The true power of the Green Party is now: to admit our own powerlessness to ‘save the world’
How to parlay four MPs into a genuinely transformative response to the climate and ecological emergency? A prominent Green thinker offers a challenging proposal.
The author of this gas is a philosopher and activist, founder Chair of Green House and current Director of the Climate Majority Project. He writes here as a long-standing member of the Green Party of England and Wales, addressing himself explicitly to other Green Party members in the light of the Party’s unprecedented quadrupling of its Parliamentary representation in the UK general election earlier this month. Green House is not affiliated to any political party, but given our mission to lead the development of green thinking in the UK, we publish this piece for its interest as an example of innovative green-political advocacy in the changed context which that election has produced.
[Author’s Note: This Green House Gas is addressed directly to supporters of the Green Party. So, when I say ‘We’ (or ‘our’) without qualification herein, I typically mean ‘We Greens’.]
Rupert Read
Companion Piece addressed to Labour Party
Rupert ReadCompanion Piece addressed to Conservative Party
Precisely these superb general election results are the ideal launching-pad for a new and powerful honesty about our incapacity to make everything OK
What you can say when you win that you couldn’t say before
Let’s start with the obvious and good: What a brilliant, unprecedented set of general election results for the Green Party. Having been in this game for a long time, I can’t tell you how overjoyed I am at the success that July 4 brought. (For instance, I cried uncontrollably, with a great release, when it really hit me, on July 5, while welcoming Adrian Ramsay MP (!) to the heart of his new constituency, along with a big gaggle of Greens, that here where I live in East Anglia, we have actually done it: after two decades of trying, we have broken through and won ourselves a splendid MP.)
But, as I’ll explain, our achievement on July 4 makes a realistic assessment of our position now all the more essential, all the more feasible- and, in the main, all the more chastening…
For it remains the case of course even after this great leap forward that the Green Party is far from having real power at and through Westminster. This general election has represented absolutely brilliant progress. But that progress will self-evidently not be enough to alter dramatically the at-present catastrophic trajectory of this country (and of the world!), through our direct political power. We simply are not in a position dramatically to alter that trajectory.
(This would remain the case even if we were to end up holding the balance of power after the NEXT general election (or at least the one after), which, wonderfully, might now be possible. Having seen the recent experience of the Greens in Government in Scotland, we can easily seethis: the limitsof formal power as a small party. I’ll come back to this point and explore it further in subsequent sections of this piece.)
This fundamental fact is reality. We all know it, we all sense it.
While pursuing the very best that we can do directly via the ballot box, we need to be readying ourselves to do something else too. We need to get ready to access the full power of authenticity about the bitter truth, a power that five years ago was harnessed by XR and the youth climate strikers, but which our Party has as yet only partially manifested.
For what is the most powerful thing that Green activists and Green politicians/Leaders could do, soon, now? Is it just: continuing, and trying harder and bolder? Pursuing the same successful ‘target-to-win’ strategy (i.e. focussing resources almost exclusively on a small though growing number of target seats) and nothing else? I suggest not… I will lay out now what else we must do.
The unique power in the political space that Greens have is: carrying the torch for the climate and ecological cause even if (and as long as) we don’t get to instruct civil servants: i.e. for as long we do not have access to Governmental power. We are the trusted voice in the electoral sphere for this great cause of our time.
So: What if the most powerful thing that can be done now is for those who carry the flame of this cause in the public eye to admit a kind of defeat?
We Greens can do so now from a position of strength. Within the terms of our electoral system and political system, we are winning. Decisively on the rise. So if we now speak some home truths about our failing system as a whole, it won’t be seen as mere sour grapes. It will be seen as having a surprising edge of authenticity to it.
That’s the helpful paradox of these remarkable Green election results: precisely becausewe’ve done brilliantly and for the first time ever actually achieved our election-targets, we can be honest about how little of what in the big picture is needful has yet been made possible by this achievement.
When one’s only home is exiting the safe climate space, one simply has to say so.
