After Plan Z?

Where does the climate movement go as dangers escalate, "campaigning space” is eroded, we’re exhausted and it feels like we are out of new ideas?

Four years ago…

In April 2022, I was arrested at a climate protest. In what was a month of high-profile scientific reports and stark statements about the “moral and economic madness” of wealthy countries pursuing new fossil fuels, the UK government had published an energy strategy setting out its intention to maximise the extraction of oil and gas from the North Sea. 

We met in a cafe, where I awkwardly sipped a peppermint tea, wondering whether I’d regret taking on more liquid... Once dozens of other scientists had arrived, the dimly-lit basement now pretty cramped, it was time to go.  We stopped in a quiet alleyway to distribute lab coats, placards, posters and pots of wallpaper paste, attracting some understandably puzzled stares from construction workers. Next thing I remember we were rushing up to the energy department, then pasting giant pages of and quotes from some of the most consequential scientific reports of all time onto the glass front of the building.

Eight of us superglued a hand to the glass. Why? The practical reason: to make us harder to remove, to make our protest and its message harder to ignore.  Symbolically, we were standing by the climate science the government seemed to be disregarding in its plans to allow oil companies extract “every last drop” of deadly fuel from beneath UK waters. But emotionally and personally… I did this because I felt desperate. I really didn’t know what else to do.  

“It possibly looks extreme or crazy or a bit mad.  For me this is a plan Z.  Everything else has been tried.”  said my friend Stuart, stuck to the glass next to me.  Referring to the failure of decades of scientific research, communication and advocacy to drive anywhere near enough change via the “proper channels”, his words gave a name to a film that was made about our actions that day,  Plan Z: From Lab Coats to Handcuffs.

The film

Louisa Jones’ and Vlad Morozov’s short film about that day captures it far better than I ever could in words, not just what took place but also the motivations, the emotions, the community and the care behind our actions. It’s toured the UK and film festivals across Europe since it was released. For the past year it’s also been available online (on YouTube) where thousands of people have watched it. 

I’ve been to about a dozen screenings, the most recent of which was at the British Science Festival in Southampton at the end of last month. This showing rounded off a two-year programme of events and discussions about the film, about climate protest and about scientists as activists. Each time I see the film, it takes me straight back to the surreal intensity of that day - Wednesday 13th April 2022 - one that’s etched into my memory, one that changed my life in multiple ways. So much so, that I’ve often found it pretty jarring to switch into communication mode to speak on panels immediately after it's screened. 

Throughout these two years, the questions audiences put to us after the film have consistently been: 

• about what happened next; 
• about the increasing repression of protest in the UK;
• about what we can do now at a time where climate impacts are on our doorsteps yet denial, delay, obstruction, misinformation, polarisation, fear and exhaustion stand in our way. 

So, in the rest of this post, I’ll summarise my thoughts on each of these.

What happened next

Nine of us were arrested, loaded into police vans, and taken away to spend the next 24 hours in custody*. I wrote about this part of the story in my chapter of our book Scientists on Survival: Personal Stories of Climate Action. It was… strange. Exhausting, uncomfortable, sad, isolating, revealing of a policing system fraught with prejudice†, inconsistencies and power imbalances, but also punctuated with moments of unexpected humanity. 

We were prosecuted, accused of “criminal damage” for the posters and people that had been stuck to the glass.  For what it’s worth, no damage was actually caused to the building - no trace of our action remained on those glass panels beyond our presence that day. Nonetheless, I think it was seven times in total we attended court. Even on a good day, procedures are simultaneously slow, confusing and chaotic.   Sometimes we waited around in overheating corridors only to be informed our case was no longer going to be heard that day. Scheduling conversations between court officials took hours. The CPS seemed to miss all their deadlines then would try to submit bizarre forms of ‘evidence’ last-minute. The prosecution argued that our actions were inherently ‘violent’ then showed footage and read statements that clearly demonstrated the opposite. It might have been comical were it not for the urgency of the underlying climate Emergency escalating day by day, nor for the thousands of cases - some with huge implications for the victims, defendants, families and communities involved -  waiting for their time in court.

To cut a long story short, we were all acquitted. My trial group didn’t even have to speak in our own defence after the magistrates ruled we had “no case to answer”. In my handwritten notes from court I’ve quoted one of them stating as part of the verdict that our prosecution for this protest could be viewed as “disproportionate interference with [our] rights to freedom of assembly and freedom of expression”. These rights are meant to be protected by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and via its incorporation into UK law via the Human Rights Act. 

