unsolicited advice

Terrible meetings for terrible times? #DoBetter

Yesterday I wrote an article called “After the heatwave – what is to be done”

After the heatwave – What is to be done?

Its advice mostly focussed on ‘holding good public meetings’. There is SO MUCH more to ‘growing a movement’ than this, but bad public meetings (and most of them are, in my extensive experience) is one way activists try to hit the accelerator with their whole body-weight unwittingly mashing down on the break. It’s heart-braking.

So, this below is a mix of questions, provocations and the customary unsolicited advice for anyone thinking about holding a meeting once this wretched heatwave ends and before the next one starts (and remember, this is one of the coolest summers of the rest of your life)

First question

Why are you holding this meeting?

Usually the answer is “to give people the facts” (and to be the person giving the people the facts)

That is not good enough – people can get the facts from the internet, newspapers etc.  If you want people to have the facts, a decent video would do better. Are you sure you aren’t holding this meeting to pump some prestige/’momentum’ back into a grassroots group/NGO offshoot that had a sheen a year ago but is now looking a bit tired?  Are you sure you’re not suffering from a little bit of Relevance Deprivation Syndrome? You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t, and suffering RDS doesn’t make you a bad/worthless person, but it DOES make you susceptible to perpetrating one of the many fatal errors in social movement organising/agitating.

Second question What would success look like for this meeting?

The usual answer is ‘lots of people come’ and ‘lots of people feel like/tell me they learned a lot.’

Okay, but then, so what? People are more informed (coulda been done more efficiently online, btw). How does a few more people knowing a few more facts (most of which they will forget quite quickly) translate into pressure for change at a local/national/international level? How?

Did those people form any new links with other people, or was all the time and all the attention devoted to the Big People at the Front Of the Room? Was the Q and A dominated by the usual suspects? Did people slump out, shoulders slinked before the close of the meeting, which seemed to have no clear end in sight? Did they? I bet they did, but you chose not to see it, or to explain it away, to blame the victim of your own malpractice for failing to design and execute a meeting well.

Who did you invite to speak at your meeting? 

I bet it’s a natural scientist and some politician/celebrity.

Of course, you need a “name” to get people in the door. I understand that. People are more likely to come if they know that the Executive Member for the Environment, some scientist from the nearest university, some person off the telly is going to be there.


But look, all these people come with baggage, with problems

The Executive Member for the Environment will probably be some brittle egomaniac who throws out half an hour of verbiage to try to disguise the fact that her local authority is far more interested in building skyscrapers and raking in cash from the airport than in doing anything meaningful about climate change. They will bludgeon the audience with factoids and boasts about their Strategies and Implementation Protocols, until everyone has lost the will to live. If anyone points out their long record of failure they will, as per media training come out with “well, I’m focussed on the future and what we do next, not on the past.” Rinse and repeat.

Your scientist

  • May not be a very good public speaker at all. This will be bad.
  • Or they may be a very good public speaker but without a strict (agreed beforehand and then gently enforced) time limit, will go on and on and on.
  • They may get involved in long detailed discussions about obscure/confusing (to Joe and Jane Public) 
  • The scientist won’t necessarily know much about what is(n’t) being done locally, and in any case will fear tarnishing their reputation for high-minded neutrality by having an opinion about a local issue (it’s fine to bash the usual suspects). [The whole question of why we continue to fetishise natural scientists about what is a social problem is for another day].

Your celebrity will be in Rod Stewart mode – “once I was a young man, and I thought all I had to do was smile.” And likely ditto the scientist on the local issues

All three, unless kept to time, will talk too long, too vaguely. 

This will eat into time for the Q and A.

The Q and A will almost certainly be dominated by a few people (usually over-educated middle class white men, young, middle-aged, and old). They will engage in point-scoring or ‘look at me for asking an obscure question’ or give speeches thinly disguised as questions (some may be butt-hurt that they were not invited to be a panellist).

The energy will be leaking from the room by now, and the chair will either be sad about it or ignore it and plough on.  The meeting will dribble to an inconclusive conclusion, with those people not reliant on public transport and who don’t have to get home to the baby-sitter or get up early in the morning sticking around and regurgitating their talking points.

Other people, who came and were talked at, who hoped to meet people and start thinking about DOING things, will go away, thinking the problem is them, and that they simply aren’t dedicated enough to be involved.

A few months later, another meeting, same format, same usual suspects, new ego-fodder. Rinse and repeat repeat repeat.


So, when you hold your meeting, I BEG you, have answers to the following questions.

  1. Have you looked at this meeting through the eyes of someone who is coming who doesn’t know anyone else? How will you make them feel welcome, how will you make it easier for them to make loose connections, chatting to people who are strangers?
  2. What is the meeting FOR?  Are you hoping to start/revive a group that will take action? Have you thought about what skills are needed? Have you got a well-written information sheet (2 sides of A4 at absolute most) to give out to everyone 
  3. Have you agreed with the speakers how long they will speak for and about what, making clear that you WILL keep them to time?
  4. Have you got a plan for how make sure that the Q&A is not the usual sausage-fest?
  5. Have you got a way to finish the meeting ON TIME, with an up-beat feel
  6. Most of all. MOST OF ALL. Have you got a way for QUICKLY communicating the content and the outcome of the meeting to all those people who would be interested in what you are doing but couldn’t come because of finances, work commitments, child-care, illness, agoraphobia etc etc?  If there isn’t a blog up on your website (you do have a website, don’t you? I mean, you’re not a captive of Meta, are you?) within a couple of days of the meeting, then, guess what champion, you’ve failed.

