by Graham Wroe
Jonathan Porritt visited Sheffield on Monday, 8th December, to launch his new book, Love, Anger and Betrayal. Jonathon was influential in my joining the Ecology (now Green) Party back in the early 80s, and his first book, Seeing Green, cemented my belief in the green manifesto. Since then, Jonathon has gone on to lead Friends of the Earth, founded the Forum for the Future, co-founded the Prince of Wales Business and Sustainability Program, he’s President of the Conservation Volunteers and has been Chancellor of Keele University.
His new book has been co-authored by 26 Just Stop Oil activists. He believes it’s not too late (to prevent the worst aspects of climate change), but the thrust of this book is that it soon will be. Jonathan spoke and answered questions without notes for an hour and a half, covering many topics, from the betrayal of various Prime Ministers, the failure of COP 30, the massive growth in renewables, the Labour crackdown on protest and human rights, the importance of Non Violent Direct Action, hope offered by people whose name begins with a Z, the frequent flyer levy and nuclear power. It was a captivating evening and I will try to do him justice by summarising the discussion below, and will be choosing some of these topics for future Sheffield Telegraph articles.
CLIMATE ANXIETY
“This was meeting number 33 of 36 meetings before Christmas, with another 10 next year. Doing that number of meetings introduces one to a whole extraordinary diversity of views about people feeling hopeful, people feeling despairing, people feeling both states of emotion at the same time, which obviously does make it difficult to handle emotionally, but I’m sure you might be familiar with that and sharing with them and I hope with you this evening some of this juggling act that goes on in all of us because it’s extremely difficult to continue in the work of activism or even mainstream conventional environmentalism if your despair has reached the point where it can no longer be managed, where as it were you’ve gone to that dark side of the sense of hope for the future and it is really difficult bringing oneself back. So this spectrum has been really extraordinary to experience through all these different meetings, and of course, a lot depends slightly on the circumstances at the time. “
COP 30
“So during Cop 30, particularly the last three or four days of the big climate conference in Brazil, at the end of November, it was difficult to eke out any real hope at all because the absolutely inevitable no-show for anything sensible, let alone visionary, was unfolding at that time. And you all know that I don’t want to spend too much time digging into the bowels of COP 30 because it’s not a good place to be. And we all know that every year we get this astonishing reminder of just how hard it is for politicians to confront the truth. There is literally not one single critical voice about one data point in all of this, that roughly 75% of all the warming emissions come through the burning of fossil fuels. Nobody really bothers to dispute that. Certainly, the fossil fuel companies don’t. The big Ag, big farming groups do contest a little bit about their share of the rest of that 100% as it were. But in terms of the contribution of burning fossil fuels to greenhouse gas emissions, it’s been known as 75% for at least two decades. That simple brush with reality has never appeared in a single one of the communications from all of these COPS.
Dealing with that has made it harder to remain upbeat. Confronting the realities of what politics looks like is difficult. “
MARK CARNEY
Mark Carney was high on Jonathon’s list of betrayers. The former Governor of the Bank of England had formerly given excellent keynote speeches about climate and the capital markets.
“And at the COP in Glasgow, Mark Carney launched the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, which became known as GFANZ. And there were hundreds of signatures to this global alliance. Trillions of dollars were managed by these huge financial interests.
GFANZ is no more. It’s gone. The net zero banking alliance is no more. It’s gone. All of these voluntary things that were signed up to at what now looking back on it seems like a mighty positive time for climate change awareness and action. All gone. This was mostly to do with the return of Donald Trump to the White House because he gave permission to all of those bankers to revert to their normal massively destructive short-term greedy profiteering hateful ways and stop pretending that they give a shit about climate change.
Mark Carney is now prime minister of Canada.
Within three months of becoming prime minister, the fossil fuel industry got him exactly where they wanted him. He started to change completely. He decided that there would be a good case for three huge new liquefied natural gas turbines in Canada. He declined to provide any further taxpayer subsidy for renewable energy. He buried the vehicle emission standards, and he got rid of the Carbon Tax. Two weeks ago, he signed a memorandum of understanding with the Premier of Alberta to build a brand new pipeline all up the west coast of Canada, taking Alberta’s bitumen-rich tar sands up to a port at the northern edge of British Columbia.
How do you describe a man like that? He’s still intelligent, still knows what’s going on with climate science.
He is one of many politicians who have shown themselves as literally incapable of providing the quality of leadership that we need today.”
