CHAPTER 1 The Energy and Political Landscape: Climate Crisis, Extreme Energy, and the Climate Justice Movement

The Climate Crisis and Other Animals is a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of our planet and the animals who live on it. Twine examines the impact of the climate crisis on nonhuman animals and argues for the importance of a climate and food justice movement inclusive of nonhuman animals. The book examines the ways in which climate breakdown is affecting nonhuman animal species and delves deeply into the politicised controversy over the extent of emissions from animal agriculture, demonstrating the markedly lower emissions of eating vegan. Critical of misguided human-centred framings of the climate crisis, Twine makes clear the necessity of including practices of animal commodification, the importance of documenting the effect of a changing climate on other animal species, and the mitigative opportunities of a radical remaking of dominant human–animal relations. The Climate Crisis and Other Animals addresses the emissions impacts of radical land-use changes and the twentieth century scaling-up of animal commodification within the animal-industrial complex, revealing how this system is interwoven in the gendered and racialised histories of capitalism. Twine collates an impressive body of scientific research that demonstrate both the already enormous impact of the climate crisis on the lives of nonhuman animals and the need to tackle the dominance of meat-based cultures. Twine critically explores approaches to food transition and three potentially transformative scenarios for global food systems that could help dismantle the animal-industrial complex and create a more sustainable and just food system. Averting the climate and biodiversity crises requires nothing less than a radical transformation in how we see ourselves in relation to other species.

Time to pay the piper: Fossil fuel companies’ reparations for climate damages

Since the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, a global shift in consciousness has taken place around the urgency of the Earth’s climate crisis. Amidst growing panic, teenagers are emerging as key leaders and mobilizers, demanding intergenerational justice and immediate action. They are, however, often depicted as lone revolutionaries or as pawns of adult organizations. These representations obscure the complex and important ways in which climate justice movements are operating, and particularly the ways in which dynamics of age intersect with other axes of power within solidarity efforts in specific contexts. This article explores these dynamics, building on analyses of intersectional and intergenerational solidarity practices. Specifically, it delves into detailed analysis of how the Seattle group of the Raging Grannies, a network of older activists, engaged in Seattle’s ShellNo Action Coalition, mobilizing their age, whiteness, and gender to support racialized and youth activists involved in the coalition, and thus to block Shell Oil’s rigs from travelling through the Seattle harbour en route to the Arctic. Drawing from a pivotal group discussion between Grannies and other coalition members, as well as participant observation and media analysis, it examines the Grannies’ practices of solidarity during frontline protests and well beyond. The article thus offers an analysis of solidarity that is both intergenerational and intersectional in approach, while contributing to ongoing work to extend understandings of the temporal, spatial, cognitive, and relational dimensions of solidarity praxis.