What I’ve described above is what makes it all the more powerful and believable if we use the exciting pulpit that now we have to call out our failing civilisation. To admit that we are definitively exiting the safe climate space.That even the splendid successes of the ‘radical flank’ (the school climate strikers and Extinction Rebellion) in 2019, and of the Green Party now in 2024, have not translated and will not translate within the time we have been reliably told is available into sufficient policy-change or a sufficiently sane trajectory. That the Green Party will obviously still not now have the time, in this ‘critical decade’, to make everything OK, even if we follow through on this remarkable set of victories to win the maximum we can at upcoming elections. (We might possibly have been part of making everything more or less OK if we had somehow (!) achieved the ambition of early leading Greens such as Jonathon Porritt, and formed a Government by the year 2000. But it’s 2024: and we have…4 MPs.) To admit further that the tremendous opportunity thrust into humanity’s lap by the Covid pause has largely (albeit not completely) been lost. That now is the time to get serious about adaptation and preparedness; because, as the world’s leading climate scientists admitted in droveswith clear and honourable pain recently, our hopes for preventing or sufficiently mitigating dangerous climate change must now be admitted to have been largely dashed.
Precisely this is my contention. Words are deeds. Saying - with congruent, emotional accompaniments, in the wake even of our stunning success - that we are in the very midst now of a historic failure that encompasses the citizenry and elites of the world at large not excluding ourselves is the most powerful thing of all that we Greens can do.
And it is truly powerful. To change the narrative from the evidently-failed ‘Yes we can’ to ‘Can we please just face up to how badly we’ve all failed, and admit where we really are now’ might sound to some like ‘giving up’. It is the very opposite of giving up. For the psychosocial energy which will become available once we stop rather desperately staving off grief, depression, despair at the state of our world and the extent of our common failure, …the energy that then becomes available to us is incalculably huge.
You want to rocket-fuel climate action/policy (including crucially now adaptation-action and compensation for loss and damage)? Then begin by admitting where we are: as Greens, and as humanity. Own up to your own entanglement in the vast failure to date. Get underway by manifesting and then mobilising the absolutely tremendous emotional energy that is latent within us all, but held back by a dam of fake optimism. Once that dam finally bursts, the deluge will be immense. We are that potential deluge. The power that is latent in us is so vast that we’ve mostly barely begun yet even clearly to sense its scale, let alone to actually use it.
When we become who we are, then all things are possible. At least, and more accurately: all things that are still possible... (So for instance: notthe old goal of staying below 1.5 degrees C. That is now obviously impossible. 1.5 is done, gone. Acknowledging thatopenly — being clear that, tragically, the ‘safe zone’ is in the rear view mirror — is one key part of what is now Green leaders’ historic task: It itself is a hugely powerful move. It itself would buck the trend of toxic optimism that still tends to dominate climate politics).
To step into our full power — to unleash truly urgent action, to get successfully serious about addressing adaptation and loss-and-damage — we have to acknowledge what must be let go of: such as hopes for a smooth orderly transition, as well as of staying within the climatic safe zone.
When you achieve your aims and yet remain light years from your necessary objectives
We have four MPs, exactly what we aimed for. Fantastic. What I’m saying is that that achievement makes it easier and stronger for us to admit how utterly far we remain from where we need to be if society is not to tumble into an uncontrolled eco-driven collapse. And: how very late in the day it is. Not five to but five past midnight.
And we need to turn and face how the way forward is going to get harder, not easier, if and as we get bigger. Look at Germany, where (partly due to their sane, fair electoral system) the Greens have been fairly big for years. The Greens have been in government, albeit along with others, more than once now in Germany. And they have very real achievements to their names. But Germany remains on balance little further than the UK down the record towards eco-sanity. And right now, die Grunen are suffering serious push-back.
The British Greens have advanced at this election partly through our honest message of tax-and-spend to future-proof this country. But if and as we grow over the next decade, that message will start to encounter limits to the growth of itsappeal. Simply because tax-and-spend has limited appeal in our current consumerist individualist short-termist society.
In order for a bold, different Party like our Green Party to grow dramatically and sustainably and effect in due course a societal transformation will require something approaching what is called (a change in) ideological hegemony. It will require a profound shift in societal norms and mindset.
