January 23, 2025
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My Climate Protest Arrest Shows The Problem With The ‘Societal Tipping Point’ Theory
People who hope that progress on climate action will accelerate like sudden changes in our physical world need to prepare for a long, hard fight.
Supporters at Southwark Crown Court, London, UK, where five Just Stop Oil activists were sentenced to 5 and 4 years in prison on 18 July 2024 for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.
Kristian Buus/In Pictures via Getty Images
Eyeing the bruises of the arresting police officer, I took a deep breath and explained why we needed to act faster to avoid it. climate disaster. Standing at a traffic island in London, I looked straight into his body-worn video camera and hoped the speech would make it to court.
On a cold November evening in 2023, I was protesting with the nonviolent civil resistance group, Just Stop Oil (JSO), to call for action to prevent what UN Secretary-General António Gutierres called for.global boiling“. It was a reason recently published research by British Antarctic Survey researchers. He saw that we lost control of the meltdown West Antarctic ice sheetwhich contains enough ice to raise the sea level five meters. At least one glacier there has passed a “tipping point,” scientists have found, where melting is rapid and irreversible.
Tipping points in our physical world were not my only motivation. Risking arrest as a science journalist, I hoped to push society past the social tipping point of accelerating climate action. I’m a living experiment in doing so, because researchers aren’t sure what it takes to make even social change rapid and irreversible.
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In July, the left-wing Labor Party won the UK government and pledged not to issue new licenses for fossil fuel exploration, as we demanded in our protests. However, my experiences – and journalism – make me less certain that we have arrived.social point” about climate action. Instead of giving up in despair, I think this means we need to be more determined. The only way to reduce the severity of the climate disaster we face is to keep pushing, even if we never reach a point.
Social points are embedded in the key principles of Just Stop Oil’s fellow activist group Extinction Rebellion (XR), with which I also protest. The group hopes to mobilize 3.5 percent of the population, which is more than two million people in the UK, according to political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan. Comparing 323 campaigns from 1900 to 2006, they found that JSO and XR were non-violent protests. more than twice as effective like violent When Chenoweth analyzed that data for a 2013 TedX talk, he found that nonviolent campaigns were involved. more than 3.5 percent it led to a long political change in the population.
Such social point theories appear in one of four sections Global Tipping Points Report 2023 A report by 200 climate researchers from 25 organizations around the world. Author of an episode, Victoria SpicerFrom the University of Leeds, he says, in fact, that there is no magic number that will definitively reverse a social point. Every society will be different, Spaiser told me, in terms of the forces that support or oppose change.
My day of protest illustrated the conflicting forces at play in the UK. It was November 11th, Veterans Day, known in my country as Memorial Day. The policeman who arrested me said it came from a fight against the right-wing English Defense League near the Cenotaph, London’s main war memorial. My speech did not surprise him. While I was waiting to be handcuffed to be thrown into a police room, he told me he wanted to go home. The right-wing protests and the lack of governance demonstrated by police fatigue and under-resources felt typical of a world lacking climate action.
Pamper Milkoreit He led the section of the University of Oslo’s Global Tipping Points Report on governing the physical direction of global climate change. Although he is a political scientist, he focuses on the answers to physical tipping points because society is not sure they exist.
Milkores warns against over-reliance on social points to encourage change. The ravages of physical adversity led us to invent societies “out of a psychological need for speed in our solutions,” he says. Politicians and other decision-makers are also “policed,” he worries. “They say ‘Oh, yeah, I know, we don’t have much time, but we’ll get there with a social point.’ It’s another excuse not to do the hard work of decarbonisation now.’
After the arrest, I represented myself at the trial in June 2024, a month before the new UK government asked us to give up the fossil fuel licence. The judge found me not guilty of willfully obstructing the highway. Despite my luck, Several other JSO protesters have been imprisonedreducing our capacity for further protest. This again shows the opposing forces at play, and the words of my fellow protestors suggest that we are far from turning society around to appropriate climate action: recently JSO’s Roger Hallam and Daniel Shaw wrote from their cells to encourage others “Continuing regardless” even though “people are more ready than ever to put their heads in the sand”.
On a broader political level, the Global Tipping Points Report describes five potential negative social tipping processes. These include the breakdown of social norms and bonds, radicalization and polarization, conflict, financial destabilization and the displacement of people. Spaiser says that if they try to trigger social policy hiding points, for example Subsidies and incentives for solar power generation have undoubtedly been achievedare not successful, then countries should not withdraw them. This can only lead to negative reversal processes. Instead, they should continue to drive slow change. “We are in such a critical situation that if we do nothing, the system will slide into negative social points,” says Spaiser.
Demonstrators must also continue even if they do not cause positive tipping points. I now admit that I wanted to try social point theory to satisfy my “psychological need for speed,” as Milkoreit puts it. Today my need for speed is getting frustrated. The forces of light are particularly opposed to the necessary changes record profits for oil companies those who have taken ignore the plans to transition to clean energy.
Accordingly, I agree with Hallam and Shaw’s assessment of the difficult place climate action stands. Faced with this reality, it might be tempting to give in to the opposing forces, but we must not. We are currently running Continue to warm 2.7 degrees Celsius beyond what global temperatures were before the industrial revolution. in the period 1.5 degree C threshold today we are all over the world the drought will last two months on average. At 2 degrees C, they will last four months. At 3 degrees C, they will last 10 months. When it comes to climate action, it’s not as simple as winning or losing. As many of us as possible must oppose the opposition, because any degree we reduce future temperatures is an important fraction for humanity.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author(s) are not necessarily their own. American scientific
