I won’t go into the threat- that “I hope some other activists up this post, I don’t think you be allowed to walk away so easily.” Okay, I lied, I will. Wow. So, when you say critical things about XR, you should not be “allowed to walk away so easily.” Are some of those things the Daily Mail say about “scratch a greenie, find a Stalinist” possibly a bit true?
No, I will focus on the latest sad post (of someone who used to rate me very highly, as recently as February 2020, but has now forgotten all that) on Facebook. Their comments in bold, my reply in italics
right so ,let’s deal with the issues .
Great! You’re going to deal with the substance of my critique in the post. That’s great!
Your feelings are your business.
Well, that ended quickly. I think you’re projecting mate (look it up if you have to). You seem to think I have a problem with my feelings – perhaps you know that your feelings are giving you a helmet fire (look it up if you have to).
So, why so negative about what climate activists are trying to achieve, at the very least they are doing something.
I am “negative” (it is possible to be critical without being negative, btw) because – and this was made painfully and abundantly and repeatedly clear in the post – XR keeps making the same mistakes again and again and again. “At least they are doing something”. Two answers to that. One – what are they doing other than asking people to go on another London rebellion? And Two – “at least they” implies nobody else is. But there are DOZENS of groups doing stuff. This site and the one I used to be involved in – Climate Emergency Manchester – constantly report on what Stitched Up, Carbon Coop, Kindling Trust etc etc are doing. You are setting up a strawman. I am embarrassed for you
Why does this ” I’ll shit on you, and whatever you are doing” persist about you?
It wouldn’t persist if the shit behaviour – the repeated unwillingness to reflect, innovate, get beyond sage-on-the-stage (look it up if you have to) and ego-foddering (liuiyht), emotacycles and smugosphere (liuihytnn) – didn’t persist in persisting. Do something worth to be positive about, and I’ll be positive. Do the same old failed shit, and I won’t be. Is it really so hard to understand?
You are the only person I know, that believes it groundless.
Not quite sure what you mean here, grammatically and cognitively. I guess you are saying you don’t know anyone else who thinks XR is rubbish. Yeah, um, well, I know lots of people who do. Including folks who gave up on XR and got involved in Climate Emergency Manchester. Also, if XR is so great, how come those hundreds and thousands of people who were involved no longer are? How come even the media team can’t recruit (Hudson’s third law, remember)?
Is this some mark of machismo for you?
The spelling of my name is Marc. And no.
I will not just give way to you Mark, I believe you are wrong, negative and destructive in your attitude and behaviour.
I don’t care. I am not asking you to “give way.” What would be nice if you explained what in the blog post was wrong. Did I misrepresent the first half of the meeting? Did I misquote anyone? What – specifically – about my analysis – do you think is misplaced?
The tragedy is that, you don’t have to be confrontational, within XR it is possible to have your point of view.
No, the tragedy is that XR went up like a rocket and came down like a stick, and that this was preventable. And that it has burnt out and rendered unavailable thousands of people who might otherwise still be involved in radical sustained action on climate change. (A kettled jolly in Hyde Park doesn’t count).
You say I can have my point of view. That’s very generous of you. How do you square this with your earlier statement (which I have screengrabbed, btw) “I hope some other activists up this post, I don’t think you be allowed to walk away so easily.”
Clearly you believe I should be admonished, punished. Do you not even remember what you wrote half an hour ago?
Ultimately, we who have food on our table, water out of our tap, a roof over our head, freedom of information, assembly and speech, have a duty to be as clear-eyed as we can about what is happening, and whether our efforts to make the world a marginally less awful place, are having any effect.
We have the duty to see the world – and organisations to which we have given our love, time and hearts – as they are, not as we seem to need to imagine they are. We need to tell ourselves the Truth, not hide behind comforting chiliastic hallucinations.
On February 24th 1994 the bailiffs and bulldozers moved in. A two-week occupation camp, called “The Republic of Newtonia” had slowed but not stopped the Council and the Science Park. Abbey Pond, a much-loved site of birds, insects, frogs and newts, was filled in.
What can today’s climate and biodiversity activists learn from this defeat at the hands of Manchester City Council, then – as now – proclaiming its green credentials while acting to speed the destruction of green spaces?
Join Climate Emergency Manchester and several of those at the centre of the Abbey Pond campaign on Thursday 24th February, from 7.30pm, for an on-line only event.
Here is the Eventbrite link (thanks to co-host, Climate Emergency Manchester).
tl:dr Almost 40 people were treated as ego-fodder by an organisation that is deader than it realises. Opportunities for connection and innovation were, of course, missed. We’re toast
Diggers? Diggers, alluding to Gerry Winstanley, is a retronym for “Deluded Inane Gibberish Gets Extinction Rebellion Sarcasmed”
The wife told me not to go. For once she was wrong (this is newsworthy). I had a whale of a time and gathered material for this blog post and “Hudson’s three laws of movement organisation drain-circling” (see below).
The event was one of the last legs of the “National Strategy Tour” of Extinction Rebellion (you may remember them from 2019). It was every bit as diabolically bad as previous experiences of XR had led me to expect (see below) but in interesting ways. What follows is a more or less chronological account of the 90 minutes I spent there (the whole thing was a THREE HOUR event, but unlike capitalists and economists, I believe there are in fact limits, and these limits should be respected, so I law of two feeted it at half time).
What was interesting is that numbers – 38 people, slightly more female than male, mostly young with a smattering of coffin-dodgers and almost entirely white – were clearly higher than the organisers had expected. They’d booked a small ground floor room at the Fiends Meeting House, one that comfortably sits no more than 20. Also, the amount of food they bought suggests they thought they’d have the three speakers (and boy did they speak – I wouldn’t call them organisers) and maybe 15 punters. I would have guessed the same, given that it was terribly advertised – not even on the XR Manchester website, which seems not to have been updated since last April or so. Didn’t see anything on Twitter or Facebook or the bulletins of other outfits like Friends of the Earth (we will come back to this question of how XR seems to see itself in relation to other groups later). But nope, 30 at 6pm, and a few stragglers.