I could go on and on and on, but, well, I won’t.

Two other bits of reading

About the pathologies of meetings 

https://theconversation.com/weve-got-to-stop-meeting-like-this-81615

About the pathologies of movements

https://peacenews.info/node/8767/2019-how-we-blew-it-again

Categories
Activism

After the heatwave – What is to be done?

It’s too hot, this minute, to do anything. It’s too hot to march, it’s too hot to rally, it’s too hot to launch any dense, detailed footnoted report urging government (local, national, global) to Take Action Now. (It’s too hot to work on your tan as well).

So, what is to be done? Plant some (mental) seeds.

Explain to people (especially easy if you have a Keeling Curve tattooed on your forearm, just sayin’) that this heat is caused by the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the last couple of centuries. Explain to people that scientists and activists have been warning about this for forty years (longer, in fact, but no need to complicate the narrative right now).

Explain that all the talk of renewables this, Strategic Plan that, have not, in fact, slowed the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

And, most of all, explain to them that this weather we are having is only in the most trivial sense the “new normal” – explain that it is not going to stay like this, it is going to get warmer – that looking back from 10 years into the future this will be regarded as not a particularly unusual year.

And, beyond explaining, if you’re not checking in on your neighbours and family who are vulnerable to heat (the old, the young, the poor, the ill, the asthmatic etc), then why should you expect anyone to listen to you about anything?

This heatwave will end.  There will be others, later this summer (it is, after all, only June), and next year. And the year after.

So what does responsible activism on climate change mean?  Most of all, it’s about, wait for it…  holding good meetings.

To quote myself from 9 long years ago – 

“The Arctic is melting, the Antarctic slowly cracking up. Even 1.5°C of warming will mean serious problems for Australia, and that target has probably already been blown. I think it’s really important, therefore that we talk about… meetings.”

The point is this.  We need to understand that governments (made up of elected politicians and employed officials) have had forty years of warning, forty years to act, on climate, and they have been either unwilling or unable, for the most part. They will make declarations, sign pledges and then continue with business as usual, blameshifting onto another layer of government (“Well, we can’t do anything without money from central government” “Well, most of these actions have to be taken locally.” Rinse and repeat.

Similarly, there are constant false dawns of ‘progressive’ business, groups formed with great fanfare while CEOs get around the world to give motherhood-and-apple pie powerpoint presentations about ‘the sustainability agenda’ and “innovations which will help meet the challenge (once research and development funding from the taxpayer arrives).”

Meanwhile, every year we burn more coal, oil and gas to heat houses, fly planes, etc. Yes, electric vehicles are going gang-busters, but the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not come down, it keeps going up.

So, if government and the corporate sector can’t act/won’t act, then, what? Individual action? Too difficult, not going to make a difference. Amounts to re-arranging deckchairs on the Titanic while feeling good about yourself.

But what if – stay with me here, I know it sounds crazy – people got together in groups (unions, parties, churches, mosques, pressure groups, professional bodies) and those groups came up with enough in common (not frying the planet would be a start), then they might be able to insist, effectively, that governments and corporates stop making things worse – because that is what we’ve been doing these last forty years.  In 1988, when the ‘carbon dioxide’ issue finally broke through, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 351ppm.  We’ve now made that blanket much much thicker – it’s about 430ppm and rising more quickly with every (well, most) passing year.

This would be what the academics like to call ‘civil society’ getting up on its hind legs.

The initiator for this, or one of them, would likely be effective ‘grass roots’ groups (based around shared interest, shared beliefs, shared demographics, shared location).

The problem with this pretty picture is that most groups are led by people with confidence and status who – almost always, from my experience – absolutely lack the relevant abilities to hold a meeting that is engaging, inspiring and will involve more than the usual suspects staying involved.  I mean, most meetings are excruciating – boring, alienating, disempowering. As per one L. Cohen “they sentenced me to twenty years of boredom, for trying to change the system from within.”

Alongside that, you have charismatic individuals with Old Testament prophet vibes who lead a bunch of desperate people (and anyone who can read a Keeling Curve and has the courage to understand its implications is desperate) into emotionally-charged and (in the moment) satisfying actions which lead to long court cases and not much else.

Somehow we need to create norms for these “social movement organisations” so that they avoid the boredom and demotivation of the former, and ALSO avoid the sugar-rush/sugar-crash of the latter.

In the former case the air leaks out like a punctured tire – people simply don’t come back for a second or third meeting. In the latter case they go up like a rocket and come tumbling down like a stick.

I think I have developed some (okay, quite a lot of) words to help explain that, and – more importantly – some techniques for how to avoid it.  BUT it isn’t something that can be done in isolation. It requires a ‘critical mass’ of different groups all doing it at the same time, to kind of ‘create their own weather’.  

I no longer believe it will happen, but if there are other people who want to know about it, then I’ll write about it.

Categories
Activism

June 23, 2009 – Mountain Top removal protest

Seventeen years ago, on this day, June 23rd, 2009.

2009: Mountaintop Removal Mining Protest, Raleigh County, WV

A small, but vehement group staged a protest at the Goals Coal plant owned by Massey Energy against a type of mining called mountaintop removal. At least 30 demonstrators, including actress Darryl Hannah and James Hansen, then the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, were arrested for trespassing and other misdemeanor offenses like impeding traffic.

http://www.mensjournal.com/travel/events/a-brief-history-of-climate-change-protests-in-the-u-s-20140919#ixzz3J9TFuKjq

The Effects of Mountaintop Removal Mining on Appalachian Communities

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 387ppm. As of 2026, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.

