Book review. The Climate Majority Project: Setting the stage for a mainstream, urgent climate movement co-edited by Rupert Read, Liam Kavanagh and Rosie Bell

Book review. The Climate Majority Project: Setting the stage for a mainstream, urgent climate movement co-edited by Rupert Read, Liam Kavanagh and Rosie Bell
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
6 May 2024

“We haven’t yet exceeded the bounds of viable human civilisation, but we’re getting close,” top climate scientist Professor Michael Mann warned last year. “If we keep going [with carbon emissions], then all bets are off.”

This is why, in 2021, the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called for “immediate, rapid and large-scale” cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

How large? According to a December Guardian report, the UN Environment Agency estimates that for the world to have a shot at keeping below 1.5oC of global heating, emissions would need to fall by nine per cent every year. For context, emissions fell by 5.4 per cent when the pandemic brought the world to a halt in 2020.

It’s deeply frightening facts like these that lead Rupert Read, Liam Kavanagh and Rosie Bell – the co-editors of this volume – to conclude “the climate crisis is too vast, complex and multi-faceted to be addressed adequately without mass public mobilization.”

They explain how The Climate Majority Project has been established “to help catalyse” a “shift towards mass citizen action the world now urgently requires to support systems change.”

According to the authors, the Project is working for “the same degree of deep societal transformation” as radical climate activists “albeit by more accessible means.” Read sees the workplace, where people spend so much of their time and often wield considerable power, as a key site of mobilisation, with trade unions in particular in a unique position to help build a climate majority.

While the Project explicitly builds on the 2019 public opinion-shifting actions of Extinction Rebellion, the authors do not believe radical activism on its own will engender the political, economic and social revolutions now required. Indeed, the book includes an interesting conversation between Anthea Lawson and Read which explores “the possibility that the very idea of ‘activism’ is putting some people off getting involved”, and therefore may be one reason the climate movement has struggled to achieve its aims.

The Project’s intellectual foundations seem to be based on Read’s recent works, such as 2019’s This Civilisation Is Finished and Why Climate Breakdown Matters published in 2022. However, the book – and no doubt the Project too – is very much a collective effort. Joolz Thompson’s chapter on setting up the Community Climate Action in Suffolk is particularly inspiring, while Kavanagh’s deep dive into the “inner work” involved in climate action raises questions often ignored in mainstream discourse.

By grappling with arguably the biggest threat the UK and the rest of humanity has ever faced, and offering up ideas of how a powerful majority devoted to action on climate action can be assisted into being, this is an important read for, yes, climate activists – and also anyone interested in a liveable planet.