RENEWABLES
On Renewables, he said, “The massive reduction in the cost of renewables is proving to be something that even the fossil fuel industry can’t really do anything about because the costs keep coming down and the efficiencies keep going up and supply chains keep getting stronger and awareness builds in people’s minds.”
He gave the example of Australia, where so many people have invested in solar for their homes that Prime Minister Albanese declared that electricity will now be free between 11 and 2 pm. This has led to a massive uptake in home batteries, so that Australians can use their free electricity in the evening. The leader of the opposition in Australia has branded Albanese a Solar Communist!
“Here in England, we have a wretchedly low number of community energy schemes, which are by far the best way of providing people with more affordable access to low-carbon electricity in comparison to Scotland, where a much higher percentage of the population is served by community energy schemes. Why did it happen in Scotland? Just different politics.”
IRAN
Iran’s capital city is running out of water.
President Masoud Pezeshkianwe said, “We no longer have a choice in this. It is now clear that we absolutely have to move our capital city. It is now a binding obligation on us as our capital city faces complete catastrophe and a very dark future for the 15 million people who live in it. Ignoring this reality means signing our own destruction.”
BARONESS BROWN
Jonathan offered a prize to anyone in the audience who knew the source of this quote. “We should all anticipate here in this country an average temperature increase of at least 2° centigrade by 2050. Moreover, reaching 4° centigrade above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century cannot yet be ruled out and should be considered as part of effective adaptation planning here in this country.” Nobody got it! It’s a woman called Baroness Brown who chairs the Adaptation subcommittee of the Climate Change Committee. Jonathan lambasted her by saying“That is as far from physical reality as any functioning human brain can get! At 4° centigrade average temperature increase around the world, we will not be worrying too much about adaptation. We’ll be worrying a lot about what has happened to our human rights, what has happened to anything that makes it worth living in this world today. When people talk about the good news about the average temperature increase we face around the world today you need to question their sanity.” At COP 30 it was considered good news that expected temperature rise was now 2.5 degrees rather than 4 degrees. At 2.5 degrees C of global heating, climate damage cannot be insured against. Climate damage can no longer be covered by governments acting as the insurer of last resort and climate change can no longer be adapted to. It means no more mortgages, no new real estate development anywhere in the world, no long-term investment, no pensions and no financial stability. The financial sector as we know it ceases to function and with it capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable.
POLITICS AND NAMES THAT BEGIN WITH Z
“The premise of the Matrix series, is that we don’t really know whether this is a real world or whether it’s a complete illusion which people have been so effectively entered into against their wishes. They don’t know it’s an illusion. This all breaks down to the red pill and the blue pill. And the red pill of course represents a truth. And the blue pill represents illusion.
We are living in this absolutely mad world of illusion. No one really questions the degree to which climate change induced disasters are galloping up on us. No one challenges the fact that every year the costs to investors, to insurers, from climate induced disasters, is going up and up and up the whole time. You can’t really challenge that. But we don’t really know what to do about it. Neither do our politicians. Whereas we of course in the climate movement do. Take the green pill.
I’m waiting for Zack Polanski to do a ripoff of the matrix as part and parcel of
his very charismatic style of leadership which I can tell you has energised an awful lot of people in the Green Party, particularly those who’ve been hanging around for 50 years or so. I just want him to do a sort of ripoff of that. He’s just done a really interesting ripoff of the Christmas Carol as a fundraising campaign and it raised £250,000 in about a week.
It’s a bit of a cheeky way of talking about the radical politics of this, but we kind of know now that nothing, nothing can ever come out of the mainstream parties we have today. It’s not possible. They’re totally up to their eyeballs in the notion of economic growth being the only means of providing the wherewithal for progress in society today. They know it’s getting harder and harder to generate growth, which is probably why they say three times instead of once in order to remind themselves just how hard it is. Starmer is stuck. The Tories are stuck. The Lib Dems are stuck. I’m old enough to remember three or four Lib Dem conferences back in the 1980s where there were formal motions at conference for the Lliberals as they were in those days, to move away from the politics of growth and to create completely different understanding of how we should generate wealth for people ,distribute wealth create prosperity and so on. We don’t have that debate about economic growth today. It’s gone So if you’re talking to a politician who won’t even entertain the notion that our ultimate addiction is this addiction to economic growth at all costs, then you know we’ll never get anything.
