A notable day on Saturday: the final manifestation of Just Stop Oil out on the streets of London, blocking traffic. I was asked to say a few words at the celebration that followed – this (plus a few embellishments!) is what I said:
April 26th, 2025: just another day on Hothouse Earth. The temperatures in North Africa and the Middle East nudging close to 50°C – off any conceivable scale for that part of the world at this time of year. Arctic sea ice at an all-time low for this time of the year. Rumours that the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been forced by Trump to ‘bury’ its latest analysis of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere from 2024. One wonders why?
And just another day in a world riven by the consequences of unaccountable tyrants doing their worst in Sudan, in Ukraine, and in Gaza – where the World Food Programme announced that it had run out of food because of Israel’s blockade on aid getting into Gaza. A fully-fledged genocide, in real time, under the gaze of the global media actively supported by Keir Starmer and his deeply immoral Government.
(A quick shout-out along the way for the two Youth Demand activists who disrupted Sunday’s London Marathon to ensure at least some attention being paid to this continuing abomination).
The media last week was full of one bit of so-called “good news” on the climate front: according to a recent poll (involving 130,000 people in 125 countries), 89% indicated that they would like their government to be doing more about climate change – even though they’re not actively involved in ensuring that their governments actually do anything about it. Whoopee-bloody-doo, is all I can say! As one of the lead researchers involved said at the time: “worrying about climate change is something people today are doing in the privacy of their own minds …. leading to a self-fulfilling spiral of silence”.
Just imagine if they REALLY knew how bad it is! Just imagine if their ever-so private worrying away about climate change came, even fleetingly, into contact with the actual truth (the whole truth!) about the speed with which the climate is melting down.
That, unfortunately, is highly unlikely – given the power of all those forces in society today which ensure that the vast majority of people remain immured in a state of relative (and, often, complete) ignorance: the fossil fuel industry, now triumphantly celebrating the fruits of decades of systematic misinformation; the serried ranks of self-serving and often corrupt politicians; the right wing media in all their terrifying, toxic power; and (the last of my “four harbingers of the coming climate apocalypse”), most of today’s mainstream environmental organisations – who really do know the truth about the climate, but whose strategy, even now as breakdown looms, is still to double down on decades of demonstrably ineffective tactics. Just watch that spiral of silence at work.
So, just another day in the Hothouse. But not quite.
For one thing, Pope Francis was buried today. This is always difficult for me, as no great admirer of the Catholic Church, but I feel, in truth, that we have to mark the death of one of the greatest champions of climate justice, of Mother Earth (“crying out because of the harm we have inflicted on her”), of the poor, of refugees, and of the left-behind that we’ve ever had – in an age starved of such leadership.
For me, reflecting on the march today about Martin Luther King, one of the most important inspirations for JSO campaigners, Pope Francis consistently came the closest to understanding his much-quoted aphorism that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”. As we know, this means literally nothing if our actions do not reflect and reinforce that direction of travel.
And not just another day in the Hothouse – as it’s the day that marks the moving on from Just Stop Oil, going out just as it came in three years ago, bearing witness with total integrity.
I’ve spent the last year working with 26 of JSO’s younger campaigners. Together, we’ve written a book (‘Love, Anger & Betrayal’). The ‘love’ in the title is almost all theirs, articulated so movingly for those whose lives have already been impacted by climate change, and for all those hundreds of millions for whom the impacts will progressively worsen; the ‘anger’ is mostly mine; and the ‘betrayal’ – well, that’s right out there right now, as young people start to see how their future has been stripped bare, de-natured, closed down in so many different ways. What I describe in the book as the most consequential act of intergenerational injustice there has ever been.
‘Love, Anger & Betrayal’ will be out in July – my small but I hope not insignificant attempt to tell their truth, and through them, the truth about the climate crisis.
So, I guess this is my final tribute to Just Stop Oil, and to everything it did and stood for and made happen over the last three years.
Jonathon Porritt 29 April 2025