The broader context for this was that in order to get at coal under mountains in the cheapest way, just remove the top of the mountain. Very clever.

The specific context was that James Hansen and others were helping to try to defeat these proposals. This was shortly into the beginning of the Obama administration, and Obama was pushing cap and trade ahead of the Copenhagen conference, 

What I think we can learn is this: we have been trying to stop the rest of our species being insanely fucking stupid, and we have largely failed because stupidity and greed and fear and hate are easily accessed emotions. We are easily riled up apes. 

What happened next: Don’t know. Google didn’t tell me. Presumably the bad guys won…

The Effects of Mountaintop Removal Mining on Appalachian Communities

On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays

References

You can see the chronological list of All Our Yesterdays “on this day” posts here.

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.

If you want to get involved, let me know.

If you want to invite me on your podcast, that would boost my ego and probably improve the currently pitiful hit-rate on this site (the two are not-unrelated).

Also on this day: 

June 23, 1969 – Cuyahoga river catches fire. Again –

June 23, 1980 – G7 in Venice aims to sink Venice…

June 23, 1988 – it’s time to stop waffling and say the greenhouse effect is here

June 23, 1989 – Richo gonna save the world… 

June 23, 1991 – Japanese propose pledge and review 

June 23, 1997 – Australian Prime Minister skips climate meeting to fanboy Thatcher #auspol – All Our Yesterdays

June 23, 1997 – Howard vs world, API versus world 

June 23, 1997 – RIP Hermann Flohn

Categories
Activism Australia

June 20, 1999 – Joint press release by TWS, ACF and Greenpeace

Twenty seven years ago, on this day, June 20th, 

The Wilderness Society, Australian Conservation Foundation & Greenpeace 1999, 82 Reasons Why the New Environment Legislation is Bad for the Environment, joint media release by the Wilderness Society, Australian Conservation Foundation and Greenpeace, 20 June, 1999.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 368ppm. As of 2026, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.

The broader context for this was that between 1988 and sort of 1991 there had been a huge amount of media attention on climate change as an issue. Greenpeace, The Wilderness Society and Australian Conservation Foundation, as the three biggest environment groups had been frenemies, had cooperated, collaborated and competed over various issues, all of course, hoping to get the most prestige, membership dues, etc.

That’s normal, but occasionally they would come together to try and amplify their voices. And you see this now with this event in 1999, presumably around the Howard government’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EBPC) Bill.

The specific context was that the Howard Government is trying to minimise any environmental commitments.

What I think we can learn is this: is that environment groups are like anything anyone else, they’ll compete and collaborate. 

What happened next: Howard continued to be an absolute twunt. If only he’d been booted out in 2001 there wouldn’t have been quite as much damage done to the Australian policy. But here we are. Australia is fucked.

On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays

References

You can see the chronological list of All Our Yesterdays “on this day” posts here.

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.

If you want to get involved, let me know.

If you want to invite me on your podcast, that would boost my ego and probably improve the currently pitiful hit-rate on this site (the two are not-unrelated).

Also on this day: 

June 20, 1977- “Alternative Three” – An early Climate Hoax 

June 20, 1979 – Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House

June 20, 1995 – Shell raises the white flag in Brent Spar battle 

June 20, 1997 – Australia versus the world on climate change

June 20, 2005 – RIP Charles Keeling

Categories
Academia Activism Social Movements

Maps, cars, metaphors and – most of all – the responsibility of intellectuals

I’m writing this because I may be wrong.

Of course, that doesn’t narrow down the things I could write about (I mean, everything, other than that I exist: merci, Rene!).

Specifically, then. A couple of days ago one of those ‘things could be much much better than they are’ reports got released. And the Guardian, bless its centrist socks, ran an op-ed by the authors.

I did a keyword search for ‘movements’ on the latter, which came up blank.  So then I wrote a two-part thread on BSky.

It ran thus-

Another day, another worthless (worse than useless?) ‘The cat should wear a bell’report about how everything can be wonderful.  

No mention of social movements.  

Apparently the state and corporates will do all this wonderful stuff un-bidden.  Because some academics wrote a report.

1/2

And part two

I can’t take this shit seriously, and I would encourage other people to do likewise.

I search “hey, we can save the world, here’s how” articles for the word ‘movements’. No mentions gets a hard pass from me.

Saves time/bandwidth.

To read or not to read – Ctrl F movements, Ctrl F global justice…

2/2

By my pitiful engagement standards it did well.

The first post got 5 reposts, on quote post, 16 likes and a save.

The second one got some comments, a repost and 4 likes.

It is to these comments that I now turn.

One person on Bluesky typed

How to make it happen is the next step not a replacement step.

There were several things I could have said. I chose to keep it relatively neutral –

In my experience these reports never have an “implementation” sequel. Happy to be proven wrong…

To which came

*We* need to be the implementation sequel.

A map isn’t worthless just because it comes without a car.

To which I replied

A map tells you the terrain. A castle in the air doesn’t. 

I suspect we agree on a lot, and could/can fruitfully disagree.

This platform isn’t the format, imo. So I will write A (sic) post and you can respond if you like.

Which brings you up to speed, if you’re still here.

Life is short and there are moorhens to say hello to (it’s been far too long), so I will frame this around a series of questions. (These may be leading questions, they may not be the right questions, and I am happy to be told they are not, and to be told what ARE the right questions.)

Did the report (which you can read here) have anything new about new strategies for a world where hope is dying, where our situational awareness is being destroyed not merely by accelerating corporate propaganda and government secrecy but also AI slop?

