The process from here to climate emergency mobilisation

The conclusion of many readers after reading the sections above can be assumed to be as follows.

  • I can see the logic of the argument as to why it’s necessary. It would be the rational thing for us to do, given the threat we otherwise face.

  • I can now imagine what a Climate Emergency would actually look like and I believe it might actually work if we responded in this way.

  • But I still just can’t imagine it actually happening!

So, while we covered some of this in earlier sections, we need to return to the topic of how this might actually unfold. What would it take to actually shift society to emergency mode?

The world is different from Churchill’s in WWII. Those were the days when the proverbial ‘men in smoked filled rooms’ really did run the world! 

But the way it has changed – and particularly the way it operates as a distributed global system – is not all negative for the task at hand here. It is true that we tend to have far less courageous political leaders and far more dysfunctional political systems – particularly in Western democracies.  But we also have an amazingly connected world where no one can fully control the flow of information and where ideas and beliefs can spread at amazing speed, sometimes tipping ideas into the mainstream virtually overnight. 

So, as we covered earlier, we see the ‘me too’ movement on sexual harassment in the USA suddenly transform the landscape of an issue that had been on the surface of debate for many decades but had seen little progress. We see governments fall as happened in the Arab Spring with an idea suddenly spreading, despite the presence of brutal autocratic regimes. We see companies and technologies spread rapidly across the world with positive impacts on the way people live, driven by consumers not by governments, as we witnessed with the arrival of mobile telephones into Africa. We see the way solar and other renewables, batteries and electric cars have already driven huge disruptive change in energy markets across the world, despite active opposition to their spread by some political ideologies and the incumbent industry. 

While many of these system influences are beneficial to the way change happens, the fundamental way major shifts happen in society has stayed the same for hundreds of years:

  • The status quo protects itself and has to be overwhelmed by pressure;

  • The inertia in markets, framed by old incumbent companies, is very strong;

  • The elites run the world.

So, what will it take - given having logic and common-sense on the side of action clearly isn’t enough? What can overcome and overwhelm such powerful resistance? 

There are many lessons we can take from history but especially from the past 100 years. Major social and economic change hardly ever happens just because the logic says it should. From the US civil rights movement, to the fall of apartheid, to the end of the Berlin Wall, to the Arab Spring and countless others cases, we can learn what are the two most important patterns:

1.    Even when the logic is clear and most people agree change should happen, it’s the rise of mass movements, civil disobedience and large numbers of people in the streets that finally overcomes the system’s final inertia and resistance.

2.    The elites stay as the elites – change almost always happens through acceptance by those with the most power in society that resistance is futile, and that change must now occur.

There will be – and already are – powerful and rich people who strongly advocate for the emergency and in some cases will profit from the transition. Society is more used to the rich and powerful advocating policies that benefit themselves and the status quo. So, when they are advocating for their own financial benefit while also correctly advocating for society’s best interests this will unsettle some. 

However all of this is what, in the end, will collectively overcome the status quo and force change and an emergency mobilisation. Powerful, large and rich companies and their friends in the elites, with support from the state including the security and defence leaders, will together push the last resistors like the fossil fuel companies out of the boat, before they sink everyone. 

It will be messy. It is today very hard to imagine. But as Nelson Mandela, having gone through a process just like the one described above, said:

“It always seems impossible, until it’s done”.