One way of describing the project that I now run, the Climate Majority Project, is as a way of making thatkind of thing possible: I mean, changing our society from one in which most politicians most of the time are shying away from making the kind of changes that climate breakdown requires to one in which most politicians most of the time are running towards those changes, those measures. Because (in this transforming future that I am sketching) they can. Because it becomes what most citizens want, demand, push for, in part through what they (the citizenry) spend a lot of their lives doing and organising, where they work, live or pray.
Such a transformation will take time. And: we don’t have (that) time. But: in the absence of shortcuts (there isno electoral / revolutionary / technological shortcut to ‘fix’ this), there is no alternative. And this means that there is going to be much more breakdown. It means facing into the coming suffering, and the increasingly dire need for (the correct kind of) adaptation, resilience-building, and preparedness for the coming disasters.
All of this begins with the bravery of admitting our incapacity. With admitting that our theories of change have not, in the big scheme of things, got us anywhere much, relative to the scale of the coming cataclysm. Our Party’s strategy has always presumptively or explicitly supposed: that there is a Parliamentary route to saving the world. This has been the grand-strategic aim. Put Greens into power, and in due course problem solved, job done, has been the message.
To put it precisely then: the Green Party theory of change at the level of grand strategy is broken. For (the magnificent achievement of) getting 4 MPs elected in the middle of the decade which was humanity’s last chance to stabilise our climate is self-evidently not a demonstration of capacity to save the world.
The Green Party coming clean that one more heave — one more bunch of Councils, or even one more and significantly larger dollop of brilliant new MPs next time around — is absolutely not going to do it, would be immensely powerful. If we were brave enough to state the obvious truth that the hopes invested when folk were told for example in 2009 that we had 8 years (100 months, to be precise) to save the world have definitively not been realised, then citizens would start to realise that actions (and inactions) have consequences, and we would gain enormous respect. At a time when authenticity in the political sphere is enormously valued. Doing so could even, ironically and wonderfully, rocket-fuel our own political prospects, by earning us the much-sought-after laurel of authenticity, in an age tiring of political fakers. And it is very worth noting here that the speedy but incremental growth-path that we are on by way of the ‘Target To Win’ electoral strategy is, for all its very real virtues (and it has always been that path that I have advocated within the Party, and still do), by itself self-evidently insufficient to bring about truly rapid emergency-style transformative change.
What we should say
The welcome honesty around tax that was successfully part of our general election mission needs to be conjoined with a similar level of honesty around climate- and nature- decline. One key reason why, is that people will only potentially come en masse to understand just why really big financial commitments are needed if they come to understand the full seriousness of the situation. And then they can come to understand the implications of this, including the pretty desperate need to get serious about preparing to deal with extreme climate impacts. (The UK has been relatively lucky thus far, compared to most other countries, in the scale of the climate disasters we have suffered. Luck is mere happenstance. Our luck will not last.)
But such seriousness needs to begin in the kind of way that Churchill began: by warning unambiguously of the gravity of our peril, and of how it has been left too late for the path forward to be other than one of toil, tears and sweat. Brits will not be ready to face together into what is coming, and to prioritise community, love and decency over consumer fripperies, unless and until they are actually enabled to understand where collectively we are and how hard the path ahead is.
Imagine Green Party Leaders making speeches, including from the bully-pulpit of the Commons, confessing that the Party, while at last growing significantly in Parliament, has failed in its historic mission. i.e. that collectively we Brits / humans are not going to be kept safe. That now is the time to get serious about (transformative, strategic) adaptation because it is too late in the day altogether to prevent the breakdown that has started. This shift would begin by — and take concrete shape in — Greens calling for a national plan for climate resilience for the UK: a huge, communities-involving endeavour to brace for impacts, to prepare, to transform how we work with (rather than against) nature, to grow inner-and-outer resilience.
What huge news this (that I’ve asked you to imagine) would be, when it occurs. We would finally makethe news agenda; and startle pundits and voters into paying attention.