Nope. I am sorry, but having only one reference to social movements, and quite a glib one in the introduction, is just not on.

(“civil society” appears not at all. Apparently this is all going to be done by technocrats in bureaucracies. Yeah. Sure.)

Are vague invocations of “we” “being the implementation” helpful?

No. If anything, that sort of statement is more likely to have us staying within our smugospheres, doing things that make us feel good/give us status (or continue to deprive us of status perhaps?) and are easy because we’ve been doing them for ages, independently of their actual or likely success.

Why might someone push back against my performative world-weariness?

Nobody likes some smug performative world-weary asshole who pisses on everybody’s chips and apparently has no solutions of his own. (Actually, I have plenty, at a microlevel, which is what is required to make the meso and macro happen. But I totally understand how somebody might assume I don’t, either because they don’t know my stuff, aren’t interested in finding out or wouldn’t find it convenient to find out because then I would be less easily chided/dismissed). 

I keep meaning to put all this shit together in one place, but never do. Anyhoos, one the social movements, incentive structures and our inevitable doom, see here. 

Is this report much of a map of the existing terrain?

No.

You haven’t read the whole thing, how can you be sure?

I brown M&Med it.

Eh?

The Van Halen test. I asked some specific questions via my old friend Ctrl F.

Will you find any of these words? (Spoiler: no, so, not much of a map, imo)

  • Advertising
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Buen vivir
  • Permaculture
  • Positional goods
  • Predatory delay
  • Propaganda
  • Repression
  • Veganism
  • Vegetarianism

Only two mentions of capitalism, and one of those is a reference.

“More generally, the development of Western industrial capitalism since the 18th century is closely linked to a system based on the international division of labour, the mobilization of natural and human resources at the world level, and the European powers’ military and colonial domination over the rest of the planet.” (p.115)

and

Nogues-Marco, P. (2021). “Measuring colonial extraction: The East India Company’s rule and the drain of wealth (1757–1858)”. In: Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics 2.1, pp. 154–195.

Does this report, coming in at 136 pages, have anything other than another international body that will be instantly captured/de-fanged to suggest?

No. I don’t think it does (but I have yet to read all 136 pages)

Do these authors give any indication at all of knowing what a car is?

Not to me they don’t.

Are our metaphors all outa whack?

Why yes, yes they are.

What, ultimately, is the responsibility of intellectuals?

“There’s a huge cultural, intellectual, political battle that is going on. And we all have a role to play,” said Thomas Piketty, a co-director of the WIL and a professor at the Paris School of Economics. 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/04/world-inequality-lab-equality-academics-planetary-survival

Well, sure. But for me, you can’t go past Noam Chomsky – it is the responsibility of intellectuals to expose lies and tell the truth.


And the truth I keep coming back to is that ”we” (note the quote marks) are losing, and have been losing quite badly since the 70s (not that before then was exactly great). 

And if intellectuals are going to spend the bulk off their time building these probably necessary “visions” but NOT offer a fair assessment of how “we” have been failing on these questions for well over fifty years, then I do not think they are either exposing lies (sweet little lies we have been telling ourselves) or telling the truth.

James Baldwin said it best – “not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

The report doesn’t help us face our failures since (before) the 1972 Stockholm conference, at a state, corporate, civil society or social movements level. 

This is by technocrats, for technocrats, and will sink without trace. Meanwhile, the emissions will climb, the impacts will hit ever harder.


We are near the beginning of the Fafocene. Buckle up, mofos.  

That report, btw – 

Chancel, L., Mohren, C., Moshrif, R., Odersky, M., Piketty, T., Somanchi, A., et al. (2026), The Global Justice Report: A Plan for Equality & Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries, World Inequality Lab (gjp.wid.world).

Categories
Activism Australia Coal

June 5, 2006 – Rising Tide boat blockade

Nineteen years ago, on this day, June 5th, 2006, 70 brave people put their bodies on the line…

June 5, 2006, and Nov. 3, 2007: Rising Tide boat blockades of Newcastle port

On June 5, 2006, in a Rising Tide Australia action, 70 people used small boats to blockade the port of Newcastle, Australia, which exports 80 million tons of coal each year. The protest aimed to call attention to a planned expansion that would allow the port to export twice that amount.[1] The action was repeated by 100 people on Nov. 3, 2007: at this second action, participants attempted to block ships from entering the port for four hours, but police boats managed to escort three ships into the port. At one point, a police jetski rammed one woman’s kayak, resulting in her hospitalization.[2][3]

Citizen action and protests against coal in Australia – Global Energy Monitor

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 382ppm. As of 2026 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The broader context was that all the petitions, marches and begging of politicians had not worked. Emissions climbed, fossil intensive infrastructure projects kept getting approved (and still get approved).

The specific context was that the Howard government (like the Keating and Hawke governments before it) had mouthed occasional platitudes about “the environment” but were hell-bent on saying yes to whatever fossil extraction and export was proposed. 

What I think we can learn from this is that brave people have had the foresight and clarity – it hasn’t been enough. What was needed was broad-based movements. Oh well…

What happened next was that the exports and burning went on, the emissions and concentrations went up and up. The mainstream politicians have mostly given up pretending to give a shit.

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.