As long as your name begins with zed, you could be in for a very exciting time. Zack is
clearly having enormous fun at the moment, even though Rory Stewart did give him a hard time. If your name is Zoran, the mayor-elect of New York City and if you are really depressed, and you want to be reminded that politicians can be both brilliant and good and inspiring, then just listen to the YouTube film of his acceptance speech.”
“And possibly even if your name begins with Zara, although I’m not sure I can really add her to the list any longer, because frankly, Your Party, as it is now officially called, seems to demonstrate the old story that those on the left never waste an opportunity to waste an opportunity. That’s not mine, by the way, it’s from Owen Jones in the Guardian. But there’s something stirring politically, and I want us to hang on to that because we should not rule out the possibility that this imposed surreal fantasy that politicians insist we subordinate ourselves to will not be our reality forever.”
THE CO-AUTHORS
“ My 26 co-authors look at this political world and say, “What’s going on? This is mad.” They go back to that very early stage of Extinction Rebellion as it emerged in 2018 which started off with the notion Tell the Truth. This really brilliant way of bringing together concerns about the climate crisis, about social justice, about democracy, about genocide in Gaza, about the resurgence of militarism in our society with America now setting its defense budget for 2026 at one trillion dollars. Bringing all of those things together in a vision, a very different way of understanding what the world can look like. So for me it was amazing to spend the best part of the year working with the 26. I wanted to work out what was happening with the younger campaigners.”
THE LABOUR PARTY AND GENOCIDE
So that for me continues to bring a little smile to my face. And then obviously because I’ve been in the Green Party, as you heard for 50 years, I’m a little bit bound by what’s happening politically as well. And although much of what’s been happening politically for the last year has not been particularly encouraging, certainly not when you think about where Starmer has decided to take the Labour Party, deeper and deeper into a form of authoritarian repression. I can pretty much guarantee nobody had completely anticipated at the time, when so many cast their votes back in July last year.
They are increasingly determined to crush people’s rights to protest and have a total and utter denial of what is happening in Gaza today. This ongoing genocide unfolding day after day after day. Please don’t let anybody think the Trump imposed ceasefirehas meant those genocidal impacts have stopped.
DEFEND OUR JURIES
Jonathon said, “The last year has been very bad as to what is happening to our political rights and freedoms. There is an absolutely crucial principle of British justice which is called jury equity. And jury equity goes back to 1670 when a judge decided to send two Quakers to prison for preaching in a place where they shouldn’t have preached. The jury decided that they could not find the two Quakers guilty. The judge said, “You have to find them guilty because they were preaching in a place they shouldn’t have.” And the jury said, “No.” So the judge sent the jury to prison as a sort of fast track way of getting his own way. They stayed in prison until there was such an outcry over crushing the right of a jury to make its decisions on the basis of their conscience. But eventually they were freed by a higher judge, and the two Quakers were found not guilty.
And we all need to be minded by this. There’s a lot of the trials going through the courts at the moment and they will continue to go through the courts well into 2026 to 2027, and some even now pushing out into 2028. This includes several people in the audience who had been arrested outside Sheffield Cathedral for holding a sign saying “I oppose Genocide, I support Palestine Action.” If we still have jury trial for some of these things, and that’s by no means guaranteed any longer, a lot will depend on whether a judge allows the jury to hear why defendants have done what they’ve done, what their motivation has been, what their sense of proportionality is, was it proportionate to the action they took, and to learn a little bit about the basic science of climate change, which of course many juries don’t have when they come into a Just Stop Oil or an Insulate Britain or Extinction Rebellion case. So for a judge to say ”no, we’re not going to share any information about climate change” is a way of ensuring the jurors have no access to the basic knowledge which would allow them to make a decision according to their conscience. And when juries do have that chance,many juries have found people not guilty of the crimes for which they have which they’ve been accused. Even though they obviously did what they did. If you go around breaking windows on JP Morgan Bank for instance and causing £250,000 worth of damage, you can’t really deny the evidence. If you go around spraying orange powder on private jets, for instance, the evidence is there, but the jury can still say “we get that”. But we’re still going to find the defendant not guilty. And that’s happened more times than you can imagine.