For: no-one is expecting the Green Party to do this. To risk our reputation, to risk morale, to risk disappointing our funders. That is exactly why it will be a huge news-story. Why it will shift perceptions more radically than ever before. Why it will for the first time in a long time give us…a chance.
For what you are then picturing is the game being changed. Soft-denial being punctured. The media and mainstream 'political leaders' increasingly unable to hold back the tide.
What precedent is there for saying it
Can this really make sense? Are there any historical precedents for it? What I’m saying amounts to a contemporary instance of what Vaclav Havel— the dissident playwright who later, completely unexpectedly, became President of Czechoslovakia in the wake of the velvet revolution — called ‘the power of the powerless’. Havel wrote brilliantly about the power that anyone can touch and becomeby naming the truth, and confessing their own incapacity to act directly on it so as to change it sufficiently. This power of the powerless strips legitimacy away from failed ideologies, false dreams.
You’d have thought that calling oneself ‘powerless’ was a recipe for impotence. Havel et al showed it was - is - the reverse. That there is a fabulous power in the truthful admission of powerlessness, and in the respect and resonance that it can bring.
Much as civil society in 1980s Eastern Europe spoke the taboo truth about the failing regimes there, from a position of felt agencylessness, and so helped pave the way for the extraordinary tipping point of 1989, so now civil society needs to do the same vis a vis the climate more-than-emergency and the deep failure of nations and CoPs alike to address it even remotely adequately. The velvet revolutions of 1989 would not have been able to occur had the dissidents not (over years and even decades) readied their countries for something different. Similarly, the Green Party, still quite far from direct power, needs to use to the max the power it already has: to name the truth, and demonstrate, model, the leadership that increasingly citizens will be hungering for.
The great power that we in the Green Party now have truly is: to admit our own powerlessness - as THE relevant actors in the political space - to sort the climate and ecological crisis. When we achieve such authenticity, we step into a whole newpower. We resonate with people at large, and with the situation itself;indeed, with the poor wounded Earth itself. (The emotional pain that we admit to and manifest when we do this can even be seen as in a way the Earth itself coming to realise and express its woundedness. For we humans are of the Earth, not strangers to it.)
What we say then has the undeniable ring of truth to it — and carries with it a really tremendous emotional punch. Citizens can then no longer ‘outsource’ to us responsibility for ‘solving’ our predicament; they have then to face into it, for the first time, on an equal footing with us. They have to face into it, that is to say, themselves…
The extraordinary paradox is this: that only once we admit that some of our hopes have died can we generate a new hope, a 'radical' hope, a believable hope. Green politicians/leaders, by resonating fully with the citizenry, by way of being the honest brokers between them and a future, are both readying themselves for and accelerating the time when they will be called upon bythe nation. As the climate- and poly- crisis intensifies over the next couple of decades, those who have broken the taboo on speaking what is actually needful are those who are placing themselves at the heart of the nation in its coming hour of need. (For if you think the state of the country is parlous at present, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.)
Once we strike down the (fake, ego-driven, now-impossible) desire to save the world intact…then we become more powerful than we can possibly imagine.
Is there really an alternative to what I am recommending?
What is the alternative, at this point? The alternative would be easy: it would be to follow the normal playbook. To simply celebrate, and look to future rapid growth (of Party-representation), and implicitly pretend that eventually we will make everything OK if enough people put their trust in us, their X beside our name. Let’s spend a moment imagining how that could go.
On a conventional growth pathway for the Party, having achieved these remarkable breakthroughs at this election, having quadrupled our MP numbers, we could expect an — exciting, scintillating! — maximum ceiling of roughly 16 MPs at the ’28/29 election. Achieving that next quadrupling would be incredibly hard: we would have to target and once again in every case gain a slew of seats where at present we are second to Labour but in most cases well behind them, seats such as Bristol East, Sheffield Central, Huddersfield, Leeds Central, Manchester Rusholme, Birkenhead, Norwich South, Vauxhall, Stratford, as well as taking Isle of Wight East from the Conservatives and perhaps Cheltenham from the LibDems. But, after what we did on July 4, it might just be possible to do this. If that happens to give us the balance of power, we might conceivably even achieve a little bit of direct influence, by the time the ‘critical decade’ for climate ends. Which would be a very good thing, obviously.