22 | International Union Rights | 26/4 FOCUS | CLIMATE CHANGE & TRADE UNIONS Climate change is a public health issue and workers’ rights issue The past three decades are characterised by an unprecedented rise in CO2 emissions as well as the gradual development of a global movement against climate change, which routinely surfaces in the runup to the ‘COP’ conferences.1 As the global community is still far off fulfilling the targets of the 2016 Paris Agreement, new kinds of environmental and climate movements, such as Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion, have emerged, using the slogan of ‘climate justice’. Recent school student strikes and large-scale climate change demonstrations are an expression of a deep feeling that large numbers of people in the Global North want to do something about climate change. Many of them are engaging in political action for the first time and understandably look towards the existing structures of climate activism in order to articulate their hopes. Yet, the there are numerous issues that limit the ability of the climate movement to involve a broader spectrum of workers and trade unionists in their movement. Many of these are related to the organising tactics but there are also wider politics at play… The ‘NGO-ization’ of climate politics Since the late 1990s mainstream NGOs have been mobilising their members and subscribers onto the streets before major summits of the G8, World Trade Organisation and the COP talks. At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, NGOs took the global stage with a massive presence. Since the mid-1990s, many multinational companies also run their own company-internal environmental campaigns and set their own environmental goals. It has become attractive to sign up to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, as environmental and social governance features higher on the agendas of institutional investors. From the Rio Earth Summit onwards, larger NGOs have suceeded in getting a ‘seat at the table’ on policy processes concerning the environment and climate change. Unlike trade unions that are financed by their membership dues, many NGOs are however structured like private business enterprises without any democratic leadership and are dependent either on government funding or large private donations (or both). Thus, they must always be able to showcase their successes and keep their donors satisfied. That offers one possible explanation as to why some NGOs have keenly promoted market-based mechanisms and technological ‘fixes’ currently being promoted by transnational corporations. Such NGOs may argue that without their involvement the climate would be in a far worse situation, but in doing so, they also seek to legitimise their participation in a highly ecologically ineffectual process. A group of critical NGOs formed a loose network under the banner of ‘Climate Justice Now’ when the COP13 in Bali failed in 2007. This network laid the basis for global justice activists and radical environmentalists to come together at the 2009 World Social Forum in Bélém to draft the Declaration for Climate Justice. This enabled various wings of the climate movement to mobilise huge numbers of people into campaigning, protesting, and letter writing. The subsequent 2009 Copenhagen climate summit was a turning point: it did succeed in building a strong foundation for a broad movement with a minimal consensus around the ubiquitous slogan of ‘climate justice’, which continues to inspire today’s school strikers. Nonetheless, the COP15 ended with no binding targets. The breakdown of the COP15 talks made it clear that lobbying and expert work had become obsolete. NGOs were no longer exerting the same influence as they had done for the previous fifteen years. Meanwhile, the radical wing of the climate movement spearheaded by ‘Reclaim Power’ was not able to delegitimise the UNFCCC process as they had hoped for. One possible explanation for this was the absence of trade unions and organised labour from their mobilisations. Indeed, trade unions have not yet realised their potential in exposing companies’ green-washing strategies and regulating capital through their collective agreements from below. Such approaches are more necessary than ever, as it is unlikely that the climate crisis will be solved through the free market. Even to this day policymakers and world leaders are hesitant to use the state to drive through...

This chapter develops two key points about how we should understand today’s climate justice movement, both of which grow from our distinctive observations of the evolution of global climate politics since the 1990s. First, we argue that the climate justice movement is best understood as a “movement ecosystem” rather than as a unified movement or collection of formal organizations and networks. This ecosystem extends from global to local levels of action and encompasses a variety of formal and informal as well as state and non-state actors. Second, the climate justice movement today is defined by contestation over the modernist, colonial project of capitalism that defines the prevailing interstate order. Capitalism’s extractive processes separate people from natural ecosystems and from each other while destroying the socio-ecological reproductive foundations of society. Yet it continues to determine the parameters of intergovernmental climate negotiations, thereby preventing any meaningful government action in the face of the deepening climate crisis. As more people confront the consequences of climate change, more are recognizing that the unjust economic and political system that marginalizes people of color, women, and Indigenous communities is responsible for the continuing and disproportionate harms these groups suffer. It is these frontline communities who have become the leading protagonists in the climate justice movement, and their struggles over decades have helped shape the movement ecosystem in fundamental ways, providing avenues for both collective resistance and for the advance of people- and life-centered alternatives to capitalism.

This article extends Scandrett et al.’s conceptual framework for social movement learning to understand learning and knowledge creation in the climate justice movement. Drawing on radical pluralist theoretical approaches to social movement learning, learning in the climate justice movement is conceptualized at the micro, meso, and macro levels, along two continua of (a) unorganized and organized learning and (b) individual and collective learning. Two critical themes of learning about power and learning about place are used as examples to illustrate learning across the three levels. Article conclusions discuss strengths and limitations of the conceptual framework and directions for further research to better understand adult learning within the climate justice movement.

