On January 24 2017, five years ago, a judge in the United States caused controversy when he decided to frame climate change as a matter of opinion, rather than settled scientific fact
A Washington state judge has sparked outrage for remarks questioning the existence of climate change and the role of humans in global warming. During the high-profile trial of Ken Ward, a climate activist facing 30 years in prison for shutting down an oil pipeline, Judge Michael E Rickert said: “I don’t know what everybody’s beliefs are on [climate change], but I know that there’s tremendous controversy over the fact whether it even exists. And even if people believe that it does or it doesn’t, the extent of what we’re doing to ourselves and our climate and our planet, there’s great controversy over that.” The Skagit County judge made the comments on 24 January while addressing Ward’s request to present a “necessity defense” in court, meaning he would argue that the grave threat of climate change justified civil disobedience. [link]
We have to remember the very successful campaigns in the early 90s. To shift public opinion, especially among older white guys from climate science as a thing to climate science as part of a culture war.
Why this matters: Yes, you can use the legal system as one means by which to try to ‘shift the dial.’ But it’s by no means the only one. Most of the people using the law know that, they don’t need telling from me.
Just days before this post went up, activists fighting the supine “regulator” of oil and gas extraction from the North Sea lost their case, because the judge said, well, read it and weep.
[Update 31st January – see foot of this post for comment by David Taylor]
On Friday 14th January 1972 a bombshell report, ‘A Blueprint for Survival,’ was released onto an increasingly worried world. Produced by the team at The Ecologist, it laid out not just the environmental and social problems, but also offered – the clue is in the name – a blueprint for survival.
Fifty years is a nice round number for reflecting, and this 30 page report [pdf, word.doc] is designed to help with that.
It explains little of the background to the report – the world it entered, who wrote it, how it was received
It doesn’t go into a great deal of detail about what the Blueprint actually says – read it yourself!
It does however talk about what happened next – what the media response, and the political response was [spoilers – scientists warning of trouble ahead will be derided as scare-mongerers, the public’s attention span is short, it’s really hard to ‘capture the moment’ – to do so you need absorptive capacity up the wazoo].
For any Doctor Who fans out there – there’s mention of two classic Pertwee stories.
It then talks a bit about the longer-term, and the birth of the “Ecology Party” (now known as the Green Party), before turning to some of the lessons we might learn around
Abeyance
Absorptive Capacity
Arrogance
Would love to hear people’s comments
Comment received on 31st January 2022 by one of the people behind the excellent “Green History UK” website.
I’ve read your article and it’s got loads of good perspectives. Hopefully we can add that to the site as well.
I trust you won’t mind if I draw your attention to one or two issues where I have a different perspective:-
The founders of PEOPLE always wrote the name in capitals, not lower case.
They did not, initially call themselves a ‘political party’. If you look at the early PEOPLE literature you will see that they were always just called ‘PEOPLE’. On some occasions (as on the material advertising the Jigsaw Conference) they referred to themselves as a ‘movement’. . Lesley W had researched the issue and found that you didn’t have to be a ‘party’ to contest an election, so they weren’t. It was others, particularly journalists, who referred to them as a ‘party’, because they contested elections. This later led to PEOPLE referring to themselves as both a ‘movement’ and a ‘party’.
In that it intended to contest elections Movement for Survival was as much a ‘party’ as PEOPLE. The two movements had similar strategies. This isn’t surprising as PEOPLE arose directly from Survival. The similarity wasn’t just because PEOPLE took over Movement’s box of contacts. The PEOPLE founders were also supporters of Movement and the Whittakers, in particular, had been meeting with Teddy throughout 1972. Teddy told me back then how delighted he was to have found a group of professional people (estate agent, solicitors) to take over Movement. There was no formal handover but the reality was that PEOPLE grew directly out of Movement, and took it over. There is a widespread misconception (reinforced by repetition) that the modern Green Party began when PEOPLE was publicly launched in February 1973. This ‘fact’ was one of the answers in a recent Mastermind quiz. The truth is that Survival’s launch, in the January edition of the Ecologist magazine, marked the actual beginning of the global movement of green parties.
You describe Goldsmith as ‘authoritarian’. During his time he was labelled many things -all of them wrong really. There were no good labels for what he was espousing. This is understandable as he was originating a new political philosophy and it didn’t fit comfortably into any of the existing categories. You describe Blueprint as promoting ‘radical de-centralisation’. I think this phrase better describes Teddy’s outlook. He was, after all, a big admirer of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin…
Thank you for what you’re doing. We need this history!
On this day in 2013 an activist called Jonathan Moylan sent out a fake press release, purporting to be from a major Australian bank, saying it was withdrawing funding for the Whitehaven Coal mine at Maules Creek. The share price briefly plummeted.
Why this matters – this issue became part of the culture wars over coal and climate in Australia, in the lead up to the 2013 federal election that saw the ALP swept from office after only 6 years. The Coalition has been in charge ever since, regularly toppling its own leaders while exacerbating the climate crisis through a … well, it’s an ugly ugly story.
As for Moylan, well he escaped a jail term. [These sorts of non-violent direct actions are now even more illegal than they were. We can expect to see a lot more of them between now and the breakdown(s).] And the mine? Well, what do you think?
On this day, next year,… no wait, what? Yes 2023. I thought it worth discussing what I used to call the “January 4 2023 problem”, since we’re almost there.