In an election in ’32/33, we might hope to grow, on the same model, to 64 seats. Wow! Genuinely exciting. By that time, if we have achieved that objective, then we will be becoming a force to be reckoned with in British politics. We will potentially have about the same level of influence as the LibDems do right now, after their impressive growth at this election.
But…how much influence is that, really?
We all know the answer to that question (after seeing what happened in 2010-15, for instance).
And what will the world be like, in a decade’s time?
Well, to give one important example: AMOC, the ocean current system that is mainly responsible for preventing this country from a chaotic and potentially semi-Siberian climate, may well be in collapse by then. With vast knock-ons for most of the world, and just about the worst effects of all in… the UK.
For the avoidance of doubt: I would strongly favour us planning to target and get at least 16 elected next time. And at least 64 the time after. And 256+ by 2037/8. And maybe then into Government on our own by the 2040s. Giving our all, to make this happen. My point is only: even if we successfully execute that aspiration — which, crucially, will require much more than professionalism and clever focussing on the ground; it will require an authentic transformative vision and an underlying change in ideological hegemony, perhaps of the very kind outlined in the present piece — even if we succeed in doing that, we are still only nudging the critical path that we (Britain / humanity) are on. And awfully, excessively late in the day.
And: we ought to face into that (terrible) truth. We must face up to climate reality and political reality and temporal reality: all of which indicate that, while fifty years ago it was possible to imagine that Greens could get things sorted through an electoralist Parliamentary road, nowadays such a road even if successfully travelled is only one part of the — unavoidably tough — picture.
Remember that even if eventually we do get into government one day, on something like the trajectory I have just outlined, it is going to be very hard indeed to turn things around. It is not clear that our Party programme (as outlined in our manifesto), bold though it is, would be adequate to that ultimate objective, of staying within planetary boundaries. And that is partly because, as I set out above, there isn’t the political ‘headroom’ yet for more. (That again is a key reason for the existence and medium/long-term strategy of the Climate Majority Project: to make a post-growth, climate-sane future politically possible, which as yet it isn’t.)
Moreover it is clear that by the late 2030s let alone the 2040s we will very likely already be well into the zone of desperate triage, of coping with the repeated buffettings of the unprecedented storms of our children. Meanwhile, we need to acknowledge too how some other parts of the world, not least many oil-producing countries and non-democracies, are with virtual certainty going to continue actively to make things worse for a considerable time to come even if weget to the point of making things better.
Things have gone about as well as they possibly could for us in the general election just gone — and yet Britain and Planet Earth remain locked on course for climate meltdown. And that will continue to be the case even if we continue to quadruple at each election. (And such continued quadrupling is in any case not going to be possible beyond the next election or so without a wider and more thoroughgoingly truthful grand strategy.)
‘Target To Win’, ruthless focussing of our resources, has got us to 4. It might get us to 16. With each utterly-needed quadrupling, one is by definition less focussed on a small number of seats, and more bidding to truly affect the national conversation and ultimately of course policy. And, as I described in the earlier section “When you achieve your aims…”, the political task actually becomes harder and more demanding, the more one grows. All this means that as the Party grows in parliament, as it has now wonderfully begun to do, the need grows to have something much more than Target To Win as one’s politicalstrategy, if the Green Party’s growth is going to be sustainable.
The admission that it’s been left too late to save our current civilisation, that a great transformation is now unavoidable, and that we can lead by turning to get serious on transformative adaptation to cope with this situation, is actually a great candidate for the basis of what this ‘something more’ might be.
For, in the wake of coming to see that the old grand strategic aim (of saving the world, or (to be more precise) of preventing dangerous climate change and achieving an orderly ‘green transition’) is no longer available, a new grand strategy is required. Increasing our MP numbers through Target-To-Win as much as credibly possible is of course not in itself anything like the kind of deep political and communicational strategy that is required to merit a moniker like “grand”, and cannot by itself achieve transformational aims.