Quite a lot of work is going into finding out what it is that’s going on in our courtrooms at the moment. How many cases are we getting acquittals when trials are properly managed, rather than trials used as a further suppression of the legal rights of individuals to protest in the way that has been encoded in our laws since 1670? The organisation behind that is called Defend Our Juries. The name tells us a lot. Can you actually imagine five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago that we need a new NGO specifically to protect the rights of jurors from being bullied into doing things which have always been permitted in British justice? Defend our Juries emerged initially in the case of an Insulate Britain campaign, where the judge was seeking to crush any sharing of all of those details inside the court. It led to the holding up of a sign reminding people of exactly what is on the wall of the Old Bailey, which is to remind people that jurors have an absolute right to make decisions according to their conscience. From there, Defend Our Juries has gone on to become the principal organisation now seeking to lift the ban on Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, deeply involved in this and for me, an absolutely inspirational example of how civil society organisations can come up pretty much out of nowhere, given the circumstances going on in that particular area and play this fundamental role. I’m not trying to be rude about organisations like Amnesty and Liberty, which have done astonishing work over decades to protect people’s human rights here in the UK. But for some reason, it took a different organisation to say this government doesn’t listen to anything. Every month, there’s a vast march in London organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. The Government couldn’t care less.”
Jonathan concluded, “So it took a different organisation to launch the campaign to lift the ban, and that means we’ve asked people to sit in Parliament Square or wherever holding up a sign saying, “I oppose Genocide, I support Palestine Action and you know 2730 arrests have now been made for people holding up that sign, including myself. This world is basically mad!”
Q&A
NEW ZEALAND QUESTION
In New Zealand a few years ago, we had quite interesting policies from Jacinda Ardern, who then mysteriously decided to resign halfway through her premiership. Do you think this is the sort of thing that’s liable to happen to politicians who try to strenuously bring in strong policies?
“I haven’t read Jacinda’s new book. I’m half a New Zealander, and I’ve lived a lot in New Zealand, and I am a massive supporter of her because she introduced New Zealand to a very different style of politics. Over the six years, she did her best to try and change the tone of New Zealand politics, and politics is a lot about tone. I haven’t been terribly nice to some politicians, but not very often; others are better at maintaining a nicely balanced tone than I am. I’m only mentioning that now I’m about to be extremely rude to her successor, a man called Christopher Luxon. He is now the prime minister of New Zealand, who used to be the Chief Executive of Air New Zealand; it used to be he who led the aviation sector towards this wondrous fantasy land of “completely sustainable aviation”. But when he was CEO of Air New Zealand, he seriously tried a lot. He made a cracking speech, became Prime Minister threw in his lot with a couple of the circus. He’s now gone back on all the targets, and so we can have a league table for what I’m now calling climate betrayers. I’m bored with climate deniers and climate delayers. I want a new league table for climate betrayers. People who once were out there doing their advocacy and helping others see what was needed and then suddenly when circumstances changed, stopped. But to finish on Jacinda, her last year as Prime Minister was utterly miserable. The right wing really decided to make her life hell and she found it harder and harder to cope with that. She had to deal with intense social media driven invective, such as direct threats , often involving sexual violence, day in day out.
So I I certainly regret her not being Prime Minister any longer.”
NUCLEAR POWER QUESTION
I’d be interested in your views on nuclear power. I grew up in CND and was very anti-nuclear power, but there now seems to be some sort of idea that this might not be such a bad thing. So what do you think about that?
“I am as opposed to nuclear power as I was when I joined the Green Party in 1974 and I was opposed to it then partly because of the links with nuclear weapons. The campaign against nuclear disarmament and those two positions are still absolutely the positions I hold today. And when anybody tells me, “But we’ve got to do nuclear. We’ve got to do it because we can’t just do it with renewables and efficiency and storage and different grids and community energy, that won’t be enough.” That is not true. We will be able to do this transition with that combination. As long as we don’t waste billions and billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money and opportunity costs going down umpteen nuclear rabbit holes.
So tomorrow in the high court there is a judicial review that has been brought against EDF which has secured all the planning permissions that it needs to build a new nuclear power station. Two huge new reactors at Sizewell C on the Suffolk coast. Sitting next door to Sizewell B which is still operating and Sizewell A which is in the process of being decommissioned.
