Why have we all stopped talking about climate change?

Roma reflects on the RYSE summer climate residential that pulled together ~20 young people from a range of movements and spaces to work out why, as a generation, we all stopped talking about climate change.

Meg + participants on Sunday morning

“Enough of selfishness. Enough of schemes of domination. Enough of insensitivity, irresponsibility and deceit. 

“Tomorrow will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago” - Fidel Castro, 1992.

Have you stopped talking about climate change? 

About a year ago, we ran a youth democratic local process where we asked ~50 young people what they would most like to change about the world - and many of the usual suspects for leftie teenagers got covered. 

A world without racism, third spaces to be social, and improved healthacre systems. 

But across the whole day, 8 hours of discussion and deliberation, not one young person raised climate change as an issue. 

That's when we realised that not only did this represent a failure of the democratic process that we were running (it wasn't situated within the reality where we have breached 6 out of 9 planetary boundaries and are on an accelerating collision course with mass death and displacement) it represented their avoidance of the issue and our own reluctance to bring this to the teenagers we were working with. 

We got curious within the team - why hadn't any of us raised it? 

As one of the people bringing a lot of the knowledge of democratic processes to the youth assembly, I thought my excuse at the time was water tight: I was there to facilitate a democracy, I did not want to tell the young people what they should care about. 

We wrote up the manifesto, summarising everything else that they'd spoken about. We wrote a preamble which did touch on climate change - but it still felt like it remained a big black hole. 

We continued with this organising, ran education sessions on group culture, imperialism, democracy and theories of change, and didn’t think about it. 

But Robin wouldn’t drop it. Some of you might know that Robin got his start within activism as one of the organisational motors behind Extinction Rebellion youth. He started raising it during any lull in conversation: “How much have you been thinking about climate change lately?” 

This question would usually be followed by several groans as we all tried to forget again. 

And then it was 2025 - the deadline for peak emissions set by the Paris agreement. And we all knew logically that the Paris agreement was dead but suddenly the new year’s fireworks were above our heads and the warbling rendition of auld lang syne from a cold hill was not enough to stop the creeping feeling of dread. 

The initial proposal for this residential included several key points:

Many of the committed “climate kids” of the 2019-20 movement dove in head first and then fell out of love with the “old white” climate movement and began to understand that without social transformation/revolution tackling climate change is impossible. 

We then joined more social justice movements (kill the bill, free Palestine, Black lives matter) and/or began longer term institution building (this is how the RYSE was founded, although now many of our members are not from the climate movement) while still emotionally contending with the urgency of climate collapse. 

We then felt torn between the climate timeline and the social justice timeline, and the “last chance” narratives were over because according to them we’d passed last chance a while ago. 

We have also spent a significant proportion of the last few years working with and understanding the PRALER process, the key frameowrk of which being Planet Repairs. Planet Repairs comes from work by the internaitonal social movement for Afrikan reparations and can be articulated in three parts: cognitive, reparatory and environmental justice. Before we can look towards environmental justice, communities torn apart and harmed by imperialism and capitalism have to repair themselves - and that includes our community.

For a more complete explanation of Planet Repairs, you can find an explanation here, including an important quote from one of the key scholar-activists behind the naming of Planet Repairs, Esther Xosei.

To us, this became a key way of understanding the climate crisis - but we wanted to understand the other frameworks that had been picked up by our generation.

Participants gathered in the Redz living room on Saturday afternoon

We wanted to understand the other reasons people had stopped talking about it - and if they hadn’t how they had updated their narratives and actions to suit. We hosted a gathering of around 20 people from a variety of organisations, practices and backgrounds and asked them this - and despite differences, there were many similar threads. 

Many people cited that after the highly emotive “last chance to save humanity from extinction” narrative that drove much of the 2019-20 mobilisation, they felt there was no narrative to move to once it became clear that governments would not be compelled and had no intention of sticking to the Paris agreement. Some people stayed with this narrative, which rings more hollow every passing year, while some moved on to nihilism or adaptation. 

Adaptation is a wholly unappealing narrative for many young people.

We still hold the urge to fight in our bodies and getting told that the solution is adapt to devastation is not what many of us are willing to accept for the rest of our lives - although it might be a better narrative for the older cohort that came through the XR/JSO era action. And nihilism, despite it being the reaction of many young people today, doesn’t encourage useful action. As one of the participants put it - nihilism used to make people break stuff, now it just makes people sad. 

Speaking of nihilism, many of the people in attendance (and those in the local community that we spoke to in the lead up to the residential) also said that the enormity of the climate and ecological crisis and the lack of actionable solutions simply meant that talking about it was overwhelming. This is definitely where I sat for a while, although the urgency of it lived in me and how I made many of my big life decisions, I didn’t feel like I could talk about it that way. I worried that I'd make my friends feel guilty, or that they'd tell me I was overreacting. But still I didn't feel like I could help solve it because it didn't feel solveable, and so rather than admit the problem I just stopped engaging with it.

For many attendees, the enormity of the problem couples with the futility of many of the solutions offered. This stands both for peoples' increasing disillusionment with individualist solutions AND a lack of strategy that feels like it both lives up the urgency and the depth of change needed. There are articulations of vision, but many of these visions rely on "magical thinking" from reality to the future.

Growing disillusionment with the climate movement as a result of negative experiences within it were also cited - predominantly racism and an attitude in some parts of the movement that hold up climate justice as seperate to or more important than social or international justice. Eco-fascism, the fear of being labelled an eco-fascist and contributing to harmful narratives were also included within this conversation. 

And let us not forget that it is not only internal: there is a very real impact of rising state repression.

Subsequent Conservative and Labour governments used the power built between the climate, black lives matter and kill the bill movements of 2019-21 as an excuse to crack down on dissent. Alongside changing legislation, the judicial system increasingly holds protestors in contempt of court for explaining the “Why” of what they did - thanks for nothing Silas Reid - and juries are not told they can acquit a defendant based on their conscience.

Suddenly, the bar for entry for direct climate action got a lot higher. 

And before we finish, let me acknowledge that for the RYSE the purpose of this weekend was NOT to revive the climate movement. Although it had some positive impacts and we do think that movements that can work to climate timelines and protect and defend our mother earth are vital, the climate movement, as a distinct movement disconnected from a greater sense of struggle, is not what we want to be recreating. 

Overall, we were able to have two days of incredibly productive and interesting conversation about the reasons that each attendee had stopped talking about the climate and ecological crisis - and for some we began to explore solutions. 

But it is not enough for education to be interesting - for us, in these times, it’s important that it is impactful. A more substantial report is coming and we hope this will help those who feel they have a similar experience to us understand that experience a little better.

We hope to continue this inquiry as 2025 winds down and we do our autumn strategy, using this weekend and the relationships forged at it to build next year in full acknowledgement of the climate crisis and what it means for our organisations.