Worth reading:
Love, Anger & Betrayal: Just Stop Oil’s Young Climate Campaigners   

by Jonathon Porritt, Mount House Press, 2025

As veteran environmentalist Jonathon Porritt gives voice to the hopes, motivations and fears of 26 Just Stop Oil activists, Lewes long-time climate campaigner Ann Link is inspired to ask how we can all work to transform fear and denial around the climate crisis into practical action.

I have been reading Jonathon Porritt’s new book. My aim here is to convey its message and effect on me, because it is, of course, urgent to act now on climate collapse. What I love about it is that for me it inspires ideas for the practical things we can still do, even admitting the danger we are in. But we must talk to and involve people NOW, so that political and economic pressure can work.

Many of us have been very aware for years of the need for climate action: I printed ACT NOW on a dress I wore to demonstrations five years ago. I would feel self-conscious about wearing it now. But it is easy to slip into passivity, and there are lots of reasons for this. I exist in two different worlds, as the illustration below depicts. This has a strong tendency to be the case for many of us (at least some of the time), especially as we can feel strongly influenced by what people around us are doing (or not).

Jonathon Porritt was co-founder of the Green Party and director of Friends of the Earth. He set up Forum for the Future to work with business and civil society for a sustainable future. He helped set up the Prince of Wales’ Business and Sustainability Programme. As an environmentalist, he is an establishment figure, but since retiring has supported the Green Party, Just Stop Oil and Defend Our Juries.

He has co-created this book with 26 Just Stop Oil activists, and their contribution shows in his writing as well as in their profiles and quotes, which are interspersed with the main text. It’s an inspiring collaborative effort.

There is a dilemma in that conventional campaigns and momentous statements by the UN and others get little attention, whereas direct actions – like soup throwing at works of art – are front-page news but get condemned, even by more moderate environmental campaigners. The author aims to give a platform to the activists, drawing together the evidence that motivates them.

There is also much about the examples that inspire these activists. For example the young Freedom Riders in the USA who travelled to Southern states and used white-only wash rooms and lunch counters. They met with extreme violence and had to write their wills before travelling, but their actions led to the federal government enforcing civil rights.

The title reflects the love the activists show for the natural world and fellow humans, the anger of many and their betrayal by governments and society in general. They all also express bemusement at the attitude of most politicians: “It’s just baffling. Totally baffling”.

“They still think all the bad stuff is decades away – which means they’ve got plenty of time to get it sorted!”

Yet science shows we are in great danger of irreparable harm that will render our planet unliveable for most humans. Even the next five years at present levels of extreme weather and global warming will cause grief, injury and loss to millions.

Climate scientists are extremely worried now, but are being largely ignored. Timespans for projected changes like sea level rise are contracting. Ice caps are melting faster and the ocean is expanding as it gets hotter. Methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases, can leak unexpectedly from frozen beds beneath land and sea, accelerating the warming process. We may reach 1 metre in sea rise well before the end of the century, especially if we exceed a 2 degree temperature increase – a terrifying prospect given that two-thirds of the world’s largest cities are within a metre of sea level. And on the way to 2100 many major cities will have severe disruption: impacts don’t magically start at significant dates.

In October 2024, the World Health Organisation reported that around 50% of the world landmass had been affected by at least a month’s worth of extreme drought, with devastating effects on health. Heat-related deaths were up by 167%; sand and dust storms increased by one-third; and 150 million additional people ended up in “food insecurity” often not knowing where their next meal would come from.

Natural systems are less able to absorb climate gas emissions: in 2023, Johan Rockstrom, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, warned that “we are already seeing massive cracks in the resilience of the earth’s systems, both on land and in the oceans. This means that the amount of CO₂ absorbed by forests, soils, and peat bogs in 2023 was close to zero, so mitigations such as growing trees are getting less effective.” Forest fires contributed to that failure and continue to do so.

The IPCC makes predictions of when changes will happen, but 40 years is becoming 20 years, and no crisis is getting further away. Targets to keep average global heating within 1.5 degrees of pre-industrial levels now look unattainable and a rise of 2 to 3 degrees is looking more likely.