Sizewell C if it is ever built will cost somewhere between 50 and 60 billion pounds In your energy bill next month you will notice for the first time I’m sure it’ll be in very very small print but you will notice for the first time ever, contribution to nuclear future, something like that and it might be £1 a month it might be £1.50 it might £2. I’m not sure yet and if you’re a business you’ll be paying at least £100 a month extra to put all that money into building Sizewell C. It will be 15 to 20 years before it generates a single killowatt of electricity. That’s not really what worries me although it makes me very angry. What worries me is that once Sizewell C has generated its electricity for let’s say 40 years- if this all goes smoothly and it comes on stream in 2045, it then generates electricity for another 60 years, that goes through to about 100 years from now. The waste generated throughout the lifetime of that reactor will have to be stored by Sizewell C through to 2160. Average projected sea level rise by 2160 is somewhere between two and three metres. Sizewell C is one of the most rapidly eroding coastlines in the whole of Europe. Look up some phenomenal recent photos of what happened at a place called Orford Ness, which is only three miles away from Sizewell C, with not a particularly bad storm, but some tough weather. This is just madness. So don’t throw in your lot with nuclear power. It’s mostly just a massive diversion.”
GREEN HYDROGEN
There’s a large company in Sheffield called ITM making electrolyers to produce Green Hydrogen. What do you think about this?
Green hydrogen is produced by using renewable electricity to power an electrolyser, a device that splits water into its components, hydrogen and oxygen
without releasing carbon emissions, making it a clean fuel source. This process, called electrolysis, separates the water molecules, capturing the hydrogen gas for use in various industries or as a clean energy carrier.
Jonathan was very skeptical about green hydrogen.
“It costs a lot of money to make it. At the moment, something like 90% of the world’s hydrogen comes from basic gas fired hydrogen plants. And even if you’ve got a blue hydrogen oxygen where you capture the CO2 emissions from your gas fired hydrogen plant, nobody really thinks that’s going to work either. Two huge blue hydrogen plants have just been cancelled in America because they looked at the cost and they said that won’t work. Green hydrogen could get cheaper over the years and it could be really helpful to have some green hydrogen in the mix for storage but also for those industries that are really dificult to decarbonise like steel and concrete. The way the government bigs it up is highly dangerous in my opinion. I don’t think it’ll be ever be more than a small part player in global decarbonization.”
DEGROWTH AND ELECTRIC VEHICLES QUESTION
Quite a lot of your talk was about the hopefulness around technologies for renewable energy and social innovation. I’m concerned that the more energy we have, even if it’s non fossil fuel generated, the more ability we have to destroy nature and I wonder if you’ve seen glimmerings of hope around the social change needed for having less stuff, which is what a lot of that is about really. It’s part of degrowth, isn’t it? But that means people need to get by with less stuff. I just wonder if you see movement in that direction?
“So the question is, even though we might get our energy, particularly our electricity, in a much more benign form, certainly not creating the emissions of greenhouse gases, and that would be a huge reduction in the total carbon footprint of our global economy. But it would only happen if we electrified everything else that currently uses fossil fuels, including transportation, heating, and many other industrial processes. And the question is really are we going to be able to make that transition happen without further degrading and indeed destroying nature and the integrity of those natural systems on which the whole of our society depends. I don’t know the answer to that. I’m pretty convinced that we can’t. If we were to swap from 1.3 billion internal combustion engine cars at the moment to 1.3 billion all electric vehicles, as the best way of getting rid of the fossil fuels burnt in the internal combustion engine,. that would be collapse for the planet. Absolute collapse in terms of the raw materials that would be needed, the massive increase in mining, the damage often to very threatened areas, something like 75% of the new proposals to mine the raw materials needed for conversion to EV are in indigenous people’s territories around the world in South America, in America, Canada, Indonesia and elsewhere. So, I’m very nervous about this, but here’s the dilemma. It’s quite hard persuading people to accept that we can liberate ourselves from fossil fuels. You do have to work at it. If you go straight to the next thing, which is say, actually we all should be campaigning against electric vehicles, even as we campaign to get rid of veteran diesel vehicles, I know because I’ve done this, a lot of people turn on you and say, “What kind of crazy extremist are you? Are we not going to have any cars?” And if you then go and say, “Well, we might have a few cars for personal consumption especially in rural areas because I think we have to be extremely sensitive to people who live in rural areas, where access to anything makes life good is very difficult, but basically as far as our cities are concerned, no people won’t own cars anymore. There’ll be huge car clubs, there’ll be massive emphasis on public transport, there’ll be lots of investment in electric vehicles of different kinds, whether that’s bikes or walking, cycling, etc. But you won’t have this pattern of personal private car owning and we should campaign against that as the alternative to fossil fuels, which is what I believe. I have written about the need to campaign against electric vehicles.