We milled around in the foyer for a good thirty minutes. There was no announcement to explain the delay in the start time, nor particular encouragement to speak to anyone we didn’t already know (I had a good chat with a young woman who shares a name with a Doctor Who companion though). Eventually we were told that we were to be in a bigger upstairs room.
We then sat in rows facing a powerpoint (my misgivings were growing), not being told when we would start. Some people talked to the person next to each other, others were nosedown in their phones.
Eventually they did that not-bad thing of sticking their arms in the air, others followed and silence fell.
There was no “thank you for coming”, no effort to find out where folks had travelled from, or “who was in the room.” There was a “talk to the person next to you” so-called check-in. I talked to a guy who I thought might be a cop, but turned out to be SWP. And to someone else.
The XRers didn’t seem to know or care that “turn to the person next to you” means folks are likely to be talking to the person they came with, and that a superior variant is “turn to the person behind/in front of you.” So it goes.
After that perfunctory and tokenistic exercise…
BAM! Straight into being talked at for 45 minutes.
No effort to find out who had read the strategy (I’d skimmed it). No effort to tell people the shape of the evening or what they should expect, or what was expected of them.. No effort to tell people where the toilets and fire exits were. No effort to orient anyone to anything.
No, the most important thinking was for the three people at the front of the room, the Experts From HQ, to talk at us. So they did.
Apparently we should be optimistic because this strategy document is the shortest one, delivered closest to deadline,, and didn’t cook the strategy team.
Oh, we’re back to the moronic “3.5%” meme from 2019. As if Hong Kong didn’t prove otherwise. FFS.
There may have been some undercover police in the room, but there certainly weren’t any irony police, because nobody performed an arrest when one off the speakers intoned “If we don’t tend to our relationships with each other, this isn’t going to work.” The design and execution of the meeting was already showing that there was absolutely no tending of relationships here, just the same old sage-on-the-stage, info deficit ego-foddering.
We then got the “strategy.” You can read it here, and you can read a long article in the Ecologist which basically misses the point here.
This is not a strategy. A strategy examines the terrain on which a fight is being fought, the disposition of the opponent’s forces, its likely battle order tactics, its weak points, the battle readiness of your own side (resources, personnel, weak points), drawing on lessons learned. It ISN’T just a worthy shopping list of nice-to-haves.
It’s a sign of everyone’s need to believe six impossible things after breakfast that nobody guffawed when we were told “we recognise the current reality and where we’re at.”
It is akin to the Levelling Up White Paper, with its 12 missions (8 cribbed from Theresa May’s Industrial Strategy, killed off last March) and lifted from wikipedia.
Then we had someone literally reading out what was on the powerpoint (a dreadful turgid cringe-worthy slide called “Act Now”) Perhaps they didn’t trust any audience member not to laugh while reading it out?
That text talks about “common sense.” If Gramsci were here he’d be trying to explain the difference between common sense and good sense. If Gramsci were here he’d be slashing his wrists right about now.
Apparently Citizens’ Assemblies are “the tool.” Not “a potentially useful tool within a suite of activities.” Nope, they are THE tool. Nowt reductive or magical-thinking-y there then…
On and on it went. “Growth is mass mobilisation for us.”
Yes, we know. How’s that working out for you (spoilers – not well – even they admit “we’ve got lower numbers of people” – but just blame covid…)
Then we got treated to a graph. And I guessed it before it went up – the Bill Moyer Action Plan (more about this later in this interminable blog post).
According to one very sweary (bid for authenticity) speaker, XR is “teetering on the edge of success.”
Reader, I am not making this up.
Then we are told, by one of the three people who have been talking at us for half an hour and saying how important everyone’s voices are that “you guys have a tendency to be performative… when we talk about people we need to not be centering ourselves.”
Reader, I swear to you on a stack of Roger Hallam tracts, I am not making this up.
[Another time I will write about guilty middle-class white people liking a bit of flagellation, liking to be epater-ed for the purification and atonement tokens. But not today.]
Apparently we need to put ourselves in uncomfortable situations. But this seems not to apply to those at the front of the room, who have travelled around the country laying down their law. What’s that they say about Johnson and his cronies – “one rule for them…”?
Because now we come to the crux…”come rebellion time” – everyone has to be in London for a Hyde-ing to nothing. They allude to another leg of the tour when people pushed back and were told not to say no. Because, you know, radical democracy and all that (btw, they alluded to Manchester having the youngest crowd – have the other places been mostly the grey beards? Who knows or cares. What was striking was how few of the Manchester usual suspects were present).
Then a speaker said “we have creativity.” Well, you have good graphic designers (though it’s getting a bit same-y. But you don’t have creativity when it comes to designing and executing events. This is the same recycled and ultimately disempowering rubbish that it ever was, that I’ve seen again and again (see below)
And again, they call themselves a movement rather than a movement organisation.
Why do I bang on about this? Surely it’s splitting hairs? No.
Movement or movement organisation?
When XR refers to itself as a movement, it insults the other groups – old and new, big and small – that are active. It says they don’t count, unless they rebrand as XR offshoots. But it also blinds itself to the benefit IT could get from engaging with these groups. So, it didn’t, as far as I can tell ask any of the other groups in Manchester to publicise its event. If it had, it might have gotten a bigger and more diverse turn-out. It might have done something USEFUL. It would have had to allow those groups to say a bit about themselves, and maybe that was the sticking point? Or maybe XR are still stuck in early 2019 when they were so Big and Sexy that nobody else seemed to matter? Or maybe they simply don’t have the resources at all??