The kind of switch that I am outlining in this paper is, I hope, closer to the mark.
How the averting of complete dystopia requires letting go of utopianism
Our Leaders and Parliamentarians could be brave in this way: rather than simply bigging themselves and our Party up in the coming weeks and months, they could follow the more challenging and excitingand potential-ful path indicated in this piece. They could make clear that getting more Greens elected (as we absolutely must, to the max) is not now about the early stages of making everything ok; it’s about making the best of a bad job. It’s about disaster-limitation, transformative adaptation, and aiming at a ‘thrutopia’. Flourishing through and in spite of and because of the vast material process of decline that has in fact already begun.
For hopes of staying within the climatic safe zone, below 1.5 degrees C of average global over-heat, are now (as I’ve set out) nothing but out-of-reach utopian dreams. Merely fanciful. Such fancifulness blocksappropriate, congruent levels of profound concern — and responsive action. Including, vitally, action to preparefor the coming, escalating climate disasters.
We will deeply regret it if we do not help to the maximum to put in place (to the maximum) preparation for those disasters. That awareness needs to structure our political goals; i.e. to part-constitute our new emerging grand-strategic aim.
Central to our political agenda (and to our ‘offer’) now should be: getting Greens in place, because they (we) are the best prepared to prepare the country for what is coming. Both psychologically, and practically, in enacted policies and programmes.
How to earn popular trust, at this time of coming great trial
We, the ones who saw the risk of eco-driven decline coming, are the ones to trust, at this time of great trial. We make the case most effectively to British citizens — we give ourselves the best chance of becoming climate-Churchills — if we are honest enough to face and describe the situation openly, publicly, honestly. If we say things along the lines of “Give usthe chance to help see youthrough the extreme difficulties of what is coming. Together, we can do this.” It begins, with letting voters know that climate breakdown is here — and that it has been left too late to prevent it. It’s now about coping with it, as well as of course starting to stop it from becoming much much worse. Once again, as ought to be obvious, this is absolutely not 'giving up’: it is the opposite. It is moving to unleash our full power.
People’s morale on climate is fragile. This is because people are so hair-triggered to hear any realism of the kind that I have offered in this piece as doomism — in many cases, because secretly they themselves suspect that we may be doomed, but they have not dared to face/voice these thoughts, nor to follow through the logic-paths that I explore in this piece. So morale is fragile: Butwe can’t sustainably support that morale by being untruthful! Sooner or later, the truth outs. We can only resonate, and achieve the kind of buy-in that is actually required, if we dare to be truthful, and thus to break through the still-extant wall of ignorance and pretence that the future is going to be anything other than hard. Full, as I say (following a Prime Minister who, while a very flawed man, led us very well at a time of great trial), of toil, tears, and sweat.
Being brave in the way I have described above would itself begin the process. I mean: would ready the population for the painful process of disillusionment that will gradually follow the defeat of the Conservatives that has just been achieved and the actions of the new Labour Government that have begun: for the new Government is one that we knowwill be, on balance — because of its timidity, its backtrackings and half-measures, its self-imposed poverty, and its manic growthism — horrendously insufficient on dealing with climate breakdown and its causes and its manifestations in people’s lives. (Even though it will at least probably be less destructively awful, of course, than its predecessor, and it has of course made some encouraging initial gestures.). For instance, Rachel Reeves, a figure as unusually dominant in the new Labour Government as Gordon Brown was in the New Labour Government, sees no problem with expanding aviation (while supposedly being committed to ‘net zero’). Those who expect this Labour Government to be climate-saviours are self-evidently mistaken, or fooling themselves.
