I have deleted my first few attempts to write about this opportunity to address the climate crisis. It’s so enormous, and comes after so many frustrations and failures. The faux left are still out there shouting “one struggle, one fight!” — meaning anyone who’s discontent enough to be out on the streets must agree with EVERYTHING WE STAND FOR or go home.

But we don’t agree on everything. Why should we need to? A group who agree on absolutely everything will never grow large enough to be a movement.

Meanwhile, just about everyone else has been busy setting up Public Emergency Briefing (PEB) viewings. Those gatherings feel different. Why do they feel different?

Who comes to which kinds of meetings?

First, let’s think about two groups of activists the government and the media exerted themselves more than usual to slander and sabotage – two groups that keep getting dragged through the courts.

Let Just Stop Oil stand for the first set, and Palestine Action for the second.

Are they uniquely dangerous? Why are they such a threat? Whom do they threaten? Politicians, and well-paid executives, whose paymasters are the big corporations? – Oil, weapons, healthcare – big Pharma and the military-industrial complex, and, growing out of all that like a mad fungus, ‘big data’?

80% of the population want urgent action on the climate crisis. People, left to think their own thoughts, don’t want the oil industry to burn on until our planet is destroyed, don’t want innocents slaughtered daily in Western Asia and Africa, don’t want to lose our NHS and don’t want to be constantly spied on by the government. All of that is blowing up and coming together, and the government’s response is that of a cornered rat.

Look at the wild aggression that’s been stoked against even official Palestine defenders. Look at Francesca Albanese – she’s been speaking up for Palestine because that’s her job, and been reviled for it by those taught to hate but, she says, she was sanctioned when she suggested to the international courts that they should go after the private sector.

What’s going on?

A couple of weeks ago, Palantir was the new focus of public fury then all the book-burning AI companies — then some people started on about arsonists causing wildfires and they’re not wrong, but it’s the same thing — did you recognise my header image? It’s Israel, burning olive groves in Lebanon –but it all comes back around to the sum total of planetary scale destruction, and why we need the PEBs. Here’s how…

The eternal prospector

Something odd has been happening to my blog stats in the last year or two. It was all quite easy to read, before then. A spike whenever I published something in tune with a group I’m networked with, a double-spike if I had two articles running in near time –- a spike with lots of likes, shares and a few donations when we were in happy agreement, a spike without any of those when my work had served as ‘rage bait’, carrying a message a group overlapping with mine did not want to hear.

But then a new pattern emerged within that. Every day, for well over a year now, one or two ‘readers’ will turn up, visit dozens of articles – sometimes all of them – briefly — and disappear. These strange ‘readers’ might come from anywhere in the world and, be they bots or humans, they are a reiteration of Klondike Pete, dashing around the internet, trying to scoop up ‘data’ faster than the other guy, just in case their data-stash could be the one that makes its owner a billionaire.

And their product? That thing they call AI – did you know that this year, for the first time ever, there are more machine-generated words than human words bashing around on the internet?

Perhaps I should be worried, perhaps I shouldn’t. We know, we have known since Victorian times, that bubbles burst, and this one is already looking purple and wobbly…

So we could just wait for them all to kill themselves and/or each other, or we could act – what could we do? If you can survive 20 minutes of someone who talks at the speed of a machine gun, Doctorow nails it here…

And now, thanks to the floods, the heatwaves and the wildfires, thanks to AI’s proliferation of water-guzzling, polluting data-centres, thanks to the Public Emergency Briefing films, we’re gradually coming together and turning ourselves into a nation of activists, and we will act.

Politicians? Will they act? What were Just Stop Oil trying to say, and how did politicians react? They thought they could get away with trashing Just Stop Oil. Why is the superlatively destructive onslaught against Palestine a key issue? Because genocide and ecocide acted out in full view of the world is proving just too big to brush off.

And eighty percent of the population want to see serious action on climate crisis.