Back to movement/movement organisation. Perhaps it is that “movement organisation” doesn’t sound as impressive, I guess, and mostly these people are trying to pull a puffer fish tactic, for their own (short-term) benefit. So it goes.
One of the revolutionary and radical things folks were asked to do was “paint the symbol” from March. MCC graffiti teams – you have been warned to charge up your water cannons.
Then there’s more reheated Bill Moyer, with “affinity groups” as “our mojo”. Well, your mojo has gone all Bojo.
April is going to be about “how we can cause the most economic damage ever.” Uh, okay.
It will be a “single action/target” with an “array of risk levels.”
At this point I was reminded of another event I attended in the Friends Meeting House, in 2007 or 2008, after one of the climate camps. In both cases, there were people at the front exhorting, cajoling, “informing” to a bunch of people sat in rows. From sixty feet up the events would be identical, and indistinguishable from, well, any meeting, by any organisation, about anything. So much for creativity and democracy.
By now I was losing the will to live. It was 1925, and one of the speakers came out with that tired old line about “the definition of madness is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.”
Definitely not any irony police present.
They then went on to say “Maybe it [April] will change things if we’re lucky. Who knows?”
That’s a very telling moment to slip out. Magical thinking does that, in Freudian slips.
Then the buzzword salad of community resilience, succession planning and the admission that even the media team hasn’t been able to recruit and retain (see below). And that after April, with prison and burnout, things look bleak
By this time, 7.30pm, I had had enough in every sense. The person I had been trying to have a conversation about XR’s failings with (but meeting ‘diversity of tactics/covid’ as diversions and deflections) seemed more concerned by the number of F-bombs from one of the speakers than the format of the event. I guess when you’re a goldfish, it’s hard to see the water, innit?
I left at the 10 minute break (apparently there was going to be a Q&A afterwards), overhearing very uncomplimentary things about the attendees in the Scottish events as I left.
Analysis
Okay, so, short-term predictions and then further observations.
My predictions
The police will not be in a mood to go nicely. They are bruised by their failures over Partygate. Morale will be low in the aftermath of Sarah Everard, Charing Cross Whatsapp etc. Within the XR folks in April there will be various undercovers/provocateurs of various status, providing, pretexts for kettling and more (and don’t forget, this will probably be taking place under the latest draconian legislation.
Their numbers will be high, while XR numbers will be tiny. If it is as many as 5 thousand I will be surprised. – Very few from outside London. Crushingly white. The usual teens and twenty somethings and retired folks. Lots of non-violent action (glueing yourself to things) and lots of away-from-the-cameras “responses” to that by police.
Rest of “movement” won’t be there – will be gearing up for fuel poverty stuff etc.
Media – Largely sneering.
Everyone – Easter.
This will be the final bounce of the cat, the final twitch of the corpse.
Let’s see if I am wrong. It’s an empirical question.
Observations
I will divide this into three sectionos
Psych experiments
Hudson’s rules of movement organisation drain-circling
Those XR meetings in Manchester
Psychology experiments
In a past life I did undergrad psychology. The most interesting stuff was social psychology. Three classic experiments seem apposite herre.
The smoke filled room (known as – oh the irony – “Group inhibition of bystander intervention in emergencies.” I wondered during my time in that room if I was the only one seeing the smoke of delusion gradually spread and engulf so many. Why did nobody speak out>
Festinger and “When Prophecies Fail” Anthropologists should grab their notebook and dictaphones and head out to do some proper ethnographic work, because the Saucer People are doubling down.
Hudson’s three laws of movement organisation drain-circling.
One “The Moyer is less law”
Once a group starts talking about the Moyer Action Plan, you know it is dead. It didn’t talk about the dip beforehand, because the only way was UP. Now it has to – for the benefit of those faithful who haven’t exited and those newbies who have stumbled in – explain away the dip.
It is akin to the bewildered animals in Animal Farm singing “Beasts of England” – the sort of self-soothing activity, detached from reality, that you do when you realise but can’t say out loud that you are completely screwed..
[I saw this in the late 2000s with a Plane Stupid offshoot. I saw it again last night.]
Two The inverse proclaiming-learning law
The more a group talks about learning lessons and the ‘definition of insanity’, the less it will actually innovate. It will just double down on the repertoires that made it feel good at the beginning.
Media as canary in the coal-mine (gotta love the image)
If even the media team – the place where all those humanities graduates actually might fit – can’t keep itself replenished with new recruits then that’s a pretty clear indication that the organisation’s absorptive capacity is cooked.
Observations
If in the first half of a meeting the only people really able to speak are the invited speakers, the group isn’t serious about democracy, voices, learning, any of it. Those running the meeting are just interested in their moment of (a sense of) power.
Three meetings in Manchester
Date
Venue
Numbers
Comments
September 2018
Partisan
25ish – mostly white and young and sub-culture-y
Dreary info-deficit model from Saint Roger’s “Extinction” talk, whatever it was called. The power-destroying pointless powerpoint that went on and on and ON. Didn’t matter, because XR was on its way UP
May 2019
That nightclub opposite Sandbar
250 to 300, very diverse
100s of people being talked at, told they missed out on a really cool experience (the April “Rebellion”) but if they stuck around, they could at least hang out with the Kool Kids. Those people – mirabile dictu – did not stick around. XR could tell itself it was on the way up.
February 2022
Friends Meeting House (a bigger room than they thought)
38. Almost all white. Mostly young. Smattering of old farts
Dreary info-deficit model reading out of colourful powerpoint slides. What comes next? We shall see..
Also I dimly recall some dire event in mid-2019 at the Cross Street Chapel, where locals were lectured and hectored by some self-appointed busybodies from London who knew nothing but were very confident in asserting it
What is to be done
The same as it ever was.