A time of enormous opportunity is coming for Greens, because of the vast mismatch between the challenges of our time and the actual miniature commitments of Starmer’s Government and its (partly self-imposed) limited headroom. It is crucial that it is us, not the likes of Reform, who benefit from the huge coming disappointment. We will only be able to do so and to become perceived as making the running as the alternative to Labour if we grab the agenda — through for instance the humble and surprising truthfulness about our not having the capacity to turn everything around that I am enjoining herein — andturn that agenda into something intensely meaningful for the average voter — through for instance calling for (and looking in Green-run localities to start to prefigure) the national plan for climate resilience that I mentioned earlier. Such a plan will speak to average Brits much more than any talk of ‘emissions reductions’ or ‘£28 billion’ etc does: because resilience and adaptation are how to make climate meaningful to average (and especially to underprivileged) citizens. The average person meets the climate crisis not in abstractions like ‘parts per million’ or ‘net zero’ or ‘2035’ but in concrete realities like worsening floods, extreme heatwaves, electricity bills, and ways to lower them.
Being courageous in the manner that I have described in this piece, would (by blunt contrast with Labour) result in maximal mutual honesty about how climate decline is going to continue for a long time to come. And how this means that we have to learn to live with it in a way that simultaneously reduces it as much as possible (which is a simple summary of the transformative adaptation agenda: for it of course would make no sense to adapt to climate decline without mitigating its causes, while it makes every sense to look to transform our systems ‘upstream’ so as to reduce impacts: think upland land-use and dietary changes as a way of reducing flooding, for instance).
And this in turn would begin the bigger and even more challenging process of finding our way in a post-Holocene world.
…Let’s get started. Let’s start to tap up our truest, timeliest power. This ‘power of the powerless’…
Doing this will require a willingness to set aside our own ego. The natural, ego-driven path is to say, or at least imply: “Look at us! We are winning. We are growing exponentially. We can triumph! (We can save you all).” This is the norm, in our (failing) system. The norm of an ego-driven hero’s journey.
Don’t be fooled by the temptation to believe in that ego-projection, in the wake of these marvellous Green election results. Don’t as it were swallow the greenpill! Don’t, as one over-enthusiastic respondent to a post-election happy message of mine just more or less did, call on Greens to go back to your constituencies and prepare for government.
What we manifest when we step into our full power
It would be truly brave, truly powerful, instead of proferring fake optimism, to say something along theselines:
“Yes, we are so proud of how brilliantly we have done at this election. And precisely because we achieved our aims for it, we are now strong enough to be able to say: none of this is enough. Our civilisation is on course for a great humbling. And weare humble enough to acknowledgethis: and to acknowledge that we aren’t going to be able to save the future intact for you. Instead, it is now largely about a massive job of damage-limitation and transformation in the very face and course of severe impacts. It is about (what is called by the experts) transformational and strategic adaptation. It is about improving our preparedness together. Rebuilding our communities, with and through what is coming. And it is about usbeing humble, rather than pretending that we can ‘fix’ this all for you. In the end, it is about being in service of a future. We are in service of that future: and that is exactly why we share with you today the difficult news that everything is going to change, and much, tragically, is going to be swept away. And that more will be swept away if we don’t face into this bitter climate reality.
“For it has been left too late for things to be otherwise.”
Precisely by modelling this new humble spirit (humble especially in that it doesn’t pretend that Greens can ‘fix’this), precisely by letting go of our deep but now-impossible desire to save what is, Greens who are bold enough to take this path will be prefiguring the new, hopefully-better civilisation which can and will emerge out of the coming wreckage of our current disastrous path.
I have suggested in this piece that an essential part of what is needed to this end is a citizen-force, powered by truth-force and finding its expression in every part of our lives together, wherever there is leverage. A citizen-force that makes it possiblefor the likes of Greens to come to power (Step forward: the Climate Majority Project). And that complementsthe necessary central electoralist element in the Green Party’s method. But the Green Party needs to meet that citizen-force halfway. I mean: it needs to use its unique power (in the electoral / Party space) to tell the whole, difficult truth, including about the need to pivot much more to (the right, wholistic kind of) adaptation.
The Green Party manifesto is the most obvious place to look for what we Greens…manifest. The 2024 manifesto for all its virtues (a) probably tends on balance to encourage net economic growth, and (b) doesn’t name the full extremity of our predicament, an extremity that I have set out in this piece. What are needed are measures actually designed to reduce our energy and material footprint so as adequately to stop stoking climate- and nature- decline (aka degrowth, or at least postgrowth). Green Party reps kept saying they were unique in being honest on the economics, during the election campaign: but while they were indeed honest on the need to raise tax, they did not achieve the same level of honesty on the economics required in the face of climate/nature more-than-emergency.
