LONDON — When I first heard the bongos on my daily commute, I rolled my eyes. I cross Waterloo Bridge by bike to get to work. Normally, that means weaving between buses. But last week, it was green activists who were creating the obstacle course, with a healing-fields-at-Glastonbury vibe, living up to all the tree-hugger stereotypes.
Extinction Rebellion — the movement occupying several London landmarks to demand action on climate change — certainly caused disruption: 55 bus routes were closed, affecting half a million people. More than 1,000 people were arrested, with 53 charged during just a week of protests. The protest movement’s tactics and image are divisive, and its demographic skews white and privileged.
But on the street, they have been met more with mild bemusement than angry backlash. Some bystanders even welcome the pop-up pockets of pedestrianization across the city. A YouGov poll for the Times last week found that over a third of Brits say they support the protesters.
The fact is, these “prancing hippies,” to borrow the Daily Mail’s description, have a point.
Leaders have become complacent about climate change. Yes, the U.K. supports the Paris Agreement. Yes, it has a pioneering climate change act. And no, that is not enough to prevent dangerous disruption to the natural world. These activists have a half-decent idea for how to do better.
The Conservative government does not have policies in place to stay within next decade’s carbon budgets.
Our current response to climate change is indisputably inadequate. The U.N. climate deal struck in Paris in 2015 was the beginning of a process, not a job done. It set the goal of holding global temperature rise “well below 2 degrees Celsius” aiming for 1.5 degrees Celsius. (We’re already at 1 degree Celsius over pre-industrial levels). The building blocks are voluntary national emissions targets that — guess what — are not collectively up to the task.
Britain has a relatively good record. It is hitting its emissions targets, thanks to a coal power phase-out so painless it barely makes the news. Its 2008 climate law binds governments to a series of decreasing “carbon budgets,” set and monitored by an independent watchdog in line with a 2 degrees Celsius global warming limit. A handful of other countries are adopting this model, which helps to sustain climate policy beyond short-term electoral cycles.
Last year, though, a blockbuster science report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) hammered home that 2 degrees Celsius is no “safe” guardrail. It’s a death sentence for coral reefs worldwide and puts millions more people in the path of weather disaster.
The Conservative government does not have policies in place to stay within next decade’s carbon budgets. What is more, it has asked the Committee on Climate Change how to bring these budgets in line with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degrees Celsius stretch goal. The answer can only be to cut carbon faster.
Extinction Rebellion climate change activists lie on the floor as they perform a mass “die in” in the main hall of the Natural History Museum in London | Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images
Ultimately, stabilizing the climate means bringing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero. Though it did not always look that way, cleaning up electricity is the easy part: Wind and solar power costs are falling fast. Next come the transport, heating, heavy industry and farming sectors, where solutions are less mature — not to mention the controversial business of negative emissions.
Which brings us to Extinction Rebellion’s demands.
The first is simply to “tell the truth.” Scientific projections about the risks of climate change can seem dry; these activists have the imagination to consider their implications and feel the fear.
The second is to cut U.K. emissions to net zero by 2025. It’s an extreme target, with unclear origins. The IPCC advised that, to meet the 1.5-degree Celsius goal, we would have to achieve net zero by 2050 globally. Rich countries are expected to go furthest, fastest, but no credible model has suggested they can get there in six years flat.
It is the movement’s third ask that holds most promise, being both radical and pragmatic. They want to set up a citizens’ assembly on “climate and ecological justice” to steer policy.
In this, they’ve taken inspiration from Ireland, where a democratic experiment with citizens’ assemblies is most famous for leading to the repeal of a constitutional ban on abortion. A group of citizens in Ireland have also spent two weekends grilling climate experts and came up with some bold recommendations, which are working their way through traditional government institutions.
If it is serious about citizen participation, Extinction Rebellion must accept the general public may not share its revolutionary zeal.
The idea of “deliberative democracy” is to bring together experts with a cross-section of society, to come to solutions that are both effective and fair. Rely on experts to the exclusion of marginalized groups, and you get France’s Yellow Jackets; go too far the other way and you get Brexit.
In Britain, the inability of elected representatives to deliver the “will of the people” to leave the EU has renewed interest in this approach.
It takes time to brief random citizens on complex issues. The process and framing matters: Asking non-experts to find a path to net zero by 2025 would be setting them up for irrelevance. Given the right tools, though, Ireland’s example shows people can negotiate tricky tradeoffs in a way that legitimizes ambitious reform.
If it is serious about citizen participation, Extinction Rebellion must accept the general public may not share its revolutionary zeal. For its part, if the government wants to defuse the protests, a citizens’ assembly is a smart option.
Megan Darby is deputy editor at Climate Home.