On June 12 of 2019, near the beginning of the latest wave of concern about climate change, I wrote an article which you can read here.
The TL:DR. Sustaining social movement organizations is really difficult, and especially so around climate change. Has Climate Emergency Manchester, the group I was until recently involved in, solved the January 4 2023 problem?
Twitter – @ClimateEmergMcr
It’s too early to say, obviously, but the signs are encouraging. And here’s what Chloe Jeffries had to say
From January 4 2022 through to January 4 2023 CEM has a clear vision of what it is trying to do but will be faced with its toughest challenges yet. You might think that setting up a group would be the most difficult stage. Or that our momentum stalled as the pandemic first hit. But CEM was founded at the start of an upswing in attention to the climate crisis. That cycle is over. We can debate when it next picks up, and from what baseline. But in 2022 we have to sustain a social movement organisation as much public and media interest drifts elsewhere.
This is why the ‘4th January problem’ is important over the next 12 months. It will keep us focused, or help us to reset when tasks slip or a mistake is made. Or, when a piece we put out sinks without trace. We have several things in our favour; a strong core group, bolstered by two new members who worked closely with us for over a year before joining the inner sanctum; a healthy cohort of new volunteers who became involved in the final stretch of the last attention cycle (COP26) and who have already cut their teeth on concrete tasks. We have good relationships with a wider group of supporters and organisations and must use this effectively in the coming year. It will be difficult for them too. CEM also ended 2021 on a high, with a strong piece of research (on Manchester’s airport hypocrisy). December outputs have the potential to tie us through the Christmas and New Year torpor.
Solving the 4th January 2023 problem will remain the goal, but that does not mean that our tactics will stay the same right through, that we march on regardless (if anything we will do even less marching, and we never did much). I’m conscious that some of CEM’s 2019 / 2020 repertoire no longer works as well as it once did, even if innovative when first trialled. To give an example, in our reporting of Manchester City Council’s scrutiny committees, the format of one volunteer assigned to one committee has peaked. Volunteers whose committees never discuss climate get disillusioned sharp; others go native on their patch. Meanwhile, we tie up resources covering 2.5hr meetings with little or no implications for the climate emergency and then cannot cover a damning report put out by the Manchester Climate Change Agency or (likely in 2022) a fuzzy statement by the new council leader. With the 4th January problem in sight, we should be able to spot issues around functioning and effectiveness sooner and adapt (in the example above, this will be through re-assigning volunteers and giving individuals a different brief, to follow an issue rather than a committee). Already a fresh programme of work we have begun on climate change and health inequalities is shaking up the kaleidoscope pieces, bringing some different names (both from the council and civil society) into play.
What happens after 4th January 2023? Even once this date is passed, I can see the value in setting a new date to backcast from and for this to again fall early in the calendar year. Invariably those first few weeks prove tough for sustaining morale, for all the recurring reasons that the original 2019 article points out. Since then, the cost of living crisis has only worsened. The coming years will see rising inflation and energy bills that bite hard in winter and make it hard to start work with folk we don’t already know.
On the surface, it may look like little is happening with policymakers or government at this time of year too, slumping back after the seasonal break. But is that entirely true? I hope the other entries in this series provide some evidence to the contrary. A gap in public meetings might remind us that plenty goes on behind closed doors. Local authorities have budgets to sign off. And you can usually bury bad news under a snowdrift. On my Christmas walks in 2021/2, I have been listening to Obama’s account of his first term in office (all politicians and political memoirs are flawed, but at 29hrs it gives great insight into the workings of government). The response to the financial crisis is a revealing episode (or three). Much was hammered out with the banks in early January 2009, before the inauguration. Not all the negotiations were reported in the press. Yet it struck me that many at the time might have seen what they wanted to see. If you remained wedded to the notion that January is all about easing back in, and looking far out on the horizon at the year ahead, you could have filled your boots on long reads about the new family at the White House, who might sing at the swearing in and What This All Meant for America. But if you maintained what we in CEM call ‘situational awareness’, you might have recognised that crucial decisions about the economy were being made day-by-day. In 2009, we got a competent tinkering of capitalism. In Manchester 2022, we also have a new leader who will make roughly the right public noises (including on climate) but not overhaul the system. Alongside the 4 January 2023 problem of sustenance / abeyance, we have the problem that comes with every new year (heightened in Manchester in 2022) of not letting power off the hook. Don’t start unsustainably, but don’t go gently into the new year.
On this day, 30 years ago, to coincide with the visit of President George HW Bush to Australia, Greenpeace Australia took out newspaper adverts of the Statue of Liberty with smoke billowing from her torch, calling on the United States to drastically reduce its carbon emissions.
The context for this was that negotiations for the climate treaty to be signed in Rio later that year were well underway. And all the signs were that the US would play a spoiling role.
This matters, because that’s exactly what Uncle Sam did. The French said rightly, that targets and timetables for emissions reductions by wealthy countries should be included in the text of the treaty. The Americans replied, “if you put those in, we’re not coming.” The French blinked, reasoning that timetables and targets could be inserted later. They were at Kyoto, vastly inadequate, but there. And then the Americans didn’t ratify and withdrew from the process.
We are still living with the consequences of this. And our children, other people’s children, other people’s children will all also live with those. Not to mention all the other species we “share” this planet with.
It’s always worth remembering that these agreements that we live with now were the result of previous proposals, compromises and in this case -as in many others – naked veto power.