Also on this day: 

June 5, 1963  – JFK says yes to SST – All Our Yesterdays

June 5, 1967 –  Working Group on Atmospheric Pollution and Atmospheric Chemistry – All Our Yesterdays

June 5, 1993 and 2011- let’s have a march for #climate… It will make us feel good. – All Our Yesterdays

June 5, 1994 – that referendum idea is back again… – All Our Yesterdays

June 5, 2000 – Liberals pushback against Kyoto, a UN conspiracy… – All Our Yesterdays

June 5, 2001 – NSW Premier Bob Carr promises a climate advertising blitz – All Our Yesterdays

June 5, 2006 – IPA sets up astroturf outfit – All Our Yesterdays

Categories
Activism United States of America

May 29, 2025 – Daughter sues Exxon for mother’s heat death

One year ago, on this day, May 29th, 2025,

May 29 2025 case filed against Exxon etc by daughter of woman who died of hyperthermia in 2021 heat dome – https://climatecasechart.com/wp-content/uploads/case-documents/2025/20250529_docket-25-2-15986-8-SEA_complaint.pdf

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 427ppm. As of 2026 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The broader context was that from the late 70s, Exxon was well aware of the carbon dioxide threat, and had even helped oceanographers take samples of CO2 on their oil tankers, and had made many predictions and presentations for the C suite. But Exxon decided in the mid 1980s that it would change its stance on the reality of carbon dioxide build up, and it became one of the chief proponents and funders of outfits like the Global Climate Coalition, established in 1989 to resist both domestic US and international climate policy. And Exxon also funded various denialist groups, so much so that in 2006 the UK Royal Society had published an open letter asking them to knock it off. 

Exxon was also instrumental in the Dubya Bush White House 2001 to 2008 especially with their apparatchik in the CEQ writing climate policy and spreading denial.   

The specific context was that we’re now getting the long predicted weather anomalies, disasters sometimes happening much sooner than the scientists had thought, because, well, that’s nonlinear patterns for you. And what do you do when you’ve been hit by one of these well, you sue, if you can. You use court to try and do what the politics hasn’t been able to do. 

What I think we can learn from this is that most court cases fail, but that doesn’t mean you don’t use it as one of your venues for seeking justice, I guess. 

What happened next. 

On April 9 this year –

State Court in Washington Denied Fossil Fuel Defendants’ Request to Stay Case Pending Supreme Court’s Resolution of Boulder

Defendants’ motion to stay proceedings denied.

A trial court in Washington State denied fossil fuel industry defendants’ motion to stay proceedings pending the outcome of the U.S. Supreme Court’s review of Suncor Energy (U.S.A.) Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. The Washington trial court found that the outcome of the Boulder proceedings was “far from certain,” including whether the Court would issue a substantive ruling and whether the Court would resolve the issues in this case. The court also found that a potentially 14-month stay could prejudice the plaintiff’s ability to conduct discovery, that the public interest weighed against the stay, and that potential prejudice to the defendants was mitigated by the fact that some documents had already been preserved and some discovery had already been conducted in other similar cases.

https://www.climatecasechart.com/collections/leon-v-exxon-mobil-corp_b93f

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.

Also on this day: 

May 29, 1968 – UN body says “let’s have a conference, maybe?”- 

May 29, 1969 – “A Chemist Thinks about the Future” #Keeling #KeelingCurve

May 29, 1989- “We will all be flooded” –

May 29, 1992- ANAO says it will look at DPIE’s energy management programme 

May 29, 2007 “Climate Clever” ad campaign in attempt to save John Howard – All Our Yesterdays

Categories
Activism Event Report

Getting to the NEB of the issue: The National Emergency Briefing and what is to be done.

Last November eight experts made short presentations to hundreds of people gathered in Westminster Hall, London.

The topic? The climate and biodiversity emergencies that have been unfolding for decades now (the biodiversity crisis for centuries, tbf).

It was the National Emergency Briefing on climate & nature.

Well, now that has been turned into a documentary, with film showings in Europe and the rest of the world being encouraged. I went to a film showing last week in Adelaide.

In this short (ymmv) blog post I am going to talk about the film and what is missing from it, and what needs to be done now, (without holding out more than net zero hope that it will be).

What is good in the film

One is that it is short – 50 minutes is a nice round number.

All of the presentations are good (several are better than good). The presenters don’t waffle, they don’t batter people over the head with jargon.

What is cringe

NB I am not the target demographic, but the ‘Gogglebox’ side of things (cutting away to reaction shots, ‘chummy’ conversations on sofas with performative swearing was …. cringe. A mix of celebs (Deborah Meaden, Jennifer Saunders) and Joe and Jane Punter (mercifully not all white home counties). I understand why they did it, and maybe it is landing with other people. What the hell do I know.

What is ‘bad’/problematic in the film

I don’t know the order of the presentations, I suspect it more or less followed what appears in the film. The first five are ‘here is the nature of the shit we are in’. The last two are much more ‘but things are being done/can be done’. I TOTALLY get that you need to have some kind of arc, some kind of call to action. But you also need to remind people of the scale of the challenge and the need for much much more action at all levels of society. My fear is that those last two presentations will allow people to tick the box marked ‘I at least informed myself and anyway, things could get better.’ I wish there had been some sort of acknowledgement of this dynamic (which has played out repeatedly already).  Which brings us to

What is missing

Fifty minutes is not long, and if you’re trying to give all the speakers a fair shake, then, understandably you are going to end up with a certain “present-ism.”


But we really need to step back and see three things.


First, that the biodiversity crisis has been going on for a very very long time (hundreds of years). I may be wrong, but I didn’t hear anyone say ‘Sixth Extinction’.

