Climate justice vs criminal justice

XR & JSO co-founder Roger Hallam is one of five road-blocking activists to have been given significant prisons sentences. What should we make about the whinges that these sentences are 'harsh'?

It began with Westminster’s roads and bridges being blocked by a new “movement” of radical environmentalists, seemingly out of nowhere, in the second half of 2018. With global and national politics having been dominated by Trump and Brexit, climate change was exposed as being a preoccupation of a narrow part of society, and the climate policy agenda, despite the Paris agreement, was in torpor. Nearly all of Westminster was in alignment, but there was no evidence that the public wanted more of the policies that had pushed energy prices up. So a new army of street-level climate activists was convened, promising to mobilise the public around the idea of a “Climate emergency”. The founders of this new campaign believed that once government had been forced to “tell the truth”, the public would rise up to demand Net Zero emissions by 2025.

It was always a campaign of psychic terror. Extinction Rebellion (XR) co-founder Gail Bradbrook candidly explains how she had coped with her own domestic crises by taking an array of hallucinogenic drugs, ultimately leading to her enterprise with Roger Hallam, whom Bradbrook believed had unlocked “the codes to social transformation”. Hallm, Bradbrook, and other co-founders hence aimed to “activate 3.5% of the UK population – roughly 2 million people – in order to force the government to act”. “Imagine there’s twenty Hitlers”, later explained Bradbrook to MPs, about how this “activation” of 2 million people was to be achieved, “you know, ‘cos this is far worse than one Hitler… twenty Hitlers lined up… ". Is it possible that the very essence of XR is a bad trip?

Absolutely it is. For although XR, which is credited with spawning many franchises around the world and in the UK, it was itself an implementation of a hypothesis published in 2014 by clinical psychologist, Margaret Klein-Salamon, called “The Climate Mobilization”, which aimed to drive popular action towards “an all-of-society, emergency-speed mobilization to zero emissions, with a level of government economic intervention and public investment not seen since WWII”. Klein-Salamon believed that there existed in society an “emergency mode”, last seen during WWII, which could be initiated by emphasising to the public alarmist climate change scenarios. Her thesis — Leading the Public Into Emergency Mode: Introducing the Climate Emergency Movement — sets the now familiar tone:

Imagine there is a fire in your house.

What do you do?

What do you think about?

You do whatever you can to try to put out the fire or exit the house. You make a plan of action.

Your senses are heightened, you are focused like a laser, and you put your entire self into your actions. You enter emergency mode.

I’ve written quite a bit about how shrinks of one kind or another have decided to use their putative expertise to political effect in the climate debate. Although some (but too few) have questioned it, it is amazing to see how little resistance there has been to these echoes of Stalinism from within the sphere of psychology and psychiatry. Nonetheless, it seems clear that the last 20 years have seen clinicians and researchers in that field talk themselves into the idea that causing, rather than ameliorating mental distress is a legitimate use of their expertise and cultural standing. I first came across this phenomenon in 2007. Here was Dr H. Steven Moffic, talking about how to mobilise anxiety, shame, and guilt for political ends…

This somewhat long preamble into a discussion about the sentencing of JSO activists this week is necessary, I believe, because it is very easy to forget what XR and its franchises are, and what they came from. A point I shall come back to is that this is a movement that has manifestly eschewed reason.

It was formed by people whose conception of “Nature” is wholly irrational, and marks a sense of loss in their own, very damaged lives. They escaped from their emotional problems, their commercial failures and their domestic chaos — on their own accounts — by retreating from reality, into themselves, using extremely hard, mind-altering drugs. And they returned from their trips believing they had answers. They believed that their problems had been caused by environmental degradation — the consequences of industrial, capitalist society. And they believed that the degraded relationship between society and “Nature”, which had led their own dysphoria, had to be restored.

For their part, the psychiatrists and psychologists have not so much been run down by the lunatics taking over the asylum as much as they sought a settlement with their former charges, to play for higher stakes as a combined force. Listen closely to Moffic. If the healthy, happy, and well-balanced individual is not sufficiently terrified into obedience — the obedience to their authority that psychiatrists hitherto expected of people with profound mental illnesses — then, for the sake of public health, the individual at large must be made to feel distress. Happiness is dangerous folly. The concept of the asylum now encompasses the entire of society.