First, they will try to scare us away, because they’re scared. They will try to threaten us, because they are threatened. They will try to divide us or disable us because they are divided and disabled. But then, if we persist, if we unite…

In the last decade or so, many people have been shocked to discover just how dishonest and corrupt our government is. The closer you get to politicians, the more you realise that, whilst the more successful ones, the ones with cabinet jobs and so on, are undoubtedly professional, their profession is not national level administration. It’s performance. It’s PR. They’re in the business of looking as though they care about people.

I’d say that most of our MPs are very well aware of the climate crisis and all the imminent catastrophes it brings. Eighty percent of the population want to see urgent action on climate crisis. That is not the kind of statistic politicians ignore. They also know we know that much could be done to mitigate the worst effects, possibly, eventually, even head off the final disaster.

But the closer you get to government — to the ministers, and number 10, the clearer it becomes that they aren’t going to do the things we know need doing – blindingly obvious things like restoring water to public ownership, and reinstating and re-staffing our emergency services.

I believe politicians are working hard and investing hugely in their chosen response to the crisis – that is, misdirecting people by looking concerned, and accelerating and hard-selling all the military actions and surveillance-and-control plans. When navigating climate crisis, they see us – all of us – as a dangerous nuisance they’ll need to contain, and they think military and technological supremacy is the way to do it.

Did you notice that briefly, cautiously, the introductory sequences to the PEB film included shots of the catastrophic military actions going on in various countries? Do you remember the ex-military man who did one of the summaries? His map of Russia, and contested shipping routes? Politicians and the military see countries they can’t control, like Russia and Iran, as targets for destruction. I thought, okay, if there’s a bit of sea that we want to use, that we fear Russia might deny us, should we be helping Zelensky bomb Russia? Shouldn’t we rather be polite to Russia, and try to sort out some of our differences, so we’re on track to ask a favour later?

Let’s change the rules

The politicians hearing that, most of them, have been trained in nothing but performance. They will leap up and make speeches, and try to look like activists, so they can keep their jobs. So what. We know what they want – to help Israel kill off everything they can’t control in ‘the Middle East’, help Ukraine kill off Russia, and help a bunch of murderous US tech companies complete their global surveillance-and-control projects at the expense of everything from our NHS to our old books.

Meanwhile, what do we do? The slogan’s been out there for years. Turns out, it didn’t just mean recycle your yoghurt pots…

Think global, act local

What do we do, exactly? We who are so weary of so many failed attempts at political change, and we who are new to the whole idea of trying to make things happen… We’ve been persuaded for so long that the thing to do about bad government is to vote in a different party … the other one … the new one, the one that’s going to be different...

Yeah, sure.

Perhaps the answer will emerge in those local discussions, in community decision making. The only way to know is to join those discussions. If there’s a local screening of the PEB, I recommend going along to join in. If there isn’t one, set one up and invite your local contacts.

And don’t let anyone tell you what you are or are not allowed to talk about at those meetings. If you don’t think the whole, necessary conversation grows out of the screening you go to, or if you think it was great, and something you discussed needs a ‘next steps’ session, or if you want to share the experience with another group of people, set up another screening — or run your own kind of meeting. For example…

Don’t…

Above all, please, please don’t make ‘set up a Whatsapp group’ your main action point. If you must set up a Whatsapp group, where everyone can show each other political memes they agree with … Whatever you do, don’t try to organise away the ensuing chaos by setting up lots of sub-channels, where your group will dissipate and lose track of each other.

The PEBs are great, because they bring people together, face to face, and challenge them to do something. I’ve been to two, and they were totally different, and I listened to people who went to others, and found different reactions again. Responses I’ve heard about tend to fall into three types …

Blitz spirit

Some audiences get stuck in and start working out local resilience committees, discussing how they might deal with fires, floods, food shortages and so on.

Petitioners

Some put their heads together working out ways they can push MPs and councils to take the situation seriously and get to work on emergency measures.

Fightback

Some people are not going to be content with bravely dealing with the symptoms. They know we need far, far more action than what we’ll get from the government…

I don’t think it’s a case of deciding which is the right response. It’s a case of drawing those strands together into a movement that’s covering all bases. Every campaign that ever succeeded encompassed and valued its quiet administrators, its writers, its marchers and flag-wavers, and its head-on activists.

Just — please, let’s DO something.

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