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Can't stop thinking about #ExtinctionRebellion. About the deliberately controversial tactics, about the wider strategy, about Adam Boulton's sneering response, about @claireperrymp insistence the progress we've made is being ignored...
About the Very Serious People's argument that there are better theories of change, about the implicit rebuke to the likes of me who have spent years trying to advance climate action, about the nerve involved as the near-inevitable crack down approaches...
Why is this all so unnerving, and yes, exciting? I think it is the sense of what this moment and this movement could herald.
Because the whole thing - the name, the logo, the rhetoric, the tactics, all of it - reminds me as nothing so much as one of those seemingly throwaway but massively evocative lines in a @MargaretAtwood novel.
You know the ones. The references dropped into a conversation that immediately give you a sense of the trends and movements that whirled around a society under immense stress before... Well, you know the rest.
The thing all discussion of #ExtinctionRebellion has missed is how inevitable and in some ways logical it feels...
You can disagree with some of the tactics and the wider politics of some of those involved (and I do), but it is surely the physical manifestation of how part of society (perhaps a large part) was always going to respond to @GretaThunberg challenge to treat a crisis like a crisis
If you accept we face an existential civilisation level crisis - and remember that is the stated view of countless scientists, politicians, investors, etc - then a movement like #ExtinctionRebellion was always inevitable.
For years my fallback question for CEOs and politicians has been if you accept this why is your response not commensurate? It has never got a decent answer. The best answer is usually 'public consent, we need political cover'.
That absence of commensurate action (and yes, there has still been massively impressive progress) meant that as the climate crisis escalated the response was always going to intensify and fragment.
Direct action, and a lot, lot more of it, feels like an inevitable response to what we face. And that feels exciting and potentially catalysing, but also fucking terrifying. Basically, still this... businessgreen.com/bg/blog-post/3…
Last thought: if political and business leaders want to put the genie back in the bottle they'll have to do a lot better to demonstrate their theories of change are more effective. Climate action is going to have to be commensurate to climate threat. businessgreen.com/bg/blog-post/3…
Or as a senior figure at a major investment firm put it at a climate event last year, quoting Maya Angelou 'I did then as I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better'.
