Professor Jason Scott-Warren (Twitter account here) is the organiser of an open letter signed by 2500 academics to the Royal Society about its climate stance. He has kindly answered a few questions about the campaign. (You can read an August 2023 article in The Guardian here. There’s a piece in the Financial Times [paywalled] today, about the RS saying ,in effect, “yeah, nah.”
BTW, the Royal Society has – understandably – a long history in the UK around climate change, which will have to wait for another day. For now, there’s this from 2006, when it chided Exxon for funding denialist groups.
1. What is the campaign trying to achieve?
The campaign is asking the Royal Society to speak out about the fossil fuel industry and how dangerous it is, both in its determination to carry on exploring for new reserves and in its lobbying activities. Both aspects of its behaviour should be red lights for scientists, at a time when the Paris Agreement goals are hanging by a thread. If the Royal Society were to make a statement about this, it would help to galvanise action in the UK academic community, and to sway public discourse.
2. How did it get going?
I’ve been involved in campaigns at the University of Cambridge, initially to persuade the University to divest from fossil fuel companies and more recently to ask it to cut all research and philanthropic ties with them. It became clear to me that some scientists at the University were willing to give the likes of BP and Shell the benefit of the doubt because the Royal Society had not given a clear steer in this area. So I decided to start an open letter calling for an unambiguous statement. The letter now has more than 2500 signatures from UK academics.
3. What has the Royal Society’s response been – was it in anyway surprising?
The Royal Society has engaged with us, albeit at a pace that has not always inspired confidence. They agreed to hold a meeting with a small group of signatories, and discussed our demands in detail. But we were not surprised when they eventually turned our request down, pointing to all the other worthy things that they were doing on climate, and saying it would be inappropriate to condemn one sector ‘within a complex system where multiple actors need to engage urgently with these challenges’.
Decoded, this means they have swallowed the fiction that fossil fuel companies are ‘part of the solution’. At some point in the future, the story goes, these companies are going to suck all the carbon out of the atmosphere and bury it under the ocean, just so long as they can carry on generating obscene profits in the here-and-now. The susceptibility of the Royal Society to this narrative is not entirely surprising. The idea of a technological solution to the climate problem flatters their rather narrow sense of their mission. More broadly, the entanglement of some parts of the scientific establishment with the petrochemical industry is so deep that they cannot register what is happening before their eyes. They cannot admit that they have created a machine that has run out of control, and which is rapidly destroying the biosphere.
4. What are the next stages, and what help are you looking for?
In a way, this is all just more evidence (as if we needed it) that petitions and polite debates don’t work. Money trumps everything, and institutions would rather watch the world burn than bite the hand that feeds them. We need more direct action to demand changes that will never come by asking nicely. But I do think we need to keep putting pressure on the timid institutions that we inhabit, and to alert them to the fact that they have urgent moral responsibilities that they are failing to address. Their behaviour is going to look as shameful in retrospect as propping up the slave trade or apartheid. They still have an opportunity to rectify this.
5. Anything else you’d like to say.
We should celebrate the institutions that are taking a stand in this area—the UN, the International Energy Agency, the BMA and others.
