by Alice Gato
We are in a crisis.
I’m not referring to the climate crisis. I’m referring to the climate justice movement crisis.
In 2019, we had millions of people in the streets worldwide, demanding that governments do more. 5 years later, governments and companies did more: they invested on and burnt more fossil fuels every year, and made more profits off of them too. We all know the results of this: temperatures are on the rise and millions of people are being sentenced to death, starvation or displacement. We have long reached past the time where it’s acceptable to wait for governments and companies to “do more”. In 2024, the hottest year on record, not only do we not have a movement that can put millions of people in the streets for climate justice, but that movement would still fail if it continued to demand governments to solve the crisis they’ve created.
To achieve climate justice we have 5 years left to make sure the world stays below 1.5ºC to 2ºC warming by 2100. We, climate realist organizers, have the responsibility to not only revive the movement, but to re-anchor it on to the right ambition.
That re-anchoring needs to be based on honesty about two major things:
1) Urgency. We cannot escape climate deadlines: our organizations’ plans need to be based on the scientific fact that in order to avoid climate and social collapse we need to cut half of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. For the global north, this means ending fossil fuels by 2030.
2) System change. We need to seriously ask ourselves and each other if we actually believe this can be done within capitalism. Do we really think that capitalism would survive if there was an end to fossil fuels in the global north by 2030? If not, how can we keep pressuring this system into agreeing with measures that are utterly incompatible with its maintenance?
The lack of honesty (either internal, or just external) on these two aspects is one of the root causes of our movement crisis. It’s not surprising that not only the general public, but also organizers, are falling into despair. In these last decades, we have systematically been saying to people – and reinforcing this belief amongst the movement organizers – that we need people to march, blockade or sit on a road to force governments to agree to our demands. During these decades, emissions and temperatures have continued to increase year after year.
If we want to win, we need to stop deluding the people (and probably ourselves). Governments and companies will not solve the crisis they created. It’s their feet on the accelerator towards climate hell. We need to stop trying to convince them to choose a different route. We need to stop them and take the wheel. We need to do this fast because the doors to climate hell are already wide open.
This is the decisive decade for climate justice to be won. We need a movement that we’ve never had: a movement that fights to stay below 1.5ºC to 2ºC warming by 2100. Such a movement needs to accept the task of achieving system change by 2030. In short, we need to build a ruptural climate justice movement.
This is a proposal on how we can start to get out of this mess and build the ruptural movement we need, starting this spring with an international coordinated action to stop the weapons of mass destruction pointed by governments and companies against peoples’ lives. This proposal is aimed at all the organizers that recognize the urgency of the climate crisis, and that haven’t given up on trying to win before we lose everything.
The proposal consists on a four-fold plan of action:
1. Accept that governments and companies have declared war against society and the planet
We need to accept that the climate crisis and all its impacts are a premeditated and coordinated act of violence led by governments and companies against society and the planet.
Governments and companies have known for decades that continuing to extract and burn fossil fuels would lead to more displacements than all previous wars put together and more deaths than it’s possible to count. They have consciously chosen to continue to shell humanity with carbon bombs, leading us towards social and climate collapse. They have been choosing to kill us for their profits for decades. They have declared war against society and the planet.
This is not a metaphor. Every way in which we can try to comprehend and explain the climate crisis is an understatement. This is also not just a narrative or slogan, it is a central and honest analysis about what is happening, that brings with it serious strategical consequences. It is the base for how we need to operate moving forward, and it’s where we need to anchor the people and the movement.
2. Don’t pressure the war criminals, focus on those responsible to stop this war
Although governments and companies are the ones to blame, asking them to stop or pressuring them is a waste of time and energy. They have declared war against us. Asking them to stop would be as pointless as pressuring Hitler to stop the Holocaust or as ineffective as asking a dictator for more freedom.
So, although they are the ones to blame, it is us, common people everywhere, who are responsible for stopping this war, because we know they will not do it. Achieving an end to fossil fuels in the global north by 2030 and any other step required to stop this war is a responsibility that lies with us, the people, not the war criminals.
3. Targeting weapons of mass destruction
Fossil fuel infrastructures are weapons of mass destruction pointed by governments and companies towards our lives and the lives of everyone we care about. We know that war criminals cannot be pressured into giving up the arms through which they have been killing us for decades.
We need people to stop consenting with this war, because we are the only ones who can stop it, together. We should, through public disruption, tell people they need to stop consenting with the ongoing destruction and resist. But it’s through actions that focus on disrupting the weapons of mass destruction that we can show what society will need to do in order to stop the war, achieving the end of fossil fuels by 2030 and any other measure to stop the attacks against our lives.
This doesn’t mean abandoning public disruption, we can have both (either simultaneously, or in some coordinated fashion), but it means that we also need to 1) show what are the weapons threatening millions of lives, and to reat them as such; 2) show that, knowing that governments and companies will not be pressured into dismantling their weapons of mass destruction, a big part of resisting to this war will imply that the people carry out the necessary dismantlement.
At the same time, acting together by targeting these weapons of mass destruction in different countries simultaneously can allow us to start restoring some of the faith lost in the movement. This can reopen the possibility in peoples’ minds that the ongoing destruction can be stopped, if we all start resisting it.
4. Movement learning process
We need an honest reflection of our movement failures and of our own failures. And we need to share our learnings amongst committed organizers in order to be able to fail forwards.
At a time where our movement seems to be lost and committed organizers are looking for ways out, we need open and honest conversations about what these ways out are.
In practice, this means that we will need to create processes that enable us to have consequential evaluations and strategic discussions between all the organizers executing this proposal. We will need to regularly evaluate together if what we are doing is leading us closer to our goal and to be able to change what we are doing otherwise.
Taking on this approach also means sharing our failures, learnings and reflections with other movement organizers and groups, and to be able to engage in strategic discussions with them as well. We will need to be attentive to what else is going on, and to find ways that enable us to articulate the different parts of our movement that are anchored on the same ambition, in order to increase our overall strength.
This will imply honesty, accountability, openness, flexibility, disagreements, vulnerability, and investment on articulation.
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This is not an action proposal. This is a proposal to build a movement that can stop the war governments and companies have declared against society and the planet before it is too late, starting this spring.
The actions we do are not an end in itself, they need to be part of a broader plan to which we can look and say “if this plan worked, we could win”. A coordinated action in the spring, under this framework, would be a step in that direction, not the end of the road.
We know there are several organizers out there with way more experience, abilities, and resources to build international movements. This is a proposal for us to work together to rebuild while re-anchoring our movement to a position where it could be possible to stop this war before it is too late.
If any of this resonated with you, if you don’t believe that we can keep going for the next years as we have for these last decades, and know that it’s time for rupture and to stop this war, let’s talk.