Movement building, while understanding that movement building and mobilising are not the same thing, and that the latter can get in the way of the former
Wise up about the dynamics of social movement organisations, and their pathologies
Support those individuals who get cooked by the emotacycle
It’s doing so today to tell you about the month ahead, and it will probably do so over the coming days to release the results of some FOIAs that I got back from the council. Or I may punt them to CEM.
The last month
The last month has been typically a quiet one. In Manchester January always is. Climate Emergency Manchester fronted up Children and Young People’s scrutiny committee, lobbied councillors, and did the basic work of democracy that other flashier groups seem unwilling or perhaps simply unable to do. (By the way, I am no longer a member of Climate Emergency Manchester). There’s more bile and vitriol about this at the bottom of the post. But for now, let’s crack on, shall we?
Meanwhile, scientists working on climate were asked what they expect the global temperature rise by the end of the century. And most of them plumped for three degrees which is of course, catastrophic.
At some point in the coming months, I still don’t know. we’ll get the IPCC Six assessment report, which will tell us nothing we don’t already know. And the social scientists are wanting in on it too.
Nationally
We’re getting the second phase of a technology innovation fund (IETF) out now.
Tomorrow we get the long-awaited levelling up white paper, which may tell us new things about how industrial, decarbonisation and netzero are going to work, but will probably be about hanging baskets and Metro mayors.
The “Net Zero Scrutiny Group” is gonna make noise. And have an impact. See here –
We underestimate the Net Zero Scrutiny Group at our peril. These seemingly small configurations can hugely influence policy. Tiny cracks of “climate scepticism” have the ability to activate huge rifts in attempts to limit temperature rises to 2C.
Things are so bad that “greener” MPs in the Tory party have been forced to speak out. In a direct challenge to his colleagues, Chris Skidmore has set up a “Net Zero Support Group” to keep climate hopes alive; Alok Sharma has cautioned against delayed action on climate change; while Nick Fletcher and Richard Graham have written in favour of net zero. But there is yet to be a proper crackdown on climate delayism inside the governing party.
This is all compounded by the current fragility of Boris Johnson’s position. The prime minister’s perceived proximity to the net-zero strategy could mean MPs (such as those in the 100-strong Conservative Environment Network) are nervous to come out and make a strong case for net zero, lest it appear to be a vote of confidence in Johnson at this febrile time.
Locally
Expect Andy Burnham to twist in the wind more on the Clean Air Zone, and blame “Tory chaos.”
Expect the Bee Network to be quietly downgraded from promise to aspiration to circular file. Not immediately, but over time.
Manchester City Council [96 Councillors, 94 of whom are Labour] has the usual run of meetings culminating with budget Council. You can see the times and dates here. Full Council meets tomorrow. Art Gallery committee has its annual meeting this month. Hopefully CEM will be doing a blog post about the month ahead. Dunno.
There’s a by-election in Ancoats and Beswick on the 3rd, caused by the resignation of Marcia Hutchinson..
Chorlton Labour is shamelessly using the recent worse-than-useless Climate Emergency UK report to pretend that it is doing well on climate change. Hopefully some well-informed people will point out the new Labour councillor didn’t even reply to the question about pledges that Climate Emergency Manchester put to all the candidates at the recent by-election (the rest didn’t display contempt and cowardice, they actually replied).
Climate Emergency Manchester has a report and an event about health and a report that you should you can sign up to attend here – it looks to be bloody good. It’s on Tuesday 8th February.
Footnote – Climate Emergency Manchester’s shortcomings are not a lack of imagination or guts – it is having enough personnel. If you have time energy skills then you can get involved in Climate Emergency Manchester – they won’t bore you or emotionally blackmail you, or waste your time energy skills,
Now, back to the promised rant, One of the biggest flashiest groups – or attempt at a group was the so-called “COP26 Manchester coalition,” which followed on from another failed group the Greater Manchester Climate Action Network [what does all this unacknowledged and unlearnt from failure do to morale and credibility?]. The COP26 CoalItion repeatedly promised the start of a new fight has not bothered to even tweet anything new since last November. [But has been on Twitter –
It is holding a meeting tonight [Tues 2nd] because apparently they want to hold a “conference” in May about Greater Manchester and sustainability Oh joy. So they are in a six month emotacycle. Maybe they could hold it on May 6th, exactly six months after a few hundred people stood and listened to dreary speeches to end the era of injustice. And they are tolerated and enabled by people who ought to know better and in fact do know better but who would find it awkward to call their comrades to account.
Meanwhile, Extinction Rebellion has done nowt other than camp out at Ryebank Fields, National Extinction Rebellion is hosting a nationwide tour not – that you would know it from the Extinction Rebellion Manchesters website, which has not been updated since last April. Thursday night at Friends Meeting House, from 6pm, if you’ve the stamina.
Meanwhile, Manchester Green Party has updated its website on one occasion (early December, since you ask) since September last year.
MCFly has often gone on about how terrible Manchester City Council is. And it is. It really really is. But let’s pause for a moment and look at how laughable the activist “community” is as well. How it doesn’t perform, or underperforms, for months and years. Is this the level of activity that a climate emergency calls for?
And before you say, practice what you preach. I did this for 13 years – for large chunks of that on my own – and I am still doing Climate Education stuff, literally daily – see allouryesterdays.infon
That’s it for McFly in the month ahead see you over the coming days and weeks for some FOIA results. In the meantime, carpe the diems and count whatever blessings you still have.
tl:dr – why do activists with good intentions think that giving liars and greenwashers an open goal is lia good idea?
The truth is, we the “climate community” have been terrible at our self-appointed jobs.
Climate change has been an issue on the public policy agenda since 1988, longer than many of the people reading this had been alive. It has come and gone, waxed and waned. The same arguments get rehearsed, repeated, regurgitated, the same exhortations. Everyday is Groundhog Day. We seem to learn nothing, and our efforts often are counter-productive.
That’s a fancy way of saying sometimes what we do is actually worse than useless.
