Why we must join in civil disobedience over climate change
Published by Professional Social Work magazine, 18 August, 2022
How will future generations look back on this era? Not with fondness or respect. Many people understand that our society is sleepwalking into the greatest catastrophe ever known to humanity; the effects of global warming. Yet people feel powerless to create the necessary changes.
The Just Stop Oil campaign is offering some leadership and hope. People of all ages, from 15 to 93, are putting their wellbeing and liberty at risk to disrupt the flow of petrol and diesel to petrol stations nationally. Engaging in civil disobedience by attaching human bodies to oil tankers and the gates of oil depots using superglue and bike locks is driven by desperation.
The demand of the campaign is simply that our government stop issuing licences and consents for new oil and gas in the UK. The transition to renewable energy is the urgent recommendation of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) who published their third report on 4 April 2022, with a sign up from 195 member governments, including our own.
The UN Secretary-General António Guterres says we need to cut global emissions by 45 per cent this decade. However, current climate pledges are so limited they would mean a 14 percent increase in emissions. Guterres calls for a tripling in the speed of the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, pointing out that “in most cases renewables are already far cheaper”.
How would the transition be funded? A little-known fact is that the UK government subsidises the oil industry by £33 million a day via reduced taxes on domestic use of oil and gas and corporate tax breaks. Ordinary people should not be forced to pay for the necessary changes; the fossil fuel companies and the rich must pay.
April’s edition of Professional Social Work magazine published an article explaining that the consequence of climate catastrophe is “societal breakdown”. Let’s think about what that abstract term means in practice.
Initially, it means people having to choose between heating and eating, as the costs of both spiral out of control, then being able to afford neither. This is the most profound dismantling of the welfare state imaginable, happening very fast. Food banks will not be able to prevent starvation.
Social workers know how thresholds have already changed and systems weakened through years of austerity and the social impact of Covid-19. Inequality will become deeper and more entrenched than ever before and no-one will escape or be able to protect themselves from the consequences of the breakdown.
Civil disobedience and civil resistance
It is vital for civil disobedience and civil resistance to be understood as values-driven and, in common with the caring professions, based on shared humanity. There is a strong commitment to the protests being peaceful.
Civil disobedience and sustained civil resistance have long been a key factor in achieving social change, the best known examples being the suffragettes and America’s civil rights movement, neither of which was popular at the time. Dr Carmody Grey, assistant professor of Catholic theology at Durham University, says that the time for talking about science is past, that the key to engaging people is the prospect of losing all that they love.
She also is sure that our current protesters will be hated for their commitment to the public interest, before it is understood. The government and mainstream media will divert blame onto protestors, as has already happened. And yet, the UN Secretary-General says: “Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals. But, the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels.”
It is quite something for doctors, teachers, scientists and social workers to publicly cross the taboo of being arrested by the police and detained for breaking the law, with the prospect of facing court, a criminal record, and sometimes, depending on the action, a potential prison sentence. Ordinary people who would not usually ever be in conflict with the law are being charged with causing a public nuisance and trespass. The failure of all other means in the face of an international emergency does call for unusual action.
System change
Oil fuels war, for example, funding Putin in Ukraine and driving conflict over scarce resources. Resources will be increasingly scarce as climate breakdown leads to a dramatic decrease in the inhabitable area of our planet through fire, floods and expanding desert.
Continuing dependence on oil is an indefensible risk in terms of magnitude and imminence and the decision to continue this dependence appears to be driven solely by grotesque short-term profiteering.
Even if individuals were doing all within their power to reduce their carbon footprints, the changes needed are beyond our reach as individual citizens. As a species, we need to change fast or die: we are more capable of broad systemic changes than we realise, as demonstrated by Covid-19 responses and by social changes thought not possible, such as the ban on smoking in public. The first vital step is to free ourselves from dependency on oil, gas and coal.
Of course, this will be disruptive and inconvenient, but what is the alternative? We cannot continue to ignore the evidence from multiple sources – this cultural norm of desensitisation, perpetuated by our mainstream media, has created our now acute emergency.
We must spend public funds immediately on insulation and retrofitting – the most effective way of protecting homes – and free, frequent public transport, limiting car ownership by law. The UN says we must peak our oil use in 2025, so opening new oil fields must be out of the question.
Children
Children will be among those most affected, both immediately and in the course of their lifetimes. The impact on today’s babies and future generations is unimaginable. This is ultimately the most significant safeguarding issue of our lives, and failure to face it should be framed as the most serious form of institutional neglect.
A recent example of leadership has come from the international charity Save the Children, who refused a donation of £750,000 because it came from a North Sea oil developer. Charities of course have to turn down attractive support from any organisation or group which is actively harming children.
As social workers, we will be concerned about anxiety and depression in children, which are stages in facing the catastrophe. We will want to enable them to focus on their agency – for example, campaigning for schools to transition to renewable energy sources, and for better climate education, prioritising relationships and community, using models such as restorative practice.
Denial
The only way to effect the necessary change at this stage is to recognise that an emergency requires a very rapid response. The UK Parliament declared a climate emergency in May 2019 but has failed to follow this with relevant actions, so has enabled cultural norms which deny the painful truth.
Social workers are familiar with denial, we frequently work with this human response to harm and wrongdoing. In this situation of national and international emergency, each of us has a relationship with our own denial and that of others, we could not otherwise get through the day.
So that we seize the small and closing window of opportunity, we must learn and practice facing the unbearable truths together. This is the focus of the ordinary people who make up the Just Stop Oil campaign.
Many hundreds of people, mainly young people whose futures are at stake, have risked their physical safety and their liberty to spearhead public awareness of the situation and to demand that the UK government immediately halt all new fossil fuel projects. They are the fire alarm which might initially be experienced as an irritant, until those woken by it realise what is at stake.