The most tragic expression of this tendency was Greta Thunberg’s “I want you to panic” speech. Straight out of Klein-Salamon’s thesis, the emotionally manipulative spectacle made plain that green proselytising requires sharing — i.e. spreading — anxiety about the world as an unimpeachable fact about the world. You cannot explain to such people that the world is not as they see it, because the world as it is is not the object at the centre of their perspective. They, and their messy emotions are the centre of the world. The world must be a wholly intractable mess, because they are each themselves a wholly inconsolable mess. You can’t please a green. And, moreover, the truth of this is demonstrated by the reaction obtained by confronting alarmism. If you want to see pure, incandescent green rage, try explaining to them that their claims have no basis in observations. It is an insult to their very sense of themselves. It’s not about climate change, is it.

You may think I am putting it too strongly. On the contrary, I believe I am understating it. Consider this article about Bradbrook’s claims, in the No Scientist.

Rosalind Watts, a clinical psychologist at Imperial College London who has guided patients through psilocybin therapy, said there is an important link between mental health and the ecological crisis. “We are in an epidemic of depression and disconnection from ourselves and our environment,” she said. “When you’re suffering from depression, it’s incredibly difficult to care and do something.”

You may well take the view that recreational drugs can have a therapeutic application. But take a closer look at the “academic” researcher’s formulation: there is “an important link between mental health and the ecological crisis”, she claims — i.e. that some “connection” can be restored, through the use of psychedelic drugs. But not so restored, of course, that patient becomes content with industrial, capitalist society.

This notion of a connection to nature is an article of faith, as are, similarly, the notions of ecological crisis and an epidemic of poor mental health. No doubt, many people, especially children, benefit from experiences that take them away from city life. But these may be “restorative” of something subjective, far beyond scientific objectification, such as socialisation, or just taking the day off work to chill out, rather than communing with Gaia. The researcher’s preference for “connection” to “nature” and hallucinogens are manifestly lifestyle preferences in search of the legitimacy of a greater thing.

Do you know what I find bleak and depressing? The nihilistic, cod-scientific tendency of making everything ‘therapeutic’ — the goal of framing everything in emotional terms, and then calling the result a “mental health crisis”. The researcher seems oblivious to the possibility that only offering generations of children an uncontested future of ecological doom, might result in maladjusted adults. Of course not, on Moffic’s terms, such individuals are well-balanced. And if it all gets too much, drop some acid, and go to an XR rave. The penetration of therapeutic culture and environmental ideology into universities has moved “research” so far from anything resembling a “discipline” that we probably need a whole new vocabulary to describe the activity — whatever that is — that was was once covered by the term ‘scholarship’.

Prison

We saw how all this ended up for at least five Just Stop Oil (JSO) protesters on Thursday last week. The Guardian, has the detail of the sentencing, in which Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, Cressida Gethin, Louise Lancaster and Daniel Shaw (left to right in the following image) all received four years, and Roger Hallam, right, received five years.

The judge told them that

…the plain fact is that each of you has some time ago crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic. You have appointed yourselves as the sole arbiters of what should be done about climate change, bound neither by the principles of democracy nor the rule of law.

And your fanaticism makes you entirely heedless of the rights of your fellow citizens. You have taken it upon yourselves to decide that your fellow citizens must suffer disruption and harm, and how much disruption and harm they must suffer, simply so that you may parade your views.

Of particular consequence to the sentencing on the judge’s view was both the impact of their action and their intention, and the fact that the protesters all had prior convictions.

Their disruption of the M25 — London’s orbital motorway, at the centre of the UK’s road network — had affected an estimated 708,523 vehicles. This caused some to miss flights, funerals, exams, education, and important hospital appointments, the judge observes, but a full account of the consequences would be all but impossible.

