Rupert Read, who helped launch Extinction Rebellion (XR), has long had doubts about the tactics of climate activists. He pauses halfway through our Zoom call with Caroline Lucas, former Green MP, to reminisce about the early days of XR, and introducing Lucas “to the wild crowd outside parliament…at the first ever Extinction Rebellion action in London, October 31, 2018!” He still remembers the date with ease; it was a foundational time for him and for many climate activists. And yet, by as soon as 2020, “it became quite clear that XR wasn’t working, and was pushing in a more purist direction,” he says. If XR was the extreme wing, what he thinks is needed now is a “moderate flank”, something which “doesn’t feel like it’s just for activists”.
Read and Lucas have now joined forces to suggest an answer: The Climate Majority Project (CMP). “If you vibe with the cause but not the tactics of XR and Just Stop Oil, then The Climate Majority Project is for you,” Read recently told the Some Dare Call it Conspiracy podcast.
The Climate Majority Project (CMP) was first announced in a book of essays, edited by Read, in January 2024. In the book, Read writes, “Some will already feel alienated or chastised by the cultural and linguistic codes of radical social justice movements. The stakes are now too high to risk excluding those people.” Lucas came on board as a campaign adviser in late 2024, and we speak as they are expanding the team and organising the first public gathering in March 2025.
Together, Read and Lucas are now calling for “climate populism”—a non-party political movement for the climate-concerned. Conservatives Lord Deben, Lord Randall and Ben Goldsmith were signatories to its founding statement. So were the activist Swampy and Chris Packham. But while XR and Just Stop Oil had an easy call to arms—come join us to block some roads and spray some paint—the klaxon call for moderates who, in Read’s words, “don’t want to glue themselves to a road” is less clear.
“There will still be times when peaceful direct action is the right strategy”, says Lucas, who arguably remains the British green movement’s leading figurehead. “But it’s not the only strategy… XR ended up making quite a lot of people feel excluded, because not everybody can risk arrest”, especially in an era of “the increasing criminalisation of protest”. Lucas herself was arrested at an anti-fracking protest in 2013.
Read’s stance is stronger. “The strategy of Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain has been backfiring,” he says. “People who are going to engage in non-violent direct action now need to think really carefully about how to do so in a way that doesn’t turn people off.”
How to turn people on to climate action, however, remains hard to pin down. Among the near-term challenges CMP has identified is “making the climate majority aware of itself”. This is a global problem. Even in the United States, where a majority of voters elected an overtly climate-denying administration, 72 per cent of Americans accept that “global warming is happening” and 60 per cent think Congress “should do more to address global warming”. In the UK, 80 per cent are concerned about climate change and even more (84 per cent) agree that collective action can help reduce climate change. Most of us, however, underestimate the number of people who think the same. A 2022 study published in Nature found that between 80 per cent and 90 per cent of Americans underestimate the climate concern of their peers. In other words, “I care, but others don’t, so why bother”. Bringing these people together is where the hard work must now be focussed, say Read and Lucas.
This shared mission has attracted funding from unnamed individual donors, organisations including the Open Society Foundation, and online crowdfunding drives. Some of this has gone towards the CMP’s incubator, which offers seed funding for climate community projects. Beneficiaries have included Postcode Revolution (strapline: “what if we talked to our neighbours?”), Cadence Roundtable (think LinkedIn for climate concerned professionals) and Wild Card, a “grassroots” (pun presumably intended) movement helping big landowners to rewild their land.
The first in-person Climate Majority Forum took place on 15th and 16th March in London, with workshops and presentations for “anyone who resonates with what the CMP is advocating”.
Which all sounds very good and very noble—but is it all enough? Read’s book includes a section on “goodbye to 1.5”. The Paris agreement is dead in the water; a permanently changed climate is here; emissions are increasing, not being curbed. Perhaps sensing my wish for optimism, Lucas explains that community cohesion uniting across disparate demographics is already evident, from “the local football club to the local book club”.
We know how to organise around a shared passion—but to date the focus of climate action has been too abstract, on CO2, an invisible gas. If activists switch attention to greening local communities, to food security and to the protection of nature, “that’s the way to bring climate action to people’s everyday lives in a way that is tangible”, Lucas says. In fact, adds Read, “the actual work will barely mention the word climate”.
I still ask for a rallying cry. “Come to our website and see the diversity of the stuff that we do”, offers Read, bloodlessly. “There is no one simple call to action. Rather, the call is to find your place and add your unique talents.”
I wanted to end our conversation—and this column—with a clear view of how The Climate Majority Project will mobilise the masses. I ended up none the wiser. But perhaps that’s the point. Until most of us do something, and re-orientate our lives towards climate action, we won’t have the answers. It’s up to all of us to change.
With that, the call must end. Read is eager to tend to his vegetable small holding. Growing our own food is something we might all need to do, soon enough.