Please don’t think that’s the kind of transition that is going to get 8.5 billion people and 10 billion by the middle of the second half this century, to get us to a sustainable future, that isn’t going to help. So, we’ve got a tough story and the Green Party is skewered on this dilemma. So, it campaigns at the moment for green growth and green growth will not get us to the place we need to be. We have to be campaigning for beyond growth, looking at different ways of creating the prosperity we need. But most people don’t even want to talk about that.”
REFORM AND THE GREENS QUESTION
I’d like to give you a room full of apologies because, unfortunately, your meeting clashed with the Green Party meeting tonight, and it’s a real shame they didn’t hear that, because that’s one thing I’ve been trying to push within the Green Party, to go for degrowth rather than green growth. But what I wanted to ask you is, locally, the Green Party is doing really well. We’ve got 14 Councillors. We’ve now got 3,000 members, and they’re meeting tonight to work out how we can get far more Councillors in Sheffield. I’m sure we will at the next local elections in May. But the polls, with Reform still massively ahead of all the other parties, are extremely worrying. Do you think the Greens can beat the fascists and how do we do it?
“I really do. And I’ve got a sort of feeling that we’re almost at peak Reform. And that’s because much of the lying persona that Farage has created for himself over the last 20 years is beginning to fall away, bit by bit. He is being revealed as a deeply racist, deeply misogynistic plutocrat. who cares more about earning money than anything else. And as those little scales fall off him people begin to see more and more what he stands for, Reform is Nigel Farage. If Nigel Farage slips and falls, as he’s done every time before, then this mad crazy malign bubble that we have in our midst today called Reform could easily pop. What I love about the Green Party, sorry, I don’t need to plug the Green Party. What I love about about Zack in particular is that he is taking on that task of dismantling that man’s persona bit by bit, stripping away the illusions, revealing him for what he really is, which is a deeply repellent human being, and doing it in such a way as to demonstrate there is a different style of politics. For instance, coming back to Jacinda and what we should be doing in terms of tone of politics today and going for it very differently. Imagine the Green Party’s membership is 200,000 people by February next year. Everybody learned from Zoran Mandani’s campaign.Brilliant social media, which is what the Green Party has now got. That didn’t win the campaign. 110,000 volunteers on the streets of New York, day in day out for nearly five months, won the campaign for Mamdani. Zack knows that. The Green Party has had its difficulties here in Sheffield hasn’t it, but let’s hope this new infusion of energy coming from this massive increase in membership will create this new energy. Look at the percentage of young people who are joining the Green Party. It tells you something.”
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE QUESTION
What is your perspective on civil disobedience? Is it something that you now encourage other people to engage in?
“Well, I’ve always been a supporter of civil disobedience. When I was director of Friends of the Earth, we had long agonised discussions about the role that nonviolent direct action should play for Friends of the Earth in the 1980s; we had a lot of nonviolent direct action campaigns. Most of them were pretty pathetic if I’m being absolutely honest. And we have what I can only describe as deep Greenpeace envy. because Greenpeace were just bloody brilliant at their nonviolent direct action campaigns and we were definitely not in the lead. So, although I was supportive of and involved in quite a lot of those direct action campaigns and of course, together with the Green Party, have always supported civil disobedience as part of the spectrum of political responses in a society today. Most of my life Friends of the Earth and started to support XR in 2018, and then Just Stop Oil in 2022. Most of my life between FOE and then was definitely not in the world of direct action. It is difficult to be a Chancellor of a University and support direct action. Although I did think most Universities would have benefited from a lot more direct action, including my universities, but I was a Vice Chancellor, so I could not have been involved in it.
When I started meeting, talking, sharing experiences with my co-authors it deepened my understanding. It made me rethink a lot of the stuff that I worked on years ago. The Civil Rights movement or Gandhi or some things I’d never even heard of like Opour-a brilliant direct action movement led by young people with a strong element of humour. which contributed massively to the downfall of the tyrant who ruled over Yugoslavia for decades. So I learned a huge amount about that and began to understand why when you talk about nonviolent direct action, it isn’t one thing. It’s many different things, many different strands. And when Defend our Juries started, that is a form of direct action, sitting outside those courtrooms. That was an arrestable offense, and Trudi Warner, who was the first to hold the sign, was arrested and the legal process took a long time to unfold. So it was genuinely for me, confirmatory of what I knew was important part of the overall protest spectrum. Inspiring. very moving. because to be honest, it’s not an easy thing for many of the young people. It certainly made me reflect on what I ought to do at 75 years of age as it were.
