As the climate movement hits another impasse, activists Luisa Neubauer and Kumi Naidoo explain why we need to mobilise many more people from all walks of life
f a historian were charting the climate movement, she’d probably set its high-water mark so far as September of 2019, when something like 7 million people, most of them young, took to the streets of thousands of cities around the world. To read theLuisa Neubauer with Greta Thunberg during a Fridays for Future demonstration in 2019 before the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine diverted attention from the climate crisis.
, 57, who from his earliest days as an anti-apartheid campaigner to his tenure running Greenpeace International has always been engaged.“At the beginning of the war,” says Neubauer, “lots of people thought, ‘Well, now it’s all on the table. We will ramp up for renewables. We will ramp up fossil-free energy, because it’s clear that to like renewables you don’t have to be a climate activist or eco-nerd. It’s enough to kind of mildly dislike Putin and mildly like democracies and freedom and safety.
Both, in fact, are quite candid about the campaigning that doesn’t work. At the start, says Neubauer, “I was doing something which I would now retrospectively call ‘handshake activism’. It is this kind of activism that looks very, very good on your CV. It is something that you might be very dedicated to, but you’re also very keen to meet an important minister, to shake their hand and take a photo and prove that you’ve actually done something.
“There are very few accelerated change strategies that are available to us,” says Naidoo. “Really very few. One of them is going extremely hard, extremely purposefully, exceedingly strategically against all forms of finance.” The fossil fuel divestment movement – now at $40tn committed by pension funds and university endowments – is “going great,” he says, but it “can be turbocharged and do much better.
According to Neubauer, that expanded environmentalism needs to include people sometimes thought of as adversaries. Often, she says, she’ll be asked if it’s fair to cost coalminers their jobs to preserve a livable climate. “And I say, ‘Is it fair for a car [worker at] VW or a constructor of pipelines, or someone working in a coalmine … to work all day, every day, to pay the bill at the end of the month, knowing that means working against the security of the future, of the children.
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