On that last point – let’s look at Climate Emergency UK’s recent report about local authorities and whether they have climate emergency plans or not. They took up hundreds upon hundreds of volunteers hours doing a survey of local authorities. The headline was that “four fifths of councils have a plan”.
And how did this research get used? What was the outcome?
Well, it has raised Climate Emergency UK’s profile. That no doubt will keep CEUK’s funders happy.
It’s arguable to say that it has somehow kept the issue of climate “on the agenda” but climate change has been on the agenda for over 30 years (see above), so that is not the win some will want to say it is.
How’s it been used? Of course, Manchester City Council has boasted about the fact that it is third on the list, and highest of the unitary councils. They’ve put out a press release and it will be one of their smug diversionary boasts for months to come.
Pats on the back to Manchester City Council. Except, except …
Except MCC’s actual performance is woeful.
The emissions reductions it itself boasts of are largely an artefact of austerity – they cut staff, sold buildings, reduced services. Of COURSE their emissions went down.
Meanwhile, the city’s emissions are not dropping to meet the putative 2038 net zero goal and the Council is blameshifting whenever anyone holds them to account (which rarely happens, given they have 94 of the 96 council seats, and the Green Party is seriously AWOL, almost as vacuous as Friends of the Earth and XR Manchester
And Climate Emergency UK knew this about Manchester City Council because Climate Emergency Manchester (an unaffiliated organisation, which I co-founded but am no longer involved with) told them all this.
Manchester is way behind on delivering its plan and is instead going to – and this is entirely predictable – use the research to continue to tell people who are not paying close attention that somehow everything is in hand.
What would have been useful?
Climate Emergency UK in their press release and report could have pointed out that more prominently the limitations of their research.
Yes, they said this is only looking at plans, they could have easily predicted how the top 5 or 10 councils were going to use it.
Climate Emergency UK could have contacted campaigning groups in those areas for their responses, and quoted them.
This would have taken not much more time, certainly not in comparison to the amount of volunteers’ time already used.
This would have, it’s true, have complicated the message from “one fifth of councils do not have a plan” to “four fifths do have but even the top ones are pretty shit at doing what they promise”
What would the consequence have been?
The story might not have got picked up quite as widely.
It certainly wouldn’t have been retweeted by Manchester City Council.
Nowhere in Climate Emergency UKs report do you find any historical analysis? Nowhere does it point out that we have been through countless cycles of local authority promising.
Let’s fill some of that in. In 1988, the climate issue burst on the agenda, and got added to acid rain, ozone, recycling and the like.
Friends of the Earth and SERA both launched environmental charters to get local authorities to sign up to.
Many did, and then did sweet FA.
You then had the UK Local Government Declaration on Sustainable Development.
You then had, coming out of Rio – the Local Agenda 21 process – which ran into the ground within a few years.
You then had the Nottingham declaration in October 2000. Better to call it the “Nothingham Declaration.” You then had the reheated Nottingham declaration in 2005.
Then you had the late Blair/Brown era stuff, with “Local Area Indicators 186 and 188″ and the like. Manchester was saying it would be the Greenest City in the UK by 2010.
Then you had various pledges before and at COP15 at Copenhagen.
Then you had… oh look, I’ve lost track.
There’s an entire ecosystem, a subculture of bureaucrats devising photo-ops for come-and-go political leaders. Pledges for Paris, ICLEI this, the Local Government Association Climate This That And The OTHER.
Endless making of plans, promises, pledges. And within a year or two, they fall apart, are quietly shelved, then recycled. We have always been at war with Eurasia.
Social scientists have words like “incantatory governance” or even “climate bullshit” (true story). Sociologists invent words that mean industrial disease.
Now crucially ClimateEmergency UK could have said this. It could have educated people.
They could have asked people with local knowledge on the ground.
They could have asked Manchester activists about the Local Agenda 21 process – killed off in 1996 because it dared to suggest the Airport couldn’t expand forever.
They could have asked what happened to 2009’s promise of a “low carbon culture” (the council never even tried to make it happen).
They could have asked whether the City has burned through 40 per cent of its carbon budget for the entire 21st century in three years (spoiler: why yes, yes it has).
They could have asked if the Executive Member for the Environment has had precisely zero meetings with anybody about this carbon budget blow out (why no, no she hasn’t).
I know I am being very hard on Climate Emergency UK and doubtless I will be told that I am jealous or bitter or whatever.
Because people will not want to engage with the fundamental fact that by producing these sorts of league tables with no anticipation of how they’re going to be used by bad faith actors (and Manchester City Council is a bad faith actor in all of this, and has been for decades) then we are responsible for adding to the likelihood that people will continue not to engage with climate change.
Because people in Manchester reading that will have seen things are okay. And most people in the UK will have been able to think “There’s a good chance at my local authority has as a plan, so I don’t need to engage.”
And given how debilitating long-term climate activism is, and how the “movement” has just gone through one of its periodic up-like-a-rocket-down-like-a-stick episodes, was this report really pitched and framed responsibly?
With a little historical perspective and a little detail about the top 5, this did not need to happen. It didn’t need to be like this.
[Here endeth today’s truth bomb Mxxxx – when I catch flak, imma send them your way]
Post-script
And now, of course, the awful and shameless hacks in Chorlton Labour are using it to greenwash the most ungreen of Councils.
tl:dr – if we don’t do things differently, we will probably get the same results (1). We probably, for well understood reasons (see “smugosphere,” emotacycles, abeyance) will not. But keep your eyes open and you’ll have a good view of the pending ecological debacle…
UPDATE: I have added a couple of very salient points, in red (h/t Wolfgang Huber). If you have other big things that are happening, let me know.