Citing Hallam’s remarks made in a Zoom call to the protesters, the judge found that

the gridlock for which all five of you devoutly hoped come to pass, the consequences would have been catastrophic. Mass road disruption in London & southern England would have had major implications for food supplies and the maintenance of law and order, among other things.

In the zoom call, obtained by a journalist for The Sun, Hallam had said,

if we take a section of motorway, a circular motorway, people block gantries at close equidistant spaces around that circle at a certain time of the day, the whole motorway will fill up with cars and then no one will be able to get onto that motorway and it will back up on all the other motorways and all the other A-roads. In other words, it will cause a hundred times more disruption than simply 2 or 3 people doing it.

Hallam, explained the judge, had more than eleven previous convictions for related offences. Shaw had one. Whittaker De Abreu had three. Lancaster had six. Gethin had three. All of the protestors, were, at the time of protesting, already out on bail. Accordingly, the judge found it “not an appropriate case for leniency”.

The Guardian also quotes Cressida Gethin’s statement made to the court in mitigation:

I want to remind the court once more that my reasons for taking action were not beliefs or opinions. Earth’s life-support systems are breaking down due to human activities, whether we believe it or not.

These are not beliefs or opinions and feeling strongly that this is wrong is greatly understandable, I would argue. I deeply regret that this action was necessary … I maintain that it was necessary and I stand by my actions as the most effective option available to me.

And here is where, I hope, my long preamble becomes relevant.

Gethin is wrong. Her reasons for “action” really are beliefs and opinions. The notion of “Earth’s life-support systems” “breaking down due to human activities” has no basis in science. Indeed, the notion of “life-support systems” are pure ideology.

I have discussed this ideological mythology previously, in my film that directly addresses JSO protesters’ claims.

One may of course argue that CO2 emissions cause a warming of the atmosphere and find widespread scientific support for the idea. And of course, one will find a much scientific agreement that a warming atmosphere will have consequences for the climate system. And one will find plenty of scientific literature attempting to demonstrate that the shifting of climatic patterns represents a change in the risks of extreme weather, ultimately resulting in a net increase of weather-related risks to humans. But to that, we must observe first that, by each step, the certainty we can attach to such claims diminishes in degree. Second, no matter how forcefully those arguments are presented by scientists, they do not amount to a claim relating to “life support systems”, much less the sane “systems” “breaking down”.

In other words, the notion of both “life support systems” and those systems “breaking down” precedes the “science”.

Moreover, it is the intransigence of the protesters that protected them from hearing that, despite the warming, and despite the climate change, and despite the impacts of climate change, weather-related risks, as measured by metrics of human welfare, are significantly diminished.

It is widely observed that such protesters are spoilt brats. They are invariably wealthy, privileged, and indulged. But they are victims, too, of the psychodrama that has engulfed them. It sought out such individuals, to licence their predispositions to antisocial behaviour, and to posit it to them as virtue, whereas the normal (and normalising) lessons of life would tend to knock the edges off such undue self-regard. It inculcates a sense of entitlement, and confuses feelings for facts about the world, which it presents as absolutes. And it engenders contempt and hostility towards attempts to rationalise and negotiate with the shameless narcissism of, for example, narcissists, barely out of their teens, who presume to possess such wisdom that they may with impunity vandalise priceless artwork and national monuments — imposing their feelings on society and culture.

That is not mitigation. I believe that self-deception is bad faith, too. And individuals that wilfully eschew reason and debate — and indeed believe that reason and debate are in themselves evil — must take responsibility for their actions. But as we shall see, many and powerful forces are aligned to persuade them that they are not responsible for their actions.

I have made several points since the style of protesting pioneered by Extinction Rebellion in 2018, that built on the ‘direct action’ form of ‘protest’ developed by earlier green and anti-capitalist protest movements. Misconceptions about XR, and now JSO’s style of protest continue to thrive, even in commentary that is critical of them.

XR/JSO’s objectives are the same as its methods: shutting down society

Very often, even critics of JSO on the likes of GB News and Talk TV will admit to having sympathy for JSO’s “aims”, but not their “methods.

