Cameron Abadi’s Climate Radicals is a punchy and compelling investigation into environmental direct action, and poses the question, are ‘radical’ climate activists hurting the cause? The author believes that, yes, they are.
Abadi’s book focuses mainly on Germany, where the author lives, but happily the three strands of activism he investigates have strong parallels in most western countries, especially the UK. Fridays For Future are known here as the school strikers; Letzte Generation employ disruptive tactics akin to Just Stop Oil; and Ende Gelände is a direct inspiration for UK groups like Reclaim the Power that undertake direct occupation and sabotage of polluting industries.
To his credit, Abadi spends a fair amount of time among the protesters while writing this book – both in training and planning sessions, and during some direct action. He shows a sincere curiosity about these people and their motivations for participating. It is overwhelmingly clear, however, that at best he primarily views these individuals as being naive, and at worst flirts with a tone of outright contempt.
“Nobody stops to ask,” he claims, while attending a training session, “what exactly are we all doing here? What was the deeper purpose of the protests?” In a book that promises an examination of the vital intersection between contemporary politics and protest, comments like these could be perceived as undercutting the seriousness of his work.
The book’s narrative turns to the terrain of electoral politics, focusing on Germany’s Green Party (a successful chapter of the international Green movement) as the vehicle and the means through which climate policy will actually be advanced. But, having set up this framing, Abadi then spends the rest of the book tearing it down, suggesting how Greens elected to power are subject to compromise and disappointment, and how even flagship legislation like the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in the US has resulted in a net expansion of fossil fuels.
Abadi doesn’t make entirely clear what he sees as being the relationship between increasingly ‘radical’ direct action and the limitations and shortcomings of democratic, electoral politics. The most you can extrapolate from his argument is that activists who block roads or similar are unpopular among the public, and ineffectual in driving change. It does not follow from this, of course, that protest is actively counterproductive or hinders progress that would otherwise be made by policymakers.
If nobody glued themselves to Barclays’ windows, would the limitations of democratic politics suddenly vanish? If nobody blocked roads, would the IRA Act have included provision to wind down fossil fuel production? Of course not. But Abadi presents the examples of activists being screamed at by motorists by the side of the road as if they themselves are the reason that “our environmental politics isn’t working”.
On the contrary, there is some anecdotal evidence that the rise in these strands of activism from around 2019 has had a measurably positive impact on climate politics. In the UK during the 2010s, less than 10% of people would list climate as one of the top three issues they cared about. After 2019, this switched almost overnight to a quarter of the population, peaking at over a third.
Given that Abadi writes with such authority about the people he is documenting, it’s frustrating that his argument amounts to saying that neither ‘radical’ protest nor formal politics has yet risen to the challenge of grappling with the climate crisis, while purporting to be baffled why protest persists under such conditions. Yes, our environmental politics isn’t working, but I’d look to the corporate hijack of politics and limitless lobbying from fossil fuel fat cats.
Climate Radicals: Why Our Environmental Politics Isn’t Working by Cameron Abadi. Columbia Global Reports, 2024. ISBN: 9798987053645