Second, we should remember that Thatcher was told about carbon dioxide build-up repeatedly, from 1979 (that’s not a typo) onwards until finally making her pivotal speech in September 1988, and that until very recently there was an all-party consensus on the need for ‘urgent’ climate action.  And that there really wasn’t, once you take out the accounting tricks, much real UK action (Prof Kevin Anderson – a friend – nailed this, as he always does). So, it’s not as if our Lords and Masters weren’t dimly aware (and some of them are very dim) of the issue. It may be that information is not the actual problem here. 

Third that there have been repeated spasms (or, if you’re being less pejorative and more shiny happy) “waves” of concern about environmental matters.  The first big one was in the late 1960s through to the early 1970s.  Then another one between 1988 to 1992, then another from 2006 to 2009, and then one from 2018 to about 2020, when Covid came along and fried everyone’s brain. Alongside this we have seen states learn how to insulate themselves from public pressures. 


I have written about this a lot.  The two pieces I wish folks would read were these

There’s a third article I think is okay – Dear New Climate Activist (written 2018). And if you really want to go down the rabbit hole there are these about XR’s moment of maximum danger and a debate about whether it has (well, had) the right tactics. 

The point is, that social movements really struggle to sustain themselves, but withOUT an energised and engaged civil society, then governments and corporations do business as usual. The same business as usual that is wiping us out. See this from BHP, the world’s biggest mining corporation.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/may/25/bhp-files-internal-memo-revealed

George Monbiot’s latest column (May 27) is about the current government insulating itself from all critiques, all civil society input. It’s a good column but it too (for the same reasons as the film, mostly) also neglects to join the historical dots. There 

So, two final things.

The film calls on people to do three things

1.Spread the word

2. Join a group near you

3. Keep the pressure on the government


Hmmm.  That number two is – for a whole host of reasons – really really difficult. Groups fall apart, fingers and hearts get burned, and not in a ‘phoenix will rise’ kinda way, but in a ‘where shall we spread the ashes while singing a dirge?’ kinda way. If we are not honest abou t


The idea of film showings is great, but I have real concerns about how well this is executed.

The film showings MUST be short (intro, 50 minutes and then at most 40 minutes of other people, including a well-facilitated Q&A that is not (I repeat, NOT) dominated by speeches-’disguised’-as-questions from the usual suspects.

There are some really simple facilitation/meeting design techniques that can help with this, but I don’t see them being used anywhere, and I have my own reasons for believing it won’t happen (call me a cynic).

From 2014 – Meetings are institutionally sexist

From 2017 – We’ve got to stop meeting like this.

In their absence, new people will not get a word in edgeways, and the whole thing will be dominated by the usual suspects with – likely – the usual results.

(See also the aftermath of “The Age of Stupid” in 2008, “This Changes Everything” in 2014, Don’t Look Up etc etc (there have been some so bad I have tried to expunge them from my memory, a la Men In Black and the memory wand thing). There is an article to be written – “Documentary films/satires as tools of social change? Well, they could be, but not on their own…”)

Further reading

Interview with Abi Perrin: “academia isn’t responding robustly to a world that’s literally and metaphorically on fire”

Does anyone want me to do a seven minute “presentation I would have given at the NEB if they had asked me” post? If so, I will. If not, I am not sure I can be bothered (yes, I know I should use better bait when fishing for affirmation).

Categories
Activism Australia

“Bravadic hope” – the emotacycle, the 585 dead trees, and what next.

The “Stop the Chop” rally last night on the steps of Parliament House, on North Terrace, was at least as large as the one nine days earlier, before 585 trees got chopped down.

I have no doubt that many (most) who attended went feeling happy, energized (though how long that persists, we will come back to). Me, I came away with a very different set of emotions, ranging roughly from despondency to despair (I have learned not to bother, in these instances, with anger (1)).

The song remained, as I thought it would, very much the same.  I wrote this (DO Mourn, then Organise) about the dangers in not facing up to facts about where things were at, and I don’t intend to recap at any length.  The blog quotes Baldwin and Chomsky and is – but I would say this – worth your time.

Instead, I am going to talk about the likely consequences of this missed opportunity to engage people in granular involvement, rather than ‘mass’ engagement.

And I am going to introduce, of course, yet another made up word – this time, an adjective.

[FWIW – I am grappling with ideas about how we think about (collective) emotions in “social movements” and I’d be very happy to hear from people who are thinking about this too, whether they agree or disagree.  I will not engage with trolls, or with smug gaslighters who try to tell me that things happened at the rally that didn’t, in fact, happen.]

What happened?

About 2000 people (and around the same number as last time) gathered on the steps of Parliament House.  There was a better sound system and they heard various speeches telling them things they already knew.

There was no serious acknowledgement of the emotional toll that losing the battle for 585 trees would have had.

There were no concrete specific actions for people to take beyond “sign a petition” (because apparently “they can’t ignore us” except they have) and to turn up either the following morning at some random thing (too short notice) or else on Saturday June 6th in Victoria Park to tie some yellow ribbons around threatened trees.

There was repeated chanting of ‘stop the chop’ (From a biased psychoanalytic perspective it was as if people were willing the past week not to have happened, pretending it hadn’t. Wanting to disappear into a fugue state.

There was repeated claims that the “movement” was growing. The only evidence adduced for this that I heard was that 47000 people had signed a petition (there was, apparently though, a problem with this petition, because a different one – it was not clear for what – was being set up – and people could sign it on the six clipboards circulating).

This put me very much in mind of that line from Casablanca “You know how you sound, Mr. Blaine? Like a man who’s trying to convince himself of something he doesn’t believe in his heart.”

Watch the clip here.

For me, it all comes back, as it did a month ago, when the Australian Conservation Foundation and Conservation Foundation of South Australia co-hosted a shamefully bad event, to the question of what do you think a movement is? To quote myself:

It comes down to what your definition of “movement” is.  