Climate justice is an important issue for civil society advocacy at the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC). While the climate justice movement has received increasing scholarly attention, the contribution of faith-based actors (FBAs) to justice debates at the UNFCCC has been largely overlooked. This article examines the contribution of FBAs to the debate on climate justice and their relation to and difference from the climate justice movement. Based on a constructivist assumption that the meaning of climate change can be interpreted differently, this article understands action on climate change as an effect of its discursive construction. This article argues that FBAs are part of these discourses and that their religious and spiritual practices are constituted and constitutive of climate justice practices. Therefore, the aim of this article is to understand FBAs’ climate justice practices and critically reflect on their contribution to global climate change politics.

Climate justice is an important issue for civil society advocacy at the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC). While the climate justice movement has received increasing scholarly attention, the contribution of faith-based actors (FBAs) to justice debates at the UNFCCC has been largely overlooked. This article examines the contribution of FBAs to the debate on climate justice and their relation to and difference from the climate justice movement. Based on a constructivist assumption that the meaning of climate change can be interpreted differently, this article understands action on climate change as an effect of its discursive construction. This article argues that FBAs are part of these discourses and that their religious and spiritual practices are constituted and constitutive of climate justice practices. Therefore, the aim of this article is to understand FBAs’ climate justice practices and critically reflect on their contribution to global climate change politics.

This article analyses the main reasons why Indonesia’s climate justice movement has so far struggled to grow into an influential mass movement. Drawing on insights from the literature on social movements, the article identifies three main reasons for this limited growth. First, Indonesia’s democratic decline during the presidency of Joko Widodo has restricted political opportunities for mobilisation. Second, climate justice as a concept remains difficult to frame at the grassroots where the impact of climate change is felt most severely but awareness of the links between severe weather events, climate change, and justice issues remains relatively low. Third, the climate justice movement has struggled to build effective coalitions with broader mass constituencies and the movement itself is divided between an old generation of moderate environmentalists and younger, more radical climate justice activists.

Climate justice has become a central discursive element of a wide variety of actors, expression of various, and contrasting, social and political visions. Indeed climate justice can be understood as a field of discursivity, susceptible to a multiplicity of articulatory practices. The climate justice movement offers a system-critical articulation of climate justice, hinging on what I call boundary-lines of critique. The central argument of this article is that technology, one of these boundary lines, eludes radical critique and enjoys rather a hegemonic position within the discourse of the climate justice movement. Distinguishing between polluting and climate-friendly technologies - between false and real solutions - in fact misdirects attention. Drawing on Hornborg's work on the relation between global patterns of resource extraction, unequal social and exchange relations and technology, the article emphasizes how reducing the critique of technology to a positional analysis measured against a boundary rhetorically constructed on a false/real solution dichotomy is not sufficient for a critique which aims at being radically system critical. Indeed, it may have the paradoxical consequence of further legitimating those processes of accumulation, appropriation and depredation crucial for industrial technology (whether or not "green") to work and at the root of the socio-ecological and climatic crises.

