Extinction Rebellion to continue climate protests this autumn

Extinction Rebellion will be mounting a fresh wave of protests this autumn, the climate change campaign’s co-founder has revealed.

Gail Bradbrook told the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) select committee yesterday (18 June) that Extinction Rebellion, which brought much of central London to a halt earlier this year, will be “back in the streets in the autumn to keep up the pressure”.

Giving evidence at the House of Commons for the committee about the Clean Growth Strategy, she said the government’s new target of net zero emissions by 2050 is insufficient and that the UK needs to go onto a “war footing” to decarbonise by 2025.

“This is an issue of national security and the appropriate response is a war time effort.”

The British people would accept that the scale of the climate crisis necessitates radical action, she said: “People have stood up in times of war.

“Current political processes are failing us and we need to adopt more ambitious targets,” Bradbrook said, arguing that a citizens’ assembly drawn from across the population should be created to work out how to achieve net zero by the middle of the next decade rather than leaving the task to parliament.

A “complete cognitive dissonance” exists between reality of climate change and government decisions, like yesterday’s announcement of the Heathrow airport third runway consultation, she said: “Our children face a future with no food on our shelves and a collapse of civilisation if we don’t take immediate action.

Bradbook also criticised the government and Committee on Climate Change’s reliance on carbon, capture use and storage (CCUS) technologies, which she branded “magical thinking”.

“I don’t think we should be putting our eggs in a basket of a technology that is not proven.

“It’s not a time to take risks when we are talking about the fate of humanity: focusing on CCUS technologies is a terrible thing to do.”

Instead, she said that it was a better bet to rely on natural carbon capture mechanism, like soil.

And Bradbrook warned against building more nuclear power plants, which tend to be located in coastal locations given the risk of rising sea levels and civilizational collapse.

Baroness Bryony Worthington, executive director of Environmental Defense Fund Europe, said that moving ahead with demonstration projects on CCUS and nuclear power is “really important” because of the urgent need to cut emissions.

But acknowledging that the economics of CCUS are “harsh”, she said that it may be overtaken on cost by other renewable technologies. “We might find that CCUS’s day in the sun might pass quite quickly.”

She also called for the introduction of zero interest rate loans to encourage the uptake of electric vehicles, adding that in the current low interest environment, the green industrial revolution provides the “perfect answer” for investors seeking returns.

The remaining  Tory leader hopefuls were challenged to commit to net zero carbon emissions by the middle of the next decade by a young environment activist during yesterday’s televised debate. They all said they have committed to 2050 but would not be drawn on slashing the target to 2025.