In January 2025 the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries published an extraordinary report: Planetary Insolvency: Finding our Balance with Nature. Their risk management experts reassessed risks from fires, flooding, droughts, temperature increases and rising sea levels through to 2050 and on to 2100. The authors said a likely increase of over 2 degrees would be “catastrophic”. Impacts would include:

• Economic contraction: GDP loss of over 25%
• Two billion deaths by 2050.
• Heating of 2 degrees or more, triggering multiple climate tipping points
• Breakdown of some critical ecosystem services and earth systems
• Major extinctions
• Ocean circulation severely impacted
• Severe socio-economic fragmentation in many regions
• Loss of low-lying regions
• Mass migration
• Catastrophic mortality events from disease, malnutrition, thirst and conflict.

New evidence of inaction

The truth is, sadly, that we are looking back on more than 30 years of near complete failure – from the emergence of the UN convention on Climate Change to now. Jonathon Porritt blames a belief in gradual, consensual change in society and politics, which has manifestly failed so that it is nearly too late.

He quotes historians: civilisations fail when their elites can no longer agree on what threatens them, but says our elites do agree: they are threatened by the truth about their part in our precarious situation. They fear mass uprising, as Naomi Klein says. The mainstream media distract us and virulently oppose those such as Just Stop Oil who use non-violent direct action to seek to tell the truth. The media are also dominated by fossil fuel interests, for example Paul Marshall, a hedge fund billionaire with massive investments in fossil fuels, owner of the Spectator and GB News, and prospective owner of the Telegraph.

The climate crisis is very different from previous issues such as the depletion of the ozone layer. There, alternatives existed to CFCs and the Montreal Protocol has successfully limited this damage so that the ozone layer is recovering. Fossil fuels permeate our whole economic and political systems. In some cases, petrochemical companies ARE the state, enabling fossil fuel interests to dominate climate negotiations like the United Nations’ annual COP conference.  To keep maintain business as usual, world leaders have become expert in “speaking fluent climate” without in any way challenging the status quo.

The crisis is so stark and urgent that politicians are running away from it and deluding themselves with false solutions. Although the danger has become much more obvious and a majority of people want something done about it, the fossil industry is so profitable that it can buy influence on a huge scale. This happened with the Conservatives and now Labour.

Shocks that may achieve change include the failure of the insurance industry when the cost of claims from extreme weather events becomes too great. This would cause horrendous economic disruption and suffering – but so will unmitigated climate change. Intergenerational injustice may also cause uprising by young people who see that they face a worse future than their parents.

The activists believe that the only method that will work to counter inaction is non-violent direct action. Blocking a motorway in the Netherlands achieved a reduction in fossil fuel subsidies. Other citizens can be active by talking about the situation and telling the truth: that we cannot have infinite economic growth; that we rely completely on the natural world for our material prosperity and for our wellbeing; the truth that we are much more cooperative than we are often portrayed and so could work together to expand “the inspiring political and economic alternatives that would allow fair, dynamic and sustainable communities to thrive the world over.”

UN Secretary General Antony Guterres said “We have a choice: collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.”

What needs to happen now

So, what steps can we take to inspire action? Our local politicians need to read this book, and to feel the pressure from constituents. We each need to support each other to talk to our immediate circles – although it’s often difficult. We need to make practical preparations for likely disruptions, especially food shortages, and publicise them.

We need to explore initiatives for better democracy such as Assemble, an offshoot of Just Stop Oil. In Lewes, a Deliberative Democracy Group has started – contact to learn more. Personally, I think that Insure Our Future’s campaigns against companies that provide cover for new pipelines and oilfields also offer hope.

As a community, we need to act as if collapse were imminent, strengthen our communities and ourselves and look at impactful things a lot of people can do, including with their banking and finances to move capital away from fossil fuels.

‘Love, Anger and Betrayal’ is a book worth reading and re-reading. I have zigzagged to write this as the book’s structure is a little distracting, but there is something on every page to bring inspiration, and re-energise us. If you’d be interested in exploring or discussing the ideas in the book further, email here.