At the moment when we are writing this abstract, the last year was just announced as the warmest on record, the first to breach the symbolic 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. For decades, scientists have been sounding the alarm about the climate and ecological crisis, but these warnings have been met with inadequate response and political inertia.In the last decade, a strong and diverse climate movement emerged, with grassroots groups mostly composed of young people engaging in a variety of actions, including civil disobedience. Earth scientists have however been timid to engage openly with these movements, concerned about their reputation and about breaching scientific neutrality.However, fuelled by concern in the face of inaction, this started to change in the last years with scientists increasingly taking strong roles and positions for or in activist groups, for instance via groups such as Scientist Rebellion or Scientists for XR. The engagement of earth scientists in climate groups can have strong beneficial effects (Capstick et al 2022): As non-usual suspects and experts on the topic, their engagement in the climate movement can increase the feeling of emergency, while their respected position in society can help lending legitimacy to activist groups sometimes disregarded as young and unserious.Despite an increase in the willingness of earth scientists to be more engaged beyond their own research work, there are still strong barriers to their involvement in the climate movement (Dablander et al 2024). While conceptions around neutrality and fears of hurting one’s reputation are a big part of earth scientists' hesitations, uncertainties about how to get involved and the kind of roles available to them also represent a strong barrier. This poster aims at presenting different types of involvement in the climate justice movement that might fit you as an earth scientist and a citizen. It builds from our own experience in activist groups, as well as research and publications by different organizations, to display the diversity of roles needed in grassroots climate groups, and help you find your own.  Capstick, S., Thierry, A., Cox, E. et al. Civil disobedience by scientists helps press for urgent climate action. Nat. Clim. Chang. 12, 773–774 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01461-yDablander, F., Sachisthal, M.S.M., Cologna, V. et al. Climate change engagement of scientists. Nat. Clim. Chang. 14, 1033–1039 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-02091-2

This chapter focuses on features of collaborative-dialogical work (C-D) in the context of building sustainable and more resilient social movements, more particularly the climate justice movement (CJM) in the Czech Republic. It suggests that C-D principles overlap with principles of the climate justice movement, especially the principle of prefiguration, and that C-D practice and CJM can inform each other. The chapter describes a broader context of the CJM in order to link it to specific issues and dilemmas concerning the sustainability and resilience of activist collectives within the movement. It discusses how attunement to moments of solidarity with climate justice helps us when working within the social change context and with developing specific relational sensitivity that enriches our professional and human engagement in various other settings.

A central concept raised by the climate justice movement is climate debt. Here, the claims and warrants of the movement support for climate debt is identified through an argumentation analysis of their central manifestos. It is found that the climate debt claim is understood as primarily restorative, in the sense that the environmental space of the developing countries must be returned, “decolonized.” The damage caused by climate change also gives rise to a compensatory adaptation debt. The result is compared with an earlier study on ecological debt. Both concepts are framed within an unjust power relation between North and South, but there are differences. Ecological debt is mainly analyzed in terms of an unjust economic exploitation, which is congenial with its use as an argument for cancellation of Southern external debts; climate debt is rather seen as a violation of communal rights and territories, an argument for climate justice.

This article analyzes how young people in the climate justice movement cultivate a prefigurative culture centered on justice as a response to the threat of climate change. Employing grounded theory and drawing on data from in-depth interviews with 29 youth activists and participant observation in Santa Barbara County, California, the birthplace of both the environmental movement and offshore oil drilling, I argue that four key values—relationships, accessibility, intersectionality, and community—enable movement building, a stated goal of the climate justice movement. These values emerge from interviewees’ words and practices. Drawing on John Foran’s (2014) notion of political cultures of creation, I conceptualize these values and the practices that embody them as constituting a “climate justice culture of creation” that shapes and is shaped by ideas, experiences, social relations, and the reality of a changing atmosphere. These values, and movement building, are about creating alternative futures—cultures that are not dependent on inequality and fossil fuels.

Governments from around the world have been meeting annually for over twenty years to determine solutions for addressing global climate change. At the COP 21 Climate Summit in Paris, 195 governments agreed that carbon emissions must be lowered and each country reported their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC) for lowering carbon emissions. Now it is up to civil society to hold governments accountable to their commitment and to also urge bolder action since their contributions are not adequate to lower emissions to a level suitable for a livable future. A global justice movement focused on climate action can play a critical role to move more people to action. This project focuses on how to increase climate activism through a compilation of strategies and best practices in the form of a field manual to inform individuals and organizations on ways to move people to climate activism. A survey administered to Climate Activists is analyzed, and the survey results provide a list of climate actions and barriers identified by current climate activists in the field in hopes to inform the movement on what is working and what is important to focus on in the future to move people to action. This field manual will provide additional insights to help build and maintain the climate justice movement.