If you believe, as Adam Bandt and his colleagues seem to, that a movement is a bunch of people from a Big Organisation, jetting in from their HQ and standing on a stage, offering “hope,” authenticity and validation to ranks of people who are sat mutely in rows, wanting their (begging) bowls filled up, then Friday was another success in a long line of successes.

If you believe, as I and a few (many?) other people do, that a movement is made up of individuals, small groups, large groups, pulling mostly in the same direction, as frenemies, helping each other out, learning from each other, sharing ideas and resources, then Friday night was another catastrophic shit-show/missed opportunity in a world that can’t afford any more missed opportunities.

What was the broader context

The defeat of the “left” and the progressive (NOT the same thing) ecological forces over the last 60 years.  The inability to democratize the state and to stop its total (rather than partial) capture by corporate and technocratic interests, especially in response to the public pressure upsurges of the 1960s and 1970s.

There are lots of factors here. One is the ‘professionalisation’ of campaigning groups and ‘Non-governmental organisations’ (NGOs), so that they become captured by middle-class/tertiary-educated people and  – crucially – the perspectives of those people.  It was fascinating that the “Conservation Council of South Australia” didn’t even bother to send out an email in advance of the rally. They are ducking and covering.


What was the specific context

In 2023 the Malinauskas government passed some absurdly repressive laws (mentioned – and booed – last night) raising the maximum fine for various forms of protest (e.g. trespass) from $750 to $50,000. Well, it worked. As nobody at the rally mentioned, the Australian Energy Producers had just held a conference on North Terrace and bar a few Extinction Rebellion people, nada.

There is a growing sense of loneliness, atomization, despair in the air, and people are quite understandably desperate to congregate with other people who think and feel like them, even if it is only briefly, only futile. It’s apparently ‘better than nothing’.

What do we learn?

Here’s the promised neologisim.  Are you ready?  Bravadic.

Bravado is the noun – meaning blustering swaggering conduct. 

Well, last night felt very much like a display of ‘bravadic hope’, of people gathered, like all the animals of Animal Farm (except the pigs and dogs) to sing ‘Beasts of England’ as a way of soothing themselves. (see here for the Animal Farm quote, and a bonus snark about a terrible student meeting).

Why is this so?  It’s partly because (thanks to fifty plus years of losing) we don’t have expectations or norms about how leaders need to nurture actual movement-building techniques in social movement organisations, during campaigns. It’s always possible to rabble (a)rouse, without helping people develop the tools, spaces, language to cope with inevitable setbacks. Instead, we allow a silence to cover (in the short term) those wounds. (I will write more on this soon, and link to it). We come to think of a campaign as a series of Big Events, rather than granular slogs.  I coined the term emotacycle for just these purposes. What we are seeing here, I reckon, is the peak of an emotacycle. 

What do I think will happen next (NB it’s the future, so wtaf do I know?).

  • The anger and energy on display over the last week will dissipate. Not among everyone, but among enough people to make a serious difference at the level of a ‘movement’. The Saturday June 6th event will be significantly smaller (harder to get to, people have other responsibilities that don’t impinge on a Weds/Friday evening for an hour, people don’t see the point).
  • A feeling of ‘well, I’ll get involved again if I have to closer to the time of the Next Big Threat’ will kick in.
  • The opportunity to do something different, something that actually counts as movement-building, will be (further) squandered.

What needed to happen

There were two thousand people present. I already have written two speeches about what needed to be done. You can read them here and here.

Basically, the expectation needed to be created that those present would not simply go home, but they would get together with people they knew, and think hard about all the things that they could do with existing skills and knowledge, and the other tasks that needed doing, but for which skills and knowledge might be in short supply.  People needed to be told that turning up at a rally now and then, supplemented by signing a petition and being chronically online battling trolls in a Facebook group, Is. Not. Enough.

Footnotes

(1) This not because I have become a more mature or calmer person, but because I have at least managed to massage my expectations down down down).

Categories
Activism Australia

*DO* Mourn, and then Organise

“Don’t mourn, organise”

Joe Hill (of the International Workers of the World)

[Update – speech I won’t give at the bottom of this post]

The American novelist, thinker and civil rights activist James Baldwin wrote, in January 1962, that  “not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Ahead of another rally on the steps of Parliament House on Friday 22nd May (5.30 to 6.30), I think we need to face a few facts (as I see them – your mileage may vary).

  1. (It seems to me that ) Malinauskas is in a much stronger position than he was a week ago.

First and foremost, he has completed the chopping down of the trees – there is no physical thing to defend anymore. [update – there may be some remnants, but the major job of work has been done, I think.]

Second, with the help of the Advertiser (of which more in a separate blog post) and all mass media he has painted his opponents as ‘extremists’ and smeared the lot of them (1).  Sure, it won’t have worked as a smear on everyone, but it will have made some people reluctant to engage with future campaigns (the point of it is, after all, to raise the costs of ‘recruitment’ and ‘retention’). This is not new. See this below from 1970, with NSW Premier Robin Askin talking about ‘professional agitators’.

  1. A significant number of people will be (understandably!) demoralised, disenchanted.  This will especially be the case if the rally on Friday is smaller than the 2,000 is who turned up last Wednesday. 

