Disruptive political activism, from strikes to boycotts to road occupations, always makes enemies. That’s part of the point: confrontations and controversies mean publicity. More ambitiously, stunts and provocations by activists are also meant to remind the public that the status quo itself is built on disruptions. Even supposedly cautious governments are constantly altering the distribution of power and wealth, and the environment itself.
Four years since the founding of Extinction Rebellion, known by its highly committed members as XR, climate activists in Britain and many other countries are still launching waves of protests: blocking roads, throwing food over famous artworks, gluing themselves to surfaces in public places and spray-painting banks that invest in fossil fuels. New groups have appeared with XR-style tactics and goals: Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain, Animal Rebellion, Youth Climate Swarm. A steady stream of activists from teenagers to pensioners are prepared to face arrest and imprisonment in order to press governments, businesses and voters to change their behaviour.
Yet even though the climate crisis has worsened faster than many pessimistic analysts expected, and even though the official response to it remains far too slow, the work of XR and its successors still enrages many people. There are endless online videos of activists being dragged off the road by drivers, or being dangerously shunted by vehicles, or simply being shouted at by passersby. The print and broadcast media are full of similar denunciations. Tory and Labour politicians compete to be the least tolerant of disruptive climate activism – even though Labour’s opposition to the expansion of our oil and gas fields mirrors the stance of Just Stop Oil.
The constant attacks on the activists are inadvertently revealing. They are called “selfish”, when they are sacrificing far more for the environment than their critics. They are called “extremists”, despite the world’s ever more extreme weather. They are dismissed as middle-class dilettantes, yet also feared as fanatical members of a cult. They are condemned for interfering with “people going about their daily business”, as the presenter Mark Austin put it with an air of outrage on Sky News, even though our everyday habits are a central cause of the crisis.
Underlying all these criticisms is a strong but unstated desire not to engage with the activists’ main argument: that the climate emergency is so huge and urgent that modest changes to our lifestyles and conventional political action – from summits such as Cop27 to marches to polite negotiations between governments and companies – are no longer enough. On the videos of drivers confronting activists, the drivers’ fury feels about more than their vehicles being blocked. British motorists are used to obstructions and delays. The anger suggests resentment at being reminded about the climate crisis. It also acts as a way of avoiding being drawn into conversation with the protesters – a conversation that might be uncomfortable or frightening. Starting with XR’s brutally frank name, disruptive green activism presents what the US climate campaigner Al Gore once called An Inconvenient Truth.
Critics of the movement often underestimate how much support it has. An official “factsheet” justifying the government’s public order bill – legislation intended to hinder “protest groups such as Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain” – cites an opinion poll from April. While the survey shows that twice as many people support as oppose “tougher laws to tackle climate change activists blocking roads, transport and other infrastructure”, it also shows that among 18- to 34-year-olds, opinion on the issue is evenly divided. Many of those likely to be most affected by the climate crisis, and likely to become an ever more important part of the electorate, do not see disruptive protest as illegitimate.
In fact, a small but increasingly influential minority of green activists and thinkers argue that XR and similar groups are not disruptive enough. Last year the Swedish environmentalist Andreas Malm published How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a seductively well-written and well-researched book that argues climate activists should abandon their longstanding “commitment to absolute non-violence”, and instead “escalate” their campaign by “physically attacking the things that consume our planet”, such as fossil fuel infrastructure. Citing previous successful protest movements that have used sabotage, such as the suffragettes, Malm advocates violence against property, not people, to create an “inhospitable investment climate” for fossil fuel projects. The pressure on businesses and governments to switch to green technologies, he argues, would then be irresistible.
It’s not hard to find things to worry about in Malm’s argument. Wouldn’t the sabotage have to be on an enormous scale? How are governments and voters likely to react, given the fury already aroused by XR? How would violence against people be avoided, when many oil and gas facilities have security guards? And would the whole process of forcing companies to abandon their expensive fossil fuel investments be as straightforward as he claims?
Yet what Malm advocates is already happening. In June, a group called Pipe Busters broke into a building site for a new aviation fuel pipeline from Southampton to London and damaged sections of uninstalled pipe and a construction vehicle. Similar actions have happened in other countries. Meanwhile, protests by supposedly nonviolent groups have begun to include attacks on property. In April, Just Stop Oil activists vandalised petrol pumps along the M25.
It’s possible to see such actions as token, and likely to be counter-productive: feeding the panic about climate activism that will be institutionalised by the public order bill, and probably by further authoritarian legislation after that.
If you’re more optimistic, it’s possible to argue that since parties such as Labour and the US Democrats are now in favour of changing the economy to stabilise the climate, disruptive protests to draw attention to the issue are no longer required.
But even if you have that much faith in centre-left politics, the response to the protests has not been reassuring. The fury of drivers may be a foretaste of how many voters will respond when and if governments really start addressing the climate crisis, by requiring big changes in our everyday lives. Before it’s too late, the road-blockers and the reformers need to realise they’re on the same side.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
