Alec Connon, co-director of the Stop the Money Pipeline coalition, who led a September blockade of Citibank’s New York City headquarters to protest the company’s fossil fuel investments, believes three factors are necessary for an impactful action. It should be “highly targeted at elites, genuinely disruptive, and sustained over the long term,” he told me. Like most of Climate Defiance’s actions, the Citibank effort nailed the first two but not the third. Blame the lack of reinforcements. The American climate movement is “in a lull,” Paul Engler noted. “We don’t have a big organization with a big base that’s willing to put their bodies on the line.”
That may change. Such aggressive demonstrations are growing in popularity. According to a recent Yale study, nearly a third of registered voters support nonviolent civil disobedience on behalf of the climate, and 15 percent would consider joining such an action. According to the “3.5 percent rule”—the minimum slice of a population likely to force change on a government, according to research by Harvard political science professor Erica Chenoweth—that kind of participation would more than suffice.
To see what a vigorous climate movement can accomplish, consider the Netherlands. Just days before the Citibank protest, an estimated 10,000 demonstrators led by the local offshoot of Extinction Rebellion blocked a highway in the Hague to protest fossil fuel subsidies. Police dispersed them with water cannons and arrested 2,400. Protests resumed the following day and continued for a month. “It’s like, OK, you want to force the regime to do something, you go to the city, and you do not leave,” explained Roger Hallam, who contributed strategic advice to the organizers. Eventually, the lower house of Parliament called for a plan to end the subsidies. The challenge, Hallam said, is hanging in there. Nonviolent methodology “looks like shit until it wins,” he said. “The government goes, ‘No way, over our dead body.’ And then on day 28, they suddenly go, ‘Oh yeah, right then.’”
I reached out to Hallam amid a drumbeat of devastating climate reports and chaotic weather events, news so bad that I’d begun to wonder if any of the dedicated advocates I’d interviewed—from elected officials and policy wonks to radical cadre—had landed on the right approach. In a world of schemers and dreamers, Hallam is a screamer, sounding the alarm with bracing intensity. With his gray goatee, untidy ponytail, and beakish profile, he resembles a biblical prophet, and he often speaks like one: “The liberal, white middle class is desperately trying to pretend that we don’t actually face a crisis which will destroy the carbon state in the next 20 years,” he told me. “We all know what’s going to come afterwards, which is fascism. So, you know, wake-up time, isn’t it?” A sociologist who studied social movements as a Ph.D. candidate at King’s College, Hallam has also spent some 40 years at the barricades. He orchestrated Extinction Rebellion’s aggressive strategy, which forced the U.K. Parliament, in 2019, to declare a climate emergency, making Britain the first nation to do so. After being pushed out of the group (blame his allergy to compromise, appetite for arrest, and tendency to compare the climate catastrophe to the Holocaust), he co-founded Just Stop Oil, best known for snarling traffic in central London with its “slow march” protests.