Manchester Climate Monthly is going to be a relatively intermittent thing from here on. There’s a backlog of fun Freedom of Information Act requests to put up and publicise, and maybe a few other things. But on the whole, because I am leaving Manchester, and because there isn’t really an “audience” for this stuff, this site will mostly be a legacy thang.
There was a time (2011-2013) when we (and it was we, then) interviewed various groups about the year gone and the year ahead. Seems pointless now,, tbh.
Locally, at the Council level the undermining of Bev Craig (new leader) will continue, with various proxy wars going on. This is about personality and patronage opportunities, not ideology, so the picture for climate activists is confusing and mixed. Officers will be busy ducking and covering. There will be even less than no money. With the “carbon budget” concept in tatters, expect higher levels of bullshit, rather than any assessment of the hole we are in, how we got in it and what would be needed to get out.
At some point there will be a retreat (managed? announced? from the fiction that is the carbon “budget.” The Manchester Climate “Agency” will be the fig-leaf, with the “Partnership” playing some sort of Judas Goat role, or sacrificial lamb. Who knows. Most likely there will be a new promise to replace the old (as per Andy Burnham at the recent Summit”) and a new glossy document with new pictures of blonde moppets and people of colour produced. Perhaps to tie in with a consultation about the (much-delayed ‘Local Plan’). The Council will continue to rubberstamp skyscrapers and “develop” green spaces wherever it can. It seems genuinely affronted by any blade of grass that can’t pay its way.
At the GM level, well, grab your popcorn for the implementation of the Clean Air Zone – there’s a growing backlash against it
As for the “activists”, well, the picture is bleak af. Most of the remaining local groups that aren’t (un)dead will struggle to recruit and even to retain. Expect proclamations of imminent radical action that turns out to be standing in front of a building holding a stupid placard. As the months roll on, those proclamations will get quieter and less frequent. Few people will do the slog-work of trying to change the system (from without or within), and as the months pass, their morale will – everything else being equal – deteriorate, as will their capacity to act. That’s what is called, in the trade, a death spiral. (It’s not necessarily inevitable, but can only be avoided with conscious, strategic, clever action. So, given this city and arena 3, probably inevitable. See ‘abeyance’ below.)
Nationally, the problem for the Tories is a new and “credible” leader. The local elections, so often a referendum on nation affairs, will be the final blow for Johnson (probably), if he isn’t already gone. Expect more rhetoric about ‘levelling up’ and also decarbonisation (‘net zero’), but as the year progresses these will be revealed to be promises without money or policy settings behind them. There won’t be any big recantation, just a gradual death by a thousand cuts. The government might conceivably set up a “net zero delivery unit” but it will be either the plaything of Treasury or attacked by everyone as an invasion of their turf (or both, obviously). Labour will not make climate one of its top five attack points. Why would it – the issue doesn’t really have salience with swing voters it needs.
In the summer (August) BEIS release local authority data which will probably show that in many local authorities co2 emissions went up last year – “HashtagAwkward” as the young people used to say (text)
The UK holds the Presidency of the UNFCCC until COP27 in Egypt, but is unlikely to lift that many fingers to do much, now they’ve ticked the “hold successful COP” off their list. None of the leading candidates to replace Johnson give a flying… pig… about climate, btw.
The UK climate “movement” will struggle to gain traction, having missed its moment to build anything (2019-2021) and the economic crisis worsens (it’s already horrific for millions upon millions). The passage of the extremely authoritarian anti-democracy legislation(s) through parliament will offer the state more powers. It will use some of them all of the time, and most of them some of the time… The frog will keep boiling.
Internationally the Big Things are a) the release of a couple more IPCC 6th Assessment reports (working groups 2 and 3, and then the synthesis report. Expect more proclamations of ‘code incarnadine for humanity.’ At the end of the year the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change lands in Egypt, for another attempt to “keep 1.5 alive. Yeah, right.
Expect “natural” disasters and the deaths of millions of basically blameless poor people (of colour). Expect record breaking temperatures and the next 52 weeks of the Sixth Great Extinction.
Month
Local
National
International
Jan
Scrutiny committees will tokenistically talk about climate change, in a superficial, finger-pointing and one-off prophylaxis kinda way, then studiously ignore it again.
A nationally audible squelch as the damp squib that is the “Levelling Up” white paper hits the regions in the face
Feb
March
Council budget “process” culminates with Budget council Climate “framework” “2.0” will be pushed through scrutiny, rubber-stamped and largely forgotten/ignored
April
“Purdah” kicks in, by Manchester Labour will abuse their access to Council equipment/status, as they did last year, and the officers will look the other way, as they did last year.
Energy price hike will lead to more misery for millions upon millions.
May
Local elections – Labour to edge to a 95-1 majority on the council.
Local elections – if (when) Tories do badly, if Johnson is still around, he won’t be for long – Truss, Sunak, Hunt, Gove, Patel?
The third anniversary (July 10) of the Climate Emergency declaration will pass un-noticed. Or perhaps the Council will chose this day to blame everyone else for the irretrievable blowing of the city’s 15 million tonne carbon budget.
Everything shuts down, politically. Except if Bev Craig has not been dislodged. The fighting will continue if she’s still there.
BEIS release emissions data. Various local authority areas with egg on face.
Sept
Council – Selection of candidates for 2023 local elections. Expect intra-Labour blood-shedding (only metaphorical. Probably).
Party conference season (Manchester is spared)
Oct
Nov
Mid-terms in USA. Republicans to win, steal elections as a warm up for 2024… 8-17 Nov, COP27 in Egypt
Dec
What to watch for.
Abeyance. It will bite you on the ass. The sense that the caravan has moved on, that nothing was learned by anyone, that nothing has changed, that everybody knows the war is over and everybody knows the good guys lost. That’s when the abyss does some its best staring, and if you don’t have friends and prescription sunglasses, watch out.
Ridiculous “radical” responses to abeyance, involving exhortations, guilt-tripping and simulacrum-nostalgia stuff.