I just read this on Facebook, and I think it is accurate (emphasis added) –

 I know yesterday was disappointing, honestly, the past week has been tough. A lot of us are feeling depleted, angry, depressed.. Just tonight I even ate half a tub of ice cream trying to cope 😬

The point is that those people who were previously engaged in “activism”, or have strong existing sympathetic networks will be better able to deal with those feelings, but those who are – for whatever reason – more isolated, will be having a really really tough time of it.  Grief can easily curdle into cynicism and disengagement.

  1. If Malinauskas is stronger (some will dispute this) and ‘we’ are weaker (some will dispute this) then this makes the campaigns to come (MotoGP, Fracking moratorium) more difficult. Momentum counts for a lot.

Crucially, then, the same mistakes must not be committed.

For me, the rally on Wednesday May 13 was a seriously missed opportunity to get those who attended (and those who didn’t) energised, connected and inspired.  There were very very few concrete and engaging actions being suggested. It was (and I was listening closely) mostly about what other people (politicians) were already doing, and a petition to sign).


I wrote a blog about this, and suggested that the number 585 could have been used. Here is the end of a ‘speech I would have given’

This is great. Thank you. But this is not enough.  We need more. So a final pledge is coming up..

We need artists, poets, songs. We need tiktok videos, we need memes, slogans. We need blogs. We need letters to the Advertiser.  Sorry- I was just playing with you.  We need to bypass the Murdoch media. We need lawyers, we need conversations, we need networks. We need people standing outside football matches with placards and information about what is being done by this government, and in whose benefits. We need – well, we need more ideas than I have, we need all the ideas, skills and energy that YOU have. 

Does each of you pledge to go home from here and – alone or with your friends – come up with a list of five things you all can do, with your knowledge, your skills, your networks, your time?  Then DO those things, get better at those actions. Share those actions? Do you?

(Hopefully ‘yes’)

  • Talk to five people
  • Write an eight sentence letter to the Premier and your MP 
  • Come up with a list of five things to do.

If you pledge it, then on three, 585!

(hopefully people chant 585)

What is to be done

The American linguist Noam Chomsky once wrote

“If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that’s something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can’t live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organizations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.” 

It is not clear to me that the organisations trying, valiantly, to defend the parklands are able to do this – time will tell, she usually does (1). 

We have to face facts (which doesn’t guarantee that we will ultimately change them).

The parklands are under siege. They have been before. This below is from 1984.

We have to develop skills, knowledge, relationships. We have to spot where we have absolute lacks or single-points of failures in our organisations and networks. That takes time, effort and does not come with any endorphins.

We have to give guidance, encouragement and support (emotional, intellectual etc) to people who are new, who have limited time, who are despairing

We have to acknowledge that there are risks in despair leading people into de-activation or into (more) conspiracy theories, or into smugness and dismissal of posts (like my last one and this one too presumably) that try to raise questions of efficacy.

Friday’s rally will – I presume – predominantly be attended by a subset of those who were there last Wednesday. The mood will be angry, sombre. There will probably be some recriminations, some hopelessness.  I don’t think the ‘stop the chop’ chant will work in the same way.

All this is an enormous challenge for the speakers, for the strategists.

Not an insurmountable one, but enormous. A bit like the polycrisis we face – of a collapsing biosphere, hollowed-out democracy, accelerating wealth inequality, and AI-enshittification.

Happy times. 

Footnotes

  1. I’d like to believe that nobody could be stupid enough to have tried to doxx Malinauskas, that it must have been a ‘false flag’. But I also know that – sadly – it is entirely possible that it was simply an own goal by people unable to think through the likely consequences of their actions.  
  2. Time doesn’t always tell– see Nigel Balchin’s novel The Small Back Room.

Four minute speech I won’t give at the rally on Friday May 23

I want to take you to a bad place. Then, we come back, and we start walking, together, to a better place.

Let’s remember the last week. The trees being chopped down, the possums and birds fleeing. The naked contempt that the Premier has for democratic norms, for heritage, for Mij Tanith and the others who put their bodies in the way of his ego.

Just for a few seconds stand in your anger, your despair, your sense of hopelessness.

It’s horrible, isn’t it? Not a place to stay, not a place to return to.

We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it.  We have to go through it.

We have to go through it, together, helping each other as we walk.

If we want to be in better shape a year from today, we have to walk together, we have to grow, learn, organise and perhaps win.

We have to grow, as individuals and groups. We have to grow our skills. So many, but a key one is to become good at having conversations with people who don’t know what is going on, or are too busy to be involved, or have swallowed the lies and the smears.

We have to grow the size of our groups, by making it easier for busy people, unconfident people, to be meaningfully involved without coming to endless meetings, or being online 24/7.

We have to learn – the history of our state – and it didn’t begin in 1836. The politics and economics of the moment. We have to learn how social movements work. We have to learn from our past successes and mistakes. We have to learn how protest movements grow and win or lose, how they get distracted, divided, repressed.

We have to organise – along our streets, our places of work and worship, among our friends and acquaintances. And today’s stranger is tomorrow’s acquaintance may well be next year’s firm friend. By organise I do not mean everyone joins a party and takes orders from on high. I mean we share skills and knowledge, we learn from others, we strengthen the ties of those all around us to form networks, overlapping, stronger here than there, so that w.

Not everyone has to become expert at everything, but all of us can – and must – get better at something. All of us can – and must – contribute to growing, learning, organising. 

Over a hundred years ago, a real labour leader – as opposed to Malinauskus – Joe Hill, was executed.  Famously, he said  ‘don’t mourn, organise.’

Nine days ago we stood here, chanting “stop the chop.” Today we are chanting “stop the chop – never again”. 

Today  I say to you,  do mourn, but then organise. Grow, learn, organise, and, a year from now, we can be winning.