Young person who sprayed a jet fighter.
I think it’s very important to put a legal disclaimer that everyone’s actions are their own choices, but I do believe that direct action is incredibly important. I think treading the line between individual consumers choices in consuming green and getting green energy an what you consume is important. But making sure that the line between what you as an individual do and what you as a group of people together fight for is incredibly vital to a safe, greener planet. And I also find the definition and the name “nonviolent direct action” incredibly important too, because my action was considered violent because it was damage to property. And so the definition of violence, as we know it, is always and has always been in the hands of violent states, and violent people in power. And so for a group of people to say, I know what violence is and that state that those people who don’t mind causing harm to other people and saying my actions are going to be nonviolent and are going to be against that even if it’s their definition of violence or their definition of terrorism, that at its core is not violent.
Just Stop Oil was effectively policed into extinction. Just Stop Oil started in 2022. The punishment you might have anticipated when it started would have been a community sentence or suspended sentence or fine or whatever. Gradually throughout the three years the sentencing ramped up particularly with the trial of Whole truth Five where sentences of four and five years were dished out and we’ve just had a case a week ago where one group of people, involved in a gantry protest, were all found guilty and have all received custodial sentences, not in the four to five years, but nonetheless custodial sentences are still being dished out. So I think the answer is, I can’t envisiage a future, in the near term, where civil disobedience won’t be part of the necessary response because the defence of our entrenched incumbent views, practices, cruel unfair behaviours, that level of entrenchment is so deep that I don’t think conventional campaigning will, on its own, succeed in doing what needs to be done. So I think it’s inevitable.”
HOW ETHICAL IS THE RENEWABLES INDUSTRY?
How concerned do you think renewable corporations are about, for example, toxic waste or their working practice. Are they concerned, are they ethical and caring?
“In terms of the industries that are capable of now of contributing to this transition away from fossil fuels, they kind of know that they have a starting position which is on “the right side of history”, a much overused phrase. Nonetheless, they get a good feeling about it. Nobody in a fossil fuel company gets a good feeling about what they’re doing today. How they actually get out of bed in the morning and look at themselves in the mirror, I do not know. But they have no illusions that they are on the wrong side of this. They know. So they start in a good place, but do they then do the hard work about what it would take to make the green transition both more equitable, fair, less impactful in terms of climate and nature and pollution with the waste issues. Well, they do some of the work, but they do it to the point where they can get away with not having to do what they could really do, which would be a great deal more than they do. And whose fault is that? Governments.
Governments have to regulate to make these companies do everything they could do. So you look at the massive increase in mining for lithium, copper, nickel, precious metals, rare earths, all these kind of crazy critical ingredients for the Green economy. Unless governments regulate those mining companies and say you won’t have a license to do this unless you follow these practices and yes, we will prosecute you when you don’t, they’ll do as little as they can get away with to stay on the right side of history. So, this comes down to government. It doesn’t come down to the consumer in my opinion. And the reason for that is most consumers today still feel they live in a brilliant world flowing with milk and honey.”
FLYING
We live in a consumer society, so for the last 50 years international travel has blossomed. We talk about taking action and there are perhaps 60 people in this room today and people complain about the way the industry or government doesn’t act. But last year, 1.4 billion international tourist journeys were made by people who probably aren’t at this meeting tonight. Surely until you alter what the one and a half billion and more do each year that want to consume, very little will happen.
“ Most people who take holidays of the sort you’re describing, and don’t forget it’s a tiny percentage of the totality of humankind that flies today, most of them feel a holiday, possibly more than one holiday, is an entitlement, almost a right. And it’s almost a compensation for the fact that so much of the rest of people’s lives don’t seem good, don’t seem as positive and upbeat and helpful as they might like.
So when Just Stop Oil decided to go after airports in July last year, I have to say I was wholly opposed to this, because I just thought that’s gratuitously making people feel guilty about something which you don’t really want to make people feel guilty about. The vast majority of peoples holidays honestly, in the great span of things, is neither here nor there.
Going after rich bastards private jets, that’s different. Do you know how much money we could have brought in under the budget if the government had required all private jet owners and users to pay the same level of taxation coming to the UK as every other provider of aviation services has to pay today? Just leveling up to what most people have to pay on aviation taxes today. £2.7 billion.