Fatigue. Guilt. The usual brew.
What is needed (but probably won’t happen)
A group/groups willing to perform “services to the ‘movement'” in Manchester, competently, consistently, fairly and thoroughly, without being a vanguard, or an enabler. Maintaining a calendar, situational awareness (at a monthly level?) Will CEM do this? Someone else? Who knows.
Compassion for ourselves and each other, as we slouch towards Calvary, waiting to be crucified. We tried (sorta). We failed (defo). We gotta keep trying (obvs), innovating (double-obvs), but the whole dead man trudging thing is a thing…
Footnote
(1) Of course, we are very likely to get the same result (nasty, very) regardless of what we do – matters may largely be even further out of control than our standard illusions allow for. This, as if it needs repeating, is the human condition. Especially these days.
We’re toast. That has been clear for quite some time. Who gets to count as “we” is of course of for debate, and how the toast-i-ness came to be “a thing” (as the young people used to say) is another question. But rather than admit that, we keep pretending there’s a new Saviour gonna go all Deus Ex Machina on our sorry doomed asses. Now that we’ve given up on the working classes, the peasants, da yoof and technology, somehow “climate change” is gonna short-circuit the circuits of extractivism and exploitation.
Keywords: Anthropocene, extractivism, more-than-human and whatever other buzzwords are faddish right now.
Introduction
We’re toast (and continues in this vein, padding out the abstract for a bit. Grand Societal Challenges blah blah. Urgency of climate action. Theories of transformation (throw in some MLP?)
This article proceeds as follows… (grab first sentences of next sections)
Methodology
I quote mined some books that have been sitting unread on my shelves for yonks. Neither engaged with nor critiqued their assumptions. Raid google books too. Quick recap of the 19th to early 21st centuries. Bish bosh.
Findings/Discussion
None of the historical actors has met expectations – they all fluffed their lines, got booed off stage, or bombed off it. The Modern Prince turned out to be a frog even after being kissed. Turns out “we” are toast who knew, eh? So it goes
Turns out the organised working class got crushed or bought off,
The peasants are too far from the metropole, and can be exterminated, their movements crushed, the populace diverted into various forms of pie in the sky, a comprador elite installed and kept in power. Meanwhile, it was worse when we turned to the kids on the left and got let down again by some poor excuse for protest, as the song goes.
The school strikes etc have – who coulda guessed it – turned out to be spasms of “why can’t we have the nice things?”, as anyone with two neurons to rub together would have known.
But you don’t get grants, publications, citations for saying “we’re toast” so instead academics keep inventing words for post-industrial disease (that’s another song reference, since we’re all in dire straits). And meanwhile, as a “public intellectual” you don’t get book contracts or speaking gigs for saying “we’re toast”, so they keep inventing new ways of saying “the cat should wear a bell” while never bothering to investigate while all the previous mouse meetings went nowhere. Conclusion
We’re toast, and the soi-disant pissant academic “radicals” have helped not a jot. So it goes.
References.
Yeah, throw in some Haraway, Gramsci, Karl, Foster, do some citational erasure of scholars of colour while passing their work of as your own, make sure you cite the editorial board of the journal you’re submitting to, because chances are they are doing the desk review and possibly the actual peer review.
In July 2019 Manchester City Council declared a climate emergency, forced into it by local activists and FOMO – other big cities in the UK had already done so. Everything was going to change, oh yes.
Recently, Manchester City Council signed a £3m contract with the outdoors advertising company JC Decaux. For the coming years (how many?) pedestrians will have to blot out and dodge (physically, cognitively) videoscreens telling them to Buy More Shit.
Because Buying More Shit is what we all have to do to get The Economy going again, apparently. Who cares about the environmental consequences, amirite?
Someone from the Comms Team (which, let’s remind ourselves, thinks that 11 is more than half of 50, when it comes to carbon literacy training) replied on December 20
Hi Chris, Thanks for tagging us. @JCDecaux_UK run the adverts on their digital screens and will be able to advise
Presumably the Council will continue to punt on the morality of all this, so I am curious as to the original “thinking” 1. Was there any minuted discussion within The City Council – between officers, between officers and Executive Members, between Executive Members – of the any legal liability arising from what is advertised on the displays, as per the December 17th tweet by Chris. If so, please provide copies of those discussions/discussion documents
2. Was there any minuted discussion (same groups) of the morality, aside from legal responsibility, of encouraging further consumption/consumerism during a climate emergency? If so, please provide copies of those discussions/discussion documents
3. During the negotiations with JC Decaux, did the Council propose to have any veto over what could be displayed? If so, a) please provide a copy of what MCC proposed andb) what was JC Decaux’s response? (just summarise it, since that reply is probably covered by commercial confidentiality, innit?
4. When is the contract up for renewal?
5. Is further pollution of public space to be scrutinised by any scrutiny committee, ever? If so, which one will it be?
6. Oh, and what risk assessments were conducted about distracting drivers, further light pollution for wild life and cluttering pavements to the detriment of the mobility of pedestrians and wheelchair users? Please provide copies.
Please consider this a request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000
Their reply to a FOIA had of course incomplete. In November MCFly had asked
Besides targets (or lack of them) how is this “journey” going? What “further improvements” does MCC Highways think it has made around getting to zero? How are these being quantified? How are they being reported and scrutinised?
The Council chose only to answer the last question.
The Council produces quarterly and annual progress reports which summarise activity to deliver its Climate Change Action Plan 2020-25. These are reported to the Environment and Climate Change Scrutiny Committee (the Quarter 3 report will be considered at the meeting on 13 January 2022 and published on the Council’s website. Quarterly Progress Reports | Zero Carbon Manchester | Manchester City Council
This is fairly typical. They hope that you won’t notice, or that if you do, you will give up. If you do notice, and you don’t give up – if you write to them requesting information informally, they then wait to see if you will follow up that informal request.