It should be very clear from the evidence summarised by the judge’s remarks that this is a distinction without a difference. The JSO protests aimed to shut down society, not merely block the M25. The protest was unsuccessful in bringing the entire road network to gridlock, but that was its intention.

That is identical to the founding principles of XR and JSO, and so on. One of XR’s key demands when formed in 2018 was Net Zero by 2025, which is now just five months away. As I pointed out at the time, and often since, there is no precedent for such an imposition by a government on a people, destroying such wealth, and creating such an immiseration, without the use of guns and tanks, pointing at citizens. XR founders believed, falsely, that once the “truth” had been explained to the public, they would demand such an immiseration. And as I have attempted to show, that “truth” is anything but — it was an ideological dream, amplified by hallucinogenic drugs, and the deranged zealotry that emerged from the trip-heads’ folie à deux.

We must destroy society to save society… The green dream is precisely lockdown in perpetuity. They believe that, not unlike the Covid lockdowns, their public sector salaries and pensions, work-from-home lifestyles, and isn’t-it-all-a-jolly lark can continue indefinitely, without a concomitant profound transformation of society occurring, likely returning it to the violent chaos they claim to want to avoid.

XR and its franchises such as JSO intended to get people put in prison.

XR was founded on Hallam’s hypothesis of social change. Hallam, who likes to style himself as an academic, claims for example,

I studied the civil rights movement’s dynamics quite a bit, and all started off with 20–30 people. Once you get to about 1,000 people in prison, then you’re in the ballpark of something significant. In the autumn, we’re quite likely to close Heathrow airport, and there could be 500 people in prison in a week. My prediction is that will change the course of British history

Hallam’s hypothesis is that mass arrests and incarceration precede radical social change. Accordingly, if a political campaign can cause so many of its activists to lose their liberty, then this process can be shortcut — society will respond to the injustice.

The absurdity of the idea that societal change can be ‘hacked’ in this way was of course the “codes to social transformation” that impressed the drug-addled Bradbrook. But it very soon became less convincing even to XR’s adherents. In the Guardian, climate activist Ben Smoke wrote that,

Today, and in the coming days, weeks and months, hundreds – perhaps thousands – of activists hope to be arrested. Some hope to go to prison. They are part of Extinction Rebellion, a group seeking urgent action on climate change in the 12 years we have left to avert cataclysmic ecological breakdown. As part of their International Rebellion, they are seeking to “shut down” areas of central London today for as long as possible to “disrupt the ‘business as usual’ which is sending our species on a one way track to extinction”.

But…

The notion that 2,000 arrests will evoke the kind of systemic change needed to fight climate change is naive at best. At a time when the government has cracked down on protest, to not see that this could go the other way, and be used simply as a way of increasing already draconian anti-protest legislation and prosecutions, is shortsighted and irresponsible. But beyond that, the cost to individual activists, and the movement as a whole, would be huge.

Naïve, indeed.

But the green movement’s naivety has turned into total amnesia. In the Conversation, Graeme Hayes, Reader in Political Sociology, Aston University and Steven Cammiss, Associate Professor, Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham write that “harsh sentences are the logical outcome of Britain’s authoritarian turn against protest”.

“Academic” is becoming a synonym of idiot, of course. Because even a climate activist in the Guardian had sufficient nous, five years ago, to recognise that the increasingly extreme form of radical protest championed by XR, with the intention of getting thousands of people put in prison, created the risk of a public backlash driving a change in the law. And indeed, XR’s and its franchises’ projects failed to mobilise the public, failed to share its worldview, and failed, despite even the “crackdown”, to achieve sufficient numbers of arrests and imprisonments Hallam’s thesis believed would create social change.

There was no authoritarian turn against protest. There was, on the contrary, an authoritarian turn towards protest: the protesters are authoritarian — they wanted their protest to mobilise public opinion in favour of draconian policies to enforce Net Zero far faster than the government was able to. They wanted to use the power of the state to change society. But they lacked the means.

Now that Hallam’s thesis has been debunked, his bizarre coreligionists have crawled out from under their rocks to complain about the “injustice” of criminal prosecution of criminal protesters.

