[2023 was the year governments looked at the climate crisis –
and decided to persecute the activists. But around the world, the
people fighting for the survival of our planet.]
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CLIMATE 2023: SILENCING THE MESSENGERS  
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Owen Jones
December 22, 2023
Guardian
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_ 2023 was the year governments looked at the climate crisis – and
decided to persecute the activists. But around the world, the people
fighting for the survival of our planet. _

Just Stop Oil activists are confronted by police after their ‘slow
match’ in London on 1 November, 2023, photo: Thomas Krych/Zuma Press
Wire/Shutterstock

 

Injustice is easy to oppose after it has receded into the past, and
there is no cost to imagining yourself as a hero long after the event.
Everyone celebrates the suffragettes now, but at the time they were
vilified as hateful spinsters and terrorists. McCarthyism is a
pejorative political label on right and left alike now, but at his
peak, more Americans approved
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Senator Joseph McCarthy than frowned on his witch-hunt. Most people
would like to believe they’d have stood up against the homophobia of
1980s Britain – yet, by 1987, only 11%
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the British public believed same-sex relations to be “not wrong at
all”.

Which takes us to climate activism. This year has seen a global
onslaught against people agitating for more action to mitigate the
worst effects of the climate crisis. Courts can issue stern judgments,
but so can history, and you have to wonder its future verdict on how
the persecution and silencing of those raising the alarm only
escalated when the scientific evidence had become so cast-iron, and
when extreme weather events hammered home the imminent danger facing
the human species. Here in Britain, a government which is reneging on
its climate commitments – not least by expanding oil and gas
licences
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is simultaneously introducing repressive legislation to silence those
holding them to account.After punitive sentences were handed down
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climate activists, the UN’s rapporteur for climate change and human
rights suggested
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November that the sentences potentially breached international law.
Indeed, earlier this month, the 57-year old climate activist Stephen
Gingell was sentenced to six months in prison
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His crime? Participating in a peaceful slow march in protest against
new oil and gas licences – something that is now prohibited by the
Public Order Act 2023. In the space of a month, at least 470 peaceful
protesters were arrested
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the aid of the raft of authoritarian measures driven through by Tory
rule.

Like the climate emergency itself, the persecution of those fighting
it is a global phenomenon. At the recent Cop28 summit in Dubai,
protesters suffered restrictions
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what they and their signs could say and where they could walk. The
French government outlawed
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climate activist group Earth Uprising under the dubious pretext that
it fomented violence; this was rightly labelled
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human rights activists as appearing “wholly disproportionate in
violation of France’s obligations under international law”.

In Australia, new laws imposed steeper prison sentences and fines
against climate protesters: all this, as Human Rights Watch notes
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as the country faces “an onslaught of record-breaking temperatures,
floods, and bushfires in recent years”. In New South Wales,
meanwhile, punitive laws to crack down on climate protesters were last
week ruled
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be unconstitutional because they undermined “freedom of political
communication”.

Meanwhile, climate activists suffer coordinated attempts to portray
them as dangerous extremists. Take the Atlas Network, an influential
global grouping of rightwing thinktanks: it has helped lead campaigns
across the world to demonise climate activists as dangerous
extremists. A report
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the climate platform DeSmog argues that this has had real
consequences: from the portrayal of the German climate movement Last
Generation as de facto terrorists, which helped lay the foundation for
police raids against its activists, to the British thinktank Policy
Exchange, which is reportedly part of Atlas, publishing a report
denouncing Extinction Rebellion as an “extremist organisation
seeking the breakdown of liberal democracy and the rule of law”.
Rishi Sunak later said
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Policy Exchange’s work had helped the government in drafting its
legislation to crack down on such protesters.

Again, what will our descendants think, not least as they inhabit a
world battered by the consequences of today’s failures to address an
existential emergency, knowing we were in full possession of the
facts? Two months ago, an international team of scientists warned
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Earth’s vital signs were in a worse state than in any time in human
history, imperilling the future of life itself. From extreme weather
events to drought, famine to forced population movements, a bleak
future beckons unless the warnings of embattled climate activists are
heeded.

 I used to fly around the world in all-expenses-paid luxury – but I
couldn’t face my conscience
Carlton Reid

What is happening is hardly subtle. There is a calculated attempt to
claim that the _real extremists_ are not those who imperil our
world’s future by fighting policies that would limit carbon
emissions, but those seeking to prevent impending calamity. The truth
is these climate activists are being targeted not because they are
protesting in the wrong way or because their methods are
counterproductive, but because they have secured such a considerable
platform to make the climate emergency a more salient and discussed
issue. Understandably, vested interests profiteering at the expense of
the planet have every motive to shut them up.

There are politicians with loud voices who acknowledge that the
climate emergency is indeed real, but either say nothing when these
climate activists face coordinated campaigns to silence them, or even
render themselves complicit. In hindsight, it seems so obvious to
accept the righteousness of those who fought for the rights of women
to vote, or who stood against McCarthyite intimidation, or who fought
for gay rights. But these were often lonely battles, and those
vindicated by history paid heavy costs at the time. If the climate
activists warning of the gravest threat humanity has yet faced are
silenced into 2024, we all may find ourselves paying an intolerable
price.

_Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist_

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