£2.7 billion. So look, let’s let’s start where the real burden of responsibility/guilt lies, which is people who fly all the time without single thought as to the consequences. Which is why the Green Party is extremely keen on a policy called the Frequent Flyer Levy. So everybody gets a given number of kilometres for free without being taxed for it. And I don’t think that’s a particular problem. But as soon as you start stepping up one flight a month, two flights a month, whatever it might be to get to your nice little cottage in Dordogne or whatever, then your carbon tax level just starts going up and up.. So by the time you take your 18th flight to Dordogne you’re thinking, “Oh my god, this hurts.” Good! I don’t want to make the green transition punitive or moralistic. I’ve really avoided trying to do lifestyle finger pointing through 50 years of green politics. It’s not easy. But really, we’ve got better stories to tell about ways we can live better lives.”
SPIRITUALITY QUESTION
Going back to the matrix point of view some of this is almost like a spiritual awakening and proposing a way of life essentially as a good way to live.
“I’m very conscious of this amazing image behind me all evening. This is environmental wallpaper as they call it, which of course hopefully reminds you that part of what we do as sustainability advocates, as green advocates, is to rediscover and rebuild a different relationship with the earth. Because at the moment, whether they know it or not, the vast majority of people in OECD countries, rich world countries, have an extractive abusive relationship with the earth, not a co-created loving relationship with the natural world. And we often stop when we think of compassion and compassion for other human beings and don’t think about compassion for all creatures on Earth. Which is why one of my most wonderful charitable involvements over the last year has been patron of an organization called Compasion in World Farming which seeks to rid the world of the horror story of factory farming today. Now up to 90 billion living creatures killed every year in factory farming system. So is that spiritual? It is for me. Is my relationship with the natural world a spiritual relationship. Yes. Do I want you to put me on the spot and say okay, well is it properly thought through or is it just a rather loose tree huggy kind of thing? An American guy called Murray Bookchin, a fierce socialist.back in the 1980s, wrote a book about him. The ending of the book was eco la la because he hated all those kind of woozy meditating trees. He felt we’re being distracted from the hard business of politics. So long as you don’t put me too much on the spot. I quite like being a bit vague about what it means to have a spiritual centre to one’s green life and practice. But for me it is important. I tend not to too much out on a limb about that as you can tell because I’m completely incoherent about it! “
Finally Jonathon spoke about two books.
Hope in Hell, a Decade to Confront the Climate Emergency (2019)
and Love, Anger and Betrayal (2025)
“When I finished Hope in Hell, I absolutely swore I’d never write another book again because I felt I didn’t have anything else to say about climate change. And this notion, a decade to confront the climate emergency, how close to late is it? You can go on calibrating all the time and it was hard because it took me into a lot of pretty grim scenarios for humankind. I decided I’ll leave the sense there’s still hope but I’ll just remind people that if we don’t act fast then it’s hell without hope. When I began to connect with J Stop Oil I began to see the virulence with which the right-wing media in this country chose to attack young people in particular for their support of Just Stop Oil, for the campaign actions they took, for the expression of nonviolent peaceful direct action. I’ve always hated that whole staple of rags but I just could not believe the intensity which they went after young, obviously incredibly committed, idealistic people, who felt there was a job to do. I couldn’t believe it. So I started talking to more people in Just Stop Oil. Then I started talking to young people in Just Stop Oil. Started doing interviews. I was going to start with 10 and then went to 15 and then someone turned up a bit late. So there were 26 and I had to write that book as I need to do something to express the anger. The love is mostly theirs. The compassion they feel for people who will be absolutely devastated by now unstoppable climate disruption. Hopefully we don’t get to the point of total climate breakdown and the betrayal as touched on tonight. Political betrayal, financial betrayals.
I do want you to buy this book because all the proceeds from this book are going to support climate activism today. Now, we don’t quite know what will happen in the next stage of the kind of movement that this book is about. Just Stop Oil has stopped and new civil disobedience movements have emerged. It’s not connected with climate change at the moment but there’s bound to be something. So all the organizations that are involved at the moment supporting Just Stop Oil, Defend Our Juries, Climate Action Support Pathway (CASP), Rebels in Prison Support, the whole host of organisations, they will all be the beneficiaries of the sales of this book. “
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