"In this society, we cannot put people behind bars who have simply urged us to do what we know in our hearts is the right thing to do", claimed former celebrity chef, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

More famous for pointing cameras at animals, rather than cooking them, fellow TV celebrity, Chris Packham complained on Twitter that,

Tonight somewhere out there are five cells with sleepless people in them . Elsewhere there are empty beds , empty homes and broken hearts . Fear and tears . Anger and confusion . A bunch of good people whose lives have just been smashed by injustice . We hold you in our dreams .

Citing comparisons of average sentences for violent, sexual, and drug crimes with the sentences given to the JSO protesters, green energy tycoon, Dale Vince argued that,

This is how ridiculous sentencing for environment protestors is. It’s plainly wrong if violence and even robbery are treated less seriously. Environment protesting is an act of conscience. Our laws have been perverted to create these extreme punishments for peaceful protest. The Tories have been kicked out, let’s get rid of their twisted laws too.

But what humbug!

Vince’s comments are the most egregious. He claims that "environmental protesting is an act of conscience". But he also argues that "climate denial should become a criminal offence". Only his coreligionists are allowed to have a “conscience”, you see. If you disagree with JSO, to argue that their claims are false, then you should go to prison. Moreover, Vince has filed libel suits against Richard Tice, Sean Bailey, and the Guido Fawkes website for criticising his comments on terrorism.

And perhaps even worse, Vince has given large amounts of money to JSO, whose criminal actions were in very substantial part thus enabled. He admits that he gave the perpetrators "more than £340,000" to enable the expression of their "act of conscience". In many parts of the world, Vince would have been in the dock with the protesters for his part in their joint enterprise.

Chris Packham’s claims are also quite bizarre, given that, last year, Channel 4 commissioned him to author a documentary in which he "goes on a personal journey to decide for himself if it's ethically acceptable to break the law to protest against government policies on climate change”. In Is Disruptive Protest The Only Option Left? Is It Time to Break the Law, Packham concludes that, yes, it is time to break the law. “Personally , I've now reached a point where I believe breaking the law for the climate is the ethically responsible thing to do”, he explained on Twitter, summarising his daft movie.

Although Packham’s film came after the protests that landed the JSO activists behind bars, there can be no question that their actions have been encouraged by the likes of Packham and others, directly and indirectly.

How can one argue for individuals to break the law in order to advance their political agenda, and then complain about the law being applied? The position is insanely incoherent.

And the actions are of course spurred on in more indirect ways. In another Channel 4 documentary, commissioned at the same time as Packahm’s incoherent rant, The Truth About Britain's Power Supply, Fearnley-Whittingstall joined fellow celebs from the channel to make the failure of the UK’s Net Zero agenda look like a conspiracy.

“What if I told you that solving the climate crisis is possible”, asked Kevin McCloud. “The good news is”, adds Fearnley-Whittingstall, “we have the tools”. “The problem is our politicians”, answers McCloud. There then unfolds 47 minutes of green propaganda, showing no evidence of having understood the debate, or the failures of extant green policy, much less how the energy market really works.

XR/JSO are indistinct from the establishment

It is these rich, powerful, and extremely well-connected men, who get commissioned to produce hour-long self-indulgent documentaries on a state-owned broadcaster that are key figures in sending those five, and others, to prison.

Look at them. They style themselves as radical alternatives. But they are multimillionaire energy tycoons, a Peer, and two broadcasters.

They suffer no consequences for their actions — sharing a bleak ideological view of the world, using their power and money to advance policies that they will profit from at ordinary people’s expense, and not for encouraging criminal actions that will put others behind bars.

But they and the protestors are given all the airtime they desire. Consider this video, of a meeting between then Environment Secretary Michael Gove and XR members, just months after the formation of the campaign.

No other protest movement in history has been given such red carpet treatment. They stated their intentions to break the law loudly and clearly, but politicians could not get enough of them. Climate sceptics do not get hour-long sit downs with ministers. Within mere weeks of XR’s launch, Parliament had, as demanded, declared a “climate emergency”, convened a “climate assembly”, and passed a “Net Zero” statutory instrument, amending the Climate Change Act. All of that, of course, after zero conversation with the public at large.