So my piece is a call for a change of tack (and initially crucially of rhetoric) by the whole Green Party, above all its leaders and elected representatives, a shift which should ultimately result in a manifesto next time which is bolder on staying within planetary limits, blunter on the systemic need to brace for climate impacts, and thus readier to mobilise the full-spectrum of citizen action. The seismic change that I have envisaged is definitely not (as I have explicitly noted) one that can be achieved by Green politicians alone; it will depend for its realisability also on the far broader #ClimateMajority stepping up over the next decade. But Greens can play an absolutely key leadership role in enabling that stepping up: by naming the fullness of our predicament, in a manner that makes clear that what is called for now includes mutual aid both on the ground and in helping each other to handle the difficult truth, includes collective actionsthat all of us must endeavour to contribute to taking (for by stating their comparative powerlessness to save, Greens will prevent the ‘out-sourcing’ of climate concern, an ‘out-sourcing’ that remains endemic in our society), finding our own work to doin this multi-generational great work, and includes collective awareness not just of our plight but of the emerging multifaceted positive responseto that plight. Greens being brave enough to admit a historic failure in the very wake of the marvellous success of July 4 2024 would initiate this ‘sense-making’ process. And would thus puncture the ‘pluralistic ignorance’ which still pervades our society, like a bad dream: most people do not as yet realise that most people are realising that we are in much deeper trouble than virtually any of our politicians have yet been willing to admit.
Climate breakdown is going to result in parts of the world becoming more or less unliveable. It necessitates transferring far more resources to the global south — not least to prevent what will otherwise be politically impossible levels of migration to the global north, while enabling the world to begin to recognise the legitimate status of ‘climate refugees’. My clarion call in this piece has been for us to begin having that conversation honestly: and THAT process begins in earnest with senior / elected Greens issuing an honest clarion call about climate breakdown. (A brilliant start has been made here by Jonathon Porritt et al.) For the immediately foreseeable future, most of the worst effects of climate breakdown look set to be felt initially by people in the global South, and ultimately their countries are more at risk of becoming unlivably over-heated than ours is. But the argument of my piece has also been that we in the UK are horrifically under-prepared, that threats such as the possible coming decline in the North Atlantic Gyre and AMOC (popularly understood as producing the ‘Gulf Stream’) are poised to damage us worsethan other ostensibly more vulnerable countries, that we have been complacently and wrongly assuming that climate breakdown is only an existential matter for faraway countries of which we know little, and that in order to become clear that the bell tolls not just for them but for us we need to focus our minds together upon the awful fact that if Greens approach conventional power over the coming decades it will almost certainly be under conditions of eco-induced war-like stress and strain, even if actual war with Russia or China is not upon us. We need to listen again to the shock of Covid-19, which showed that ‘developed’ countries like ours (and the USA etc) can be more vulnerable not less to existential threats, partly because the strength of our communities is so frayed, partly because our systems are so complex, and partly because of the very complacency about how ‘rich' and ‘developed’ we are.
To begin the process of changing all this, Greens need to step into their - our - full power. That requires full disclosure, even where — rather, especiallywhere — such disclosure of the state of things is emotionally difficult, and/or involves accepting blows to our own collective ego. The most astonishing and powerful thing that the Green Party could now do is confess that now, at five past midnight, we are not going to be able to arrest climate breakdown stone dead. Things are going to get worse for a long time to come. The ultimate reason to put more Greens in power as fast as possible is because we are the ones best placed to help this country (and others) struggle through the terrible, unknown impacts beyond 1.5 that are coming — and precisely because we are the ones brave enough to tell thiswhole truth, even at the cost of no longer being able to pose as electorally-deliverable saviours.
Thanks to Prashant Vaze, Jonathan Essex, John Foster and Nadine Storey (all from the Green House core group) for comments which have improved earlier versions of this paper.
