2025 Is the Year Extinction Rebellion Demanded We Should Go Zero Carbon but ‘Britain Has Woefully Failed’

Happy New Year? 2025 is already a failure in at least one key respect: because it was the year Extinction Rebellion (XR) targeted to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by.

I helped launch XR, in 2018. The target of Britain going zero carbon by 2025 was set to demonstrate seriousness in thinking this as an emergency; and also, simply, because, if Britain was to decarbonise fast enough to fairly reflect the share of world emissions it is entitled to, especially once one takes into account our huge historic emissions, then 2025 came out as the year by which we should decarbonise in full.

Obviously Britain (and the world) have absolutely, categorically, and woefully failed to do this. As a result, tragically, we are now moving far deeper into the climate more-than-emergency even than XR foresaw as possible. As the recent insane flooding episodes show.

Very clearly, Britain going zero carbon this very year is not going to happen! What do XR themselves say about this?: “When XR was launched in 2018, 2025 was a realistic date, seven years in the future, with plenty of time to do what was needed. We keep this target to show how much time has been lost.”

So XR are notionally retaining the (now impossible) target of going net zero by 2025, to make a point. It’s a fair point.

When we launched XR in a blaze of glory and excitement and, more importantly, hope, I believed we would make a difference. And we really did, at first.

XR’s greatest achievement was successfully dragging the eco-agenda into the light of day – and that’s something to be hugely proud of. We successfully forced a national conversation on decarbonisation.

But in terms of XR’s theory of change, serious blockages emerged. The high visibility of the radical flank polarised the emerging national conversation on climate: this has been very harmful, over time.

Moreover, XR’s plan relied on the Government responding to demands and, ultimately, getting their act together. And whether Conservative, or now Labour, that was never going to happen, at least not remotely sufficiently.

So we – all of us – need to reflect on what we do now.

What lessons should readers draw from the stark failure of the radical climate movement to achieve its central demand? 

One key lesson is that we urgently need a mainstream climate-more-than-movement, a wave of wider mainstreamed action. If we are to have a future. Climate/nature action needs to occur way beyond activism. It needs mainstreaming. And the space needs depolarising.

Another key lesson is that it is time for climate activists and thought-leaders to let go of fantasies of achieving decarbonisation, directly. Instead, we need to pivot hard towards climate adaptation.

We are living now with the consequences of failure, and will do so ever more so for a very long time to come. We need to move to protect ourselves from and through this (as well as demanding protection via the state too).

Climate realists need to stop pretending that full decarbonisation is achievable within current human/political timetables, and switch to calling for and enacting deep, strategic and transformative adaptation to our terrifying terra incognita.

For the foreseeable future, Governments are absolutely not going to save us. That’s why I think 2025 needs to be the year we start to save ourselves and each other. We need to mark 2025, the year by which we should have gone zero carbon, by a handbrake turn towards transformative and strategic adaptation: to cope with our growing vulnerability, with the inexorably rising tide of climate impacts.

I moved on from XR in 2020 to start to make the case for a more encompassing, mainstreamable, depolarising, distributed wave of climate action. The first manifesto for this was published in Byline Times in 2021.

To encapsulate this vision, along with others I then formed The Climate Majority Project. Our big push in 2025 is going to be our #SAFER campaign. The word is also an acronym: it stands for Strategic Adaptation For Emergency Resilience. What does that mean, or amount to you might ask?

In 2024. we saw, perhaps for the first time, that we are now all on the climate frontline.

Impacts are no longer just in far flung countries. They are here, on our doorsteps (sadly for some people, quite literally). The crazy worldwide autumn epidemic of flooding, culminating in Valencia, has exploded like a bomb in the minds of many.

It’s clear that a decarbonisation agenda is no longer enough; we also need to adapt to what is here and the worst that is coming (because, let’s not forget, this is just the start).

SAFER aims to build support for resilience measures in order to protect local communities and to transform understanding of climate breakdown by centring the need for a serious global protective response to our shared but differentiated growing vulnerability to impacts. 

No doubt in 2025 we’ll be hearing and seeing a lot more climate breakdown, but let’s use that to inspire us to work together.

It’s not ‘game over’ yet. It never is. We can still make a huge difference, if we begin at ground level. 

So, Resolution 1 for the New Year: get your neighbours round for a cup of tea or a wee dram and start the conversation.