That is not the effect of an anti-establishment movement gaining popular support and winning against the government. That is the effect of a rump of the establishment taking instructions from the establishment, to represent to the establishment the establishment’s own wishes.

The notion of XR/JSO as a radical opposition to the establishment is complete bunk. Governments, and nearly all of Parliament longed for a movement such as XR to stand as a proxy popular movement, to legitimise the Westminster consensus, and overcome the democratic deficit. The establishment needed it.

That this created contradictions — anomalies — such as protesters facing prison sentences, is besides the point. They went to prison to serve the establishment’s needs. Environmentalism is an establishment preoccupation — an ideology rooted in contempt for humanity in general, and the lower orders in particular, which requires the dismantling of democratic control of politics.

That JSO’s activists are now in prison, now puts a question mark over the future of campaigns like it. Have they outlived their usefulness? It would seem so. XR and JSO were only ever performances.

XR/JSO protests can ruin your day, but it is government policy that will ruin lives

We should not get ahead of these observations. XR did not pass the Climate Change Act into law. JSO did not make the Net Zero amendment to the act. MPs did.

There has been, over the years, as far as I can tell, far too much focus on the useless idiots of XR and JSO, and very little attention paid to what is happening in Westminster and beyond. JSO activists are called to practically every TV and radio station’s news programmes. But their funders, with the exception of Vince — who, despite his £millions, is a small-fry in the world of green “philanthropy” — remain silent, if not anonymous. No questions are asked about the broader ownership, by ersatz “philanthropists” of nearly all of British “civil society”. “Look at these loons”, say the shock jocks. But their criticism does not look much deeper at how green ideology came to penetrate the institutions of the British establishment, and all state apparatus.

XR/JSO are the expression of society’s failure to confront green ideology

That is a catastrophic failure. XR/JSO are a spectacle. But they are just the superficial lesions of a deeper, systemic disease.

Above, I have tried to explain, from root to branch, how ideas turned into prison sentences. Green ideology slowly capitalised on the anomie developing in institutions — even within psychiatric medicine. It captured those institutions, like a gangrenous rot, festering within a body. Rather than confronting the radical and weird ideas that began to dominate society’s most important institutions — science and medicine, broadcasting, education, and more — their populations were simply cowed. Rather than doing what they were founded to do, back in the age of reason, they abandoned their principles, such as first do no harm, to make themselves accessories of a political agenda above all else.

When Greta said she wanted people to panic, when those boys said that farming should be abolished, and when late middle aged women, dressed as pixies danced on Westminster’s ridges, we should have been shocked. What have these degenerate boomers done to these children’s minds? Why have children, among the first generations in history never to have experienced hunger, grown up to believe that their lives are the most precarious in history?

I don’t want to indulge the idiot who stood on the gantry across the motorway, and wept that she was there “because I don’t have a future”. But I do want to know why she believes such a thing. I don’t have any pity for the ugly narcissists who demand “what is more important: art or life?” But I do want to know why they are possessed by such an absurd, self-important idea.

Green ideology has been out of control for decades. We should not be distracted by its claims, either in science or “justice”. We have known for a long time that it is radical, weird, and that in the end, its aims are to deprive us all of our liberty.

We therefore need to shift the debate away from those distracting claims about how the world is doomed, to refocus on what kind of world environmental ideologues want to create. No, it is not merely a world free of climate change. Nor is it a world in which human society exists in some kind of “harmony” with “nature”. Even the word “sustainable” is used too readily, even by critics of Net Zero without regard for its origins and consequences.

We need to unapologetically make green ideology itself — not its performances and distractions — the object of scrutiny and criticism. We need, therefore, to say also that it is a good thing that a number of its adherents are in prison. They are bad people. And they have been made bad by bad ideology. It is our responsibility to confront bad ideology, not to indulge it.

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There was no podcast last week due to being extremely busy, and timetabling conflicts. I will attempt to produce an extra podcast in the near future.