MCFly is done with that, so wrote back as follows
Thanks you for your reply to this. It is however incomplete, and in fact merely a typical fobbing off. I asked four questions within question two. You only replied to (did not answer) the fourth of them. We both know that MCC Highways Department inaction on climate change has not been scrutinised by the largely hopeless and entirely Labour Environment and Climate Change Scrutiny Committee.
So, I repeat the questions
Besides targets (or lack of them) how is this “journey” going?
What “further improvements” does MCC Highways think it has made around getting to zero?
How are these being quantified?
Doubtless you will send me a stock response along the lines of “we are looking into this and will get back to you in due course.” Let me be clear: if you have not responded, in detail, by the close of play on Friday 17th December, I will be submitting a request for an internal review. I sincerely hope, however, that this is not necessary. It depends on you actually answering all the questions that were in the initial FOIA.
I will also be submitting a follow-up FOIA about the correspondence between MCC and other councils about this matter.
And lo, on Friday 17th December, I got the “answers.”
And the answers reveal that the word “journey” was code for “we’re doing nothing. Piss off, oik.”
Besides targets (or lack of them) how is this “journey” going?
Manchester City Council Highways do not have carbon targets involving surfacing materials at this moment in time.
What “further improvements” does MCC Highways think it has made around getting to zero?
At this time there is no information available to share with you regarding the use of different resurfacing materials.
How are these being quantified?
Manchester City Council Highways do not have any information available at this moment in time.
Oh, and MCFly has submitted the following FOIA –
Dear Sir/Madam, in response to FOIA 6190, (on procurement of low carbon asphalt) I was told that
“Manchester City Council Highways Service are still working through target setting. This needs to align with the Manchester Climate Change Agency as well as Greater Manchester wide partners to ensure there is a consistent approach and the reporting, measuring, and monitoring of these targets’ feeds into the overall bigger picture. “
I am writing therefore to request
1) copies of the correspondence pertaining to low carbon asphalt procurement between MCC Highways Department’s relevant/responsible officer(s) and
a) MCCA
b) the relevant Executive Member with responsibility for Highways
c) the referenced “Greater Manchester wide partners”
for the period, oh, let’s say 1st September 2021 to the present, which pertain to the creation of this very impressive-sounding “consistent approach and the reporting, measuring, and monitoring of these targets’ feeds into the overall bigger picture”
2) Minutes of meetings at which the creation of a consistent approach and … picture” were discussed, and action points raised.
3) Correspondence between MCC Highways and external to Greater Manchester bodies about this matter
My final question is
4) What is the anticipated date for the creation of a target? Perhaps it will be July 10 2022, the third anniversary of the declaration of a Climate Emergency. Or July 10 2029, the 10th anniversary.
Please do consider this a request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000
Watch this space. And maybe the outfits that claim to be doing investigative journalism could do some.
Manchester City Council has been forced to admit that it has no plans to ask members of the so-called climate change “partnership” to even put information about the climate emergency on their websites. Further, the Council is refusing to explain why it is not holding any emergency summits with business, faith or community leaders about the massive carbon budget blow out.
In 2018 Manchester City Council created a “Climate Change Partnership”. This partnership has done half of sod-all, beyond providing a convenient fig-leaf and “spread the blame” function for the Council. Even getting a list of which organisations are members is difficult, with the director of the Climate Change “Agency” stonewalling elected members for two months.
Climate Emergency Manchester checked out the websites of the partnership members it could find, and – as per last year – most had got nothing about climate change on the home pages of their website.
Manchester City Council gave only a partial answer to a Freedom of Information Act request (see here). It was invited to give a more complete reply, and so avoid an internal review. It said it would. It didn’t. After 8 days, it was given a one day deadline. And lo, there was a reply (albeit not an answer). These are the lengths they go to try to hide inconvenient information. And the information is this:
on the last question, concerning contacting the Partnership members about their websites, I asked if there were any plans to do so. The response provided did not answer that part of my question.
There are currently no recorded plans to do this.
The FOIA had also revealed that the Executive Member for the Environment has held precisely zero meetings with business, faith or community leaders about the lack of adequate action on climate change. This despite the awkward fact that Manchester has burned through 6 million of its 15 million tonnes (40% of its carbon budget) for the entire 21st century in the last three years. Here the Council hides behind the EIR, knowing that nobody will try to hold them to account on the politics, since 94 of the 96 councillors are Labour.
For the questions about emergency summits, if you look again, you will see that it says “if not, why not.” At no point is there any explanation given for the lack of an emergency summit. It may be that in some cases the Executive Member heard on the grapevine that, for example, the business community wasn’t interested, or that faith leaders thought that prayer would be enough. It may be that she was too busy doing other things. Whatever it is, I would like to [sic] answers to each of those questions.
Response :An Environmental Information Regulations request is about recorded information. An authority is not under a duty to create information, to form a view or to provide an opinion in order to respond to a request. It is only in situations where a view has been formed and recorded that it will fall within the scope of the Regulations. Therefore, the above information does not fall within the scope of the Environmental Information Regulations 2004.
So, the Executive Member has held no meetings with business, faith or community leaders about emergency action on climate change. She has no intention of doing so, it seems. She has not contacted members of the climate “partnership” to get them to put climate change on their websites. She has no plans to do so.
Three obvious questions: Why is she being paid 34 thousand pounds per annum? What does she think the job IS? Does the Labour Group think she is the right person for the job?
Our "leaders" are going to keep making empty promises. It makes them feel good. It gets the activists to act like zombie kittens. If you want to have some self-respect and perhaps make a difference (actual facts may vary), then find a functioning group that cares about your skills and knowledge - what you have, what you want.
One useful group might be www.climateemergencymanchester.net - you can email them on contact@climateemergencymanchester.net
manchester climate monthly 