The erosion of protest rights and campaigning ‘space’

As we left court for the final time in late 2022 our barrister congratulated us on our “good character remaining intact” - a distinctly lawyery way of celebrating our avoidance of any criminal convictions. But had our protest or the trial taken place today in 2026, I suspect the outcome would have been very different.

Firstly the laws have changed. Over the past four years the UK has introduced a slew of additional restrictions on protest, criminalising nonviolent tactics that have been used for centuries and imposing penalties widely described as repressive or draconian. To give just one relevant example, the 2023 Public Order Act made “locking on” - which would include attaching yourself to a building - an offence in itself in the context of a protest. It’s now punishable by up to six months in prison.  

Secondly, how the courts treat protest cases has become progressively more unpredictable, with harsher sentences and sometimes extreme restrictions on defendants becoming commonplace.  This has included:

• Legal defences disallowed. Defences based on principles such as necessity, proportionality and/or “reasonable excuse” - all of which we came prepared to argue - are often no longer available to defendants to use in similar protest cases.   
• Judges barring defendants from explaining their motivations and beliefs, or telling juries that these should be considered irrelevant. In one case, two Insulate Britain campaigners were sent to prison for contempt of court for defying a judge’s instruction not to say “climate change” or “fuel poverty”.
• Prison sentences of up to five years for activists accused of planning non-violent climate protests, and the use of remand (imprisonment before trial/conviction) becoming more common for peaceful protesters. 

There is so much more I could say (some of which I've written about elsewhere) about how our rights to protest have been eroded, including via increased use of civil injunctions, repressive bail conditions, surveillance and harassment, pre-emptive policing and arrests… the list goes on. The combination of all of these has an undeniable “chilling effect”: I regularly hear people express wanting to participate in protests but understandably staying away because they aren’t sure what is and isn’t within the law, they don’t trust how the police will behave, or they fear the consequences of being arrested - lawfully or otherwise. 

But this all just one visible component of a much more insidious stifling of peaceful activism and campaigning happening here in the UK and I’m sure far beyond it too. At a recent event that brought together a range of organisations involved in environmental and human rights advocacy, equality, anti-racism, refugee support, poverty action and more, I heard campaigners, civil servants and charity employees speak about how much harder it has become for them to work impactfully. They spoke about how funders and institutions are jumpy about supporting causes that until recently were relatively uncontroversial. Many had been targeted with threats, abuse, malicious lawsuits, or ‘weaponised admin’‡.  Media channels that were once key to amplifying their work and messages had rapidly become hellish, or just ineffective. Some have found themselves censored by managers and collaborators, or would knowingly censor themselves to avoid conflict§. All of this has happened in the space of a few years, and seems to be getting worse, fast.  

Meeting the moment?

The combination of intensifying climate breakdown with the wilful blunting of the tools we have to respond to it terrifies me. And I know I’m not alone.  Hard-won successes for the climate movement are now in danger of being - or already have been - reversed. In the UK, the government once again looks set to license new oil and gas fields.  Climate scientists’ warnings and robust dismantling of fossil fuel industry lines are falling on deaf or unwilling ears. The stakes are even higher than they were four years ago, but so too are the personal risks involved in challenging or disrupting powerful vested interests . On top of this, the capacity and effort required to do this effectively - and relatively safely - has increased significantly. 

It’s little wonder so many of us are feeling exhausted and disempowered. There are huge imbalances in power and risk, and these tend not to play out in favour of there being fairer societies and habitable Earth for them to exist upon. That balance can - and must - shift. But it can only do so if large numbers of us, especially those with comparatively more resources, influence and protection from harm, decide we have a role to play in improving our collective predicament, even if we know that the best “solutions” are no longer within reach. 

Recently, I’ve been finding tentatively-renewed energy in spaces where different people and organisations across movements and types of approach are coming together to confront this reality. And whilst I don’t have “the answer” to what needs to happen now, here are some of the insights I think I’ve gained from those discussions and from my own experiences: 

🐙 No “one thing” will “work”:  We need a diversity of complementary, creative approaches to problems as massive and complex as climate breakdown, systemic injustice and the erosion of our rights. Each of us brings different strengths, assets, constraints and vulnerabilities which will make us more or less suited to different forms of action. 

🦉 Knowing our rights and how to advocate for them is becoming increasingly essential.  Part of the “chilling effect” of repressive laws and restrictions is that it creates fear about speaking up or taking action in ways that are still within “the rules”. Knowing what those rules are and sharing that knowledge as widely as possible can help us plan our actions as safely as possible and support others to feel more confident in joining us.  Where we can confidently identify, communicate and/or challenge abuses of power, for example by police or employers, we are better equipped to protect ourselves and one another from them‖. 

 🤹 Being strategic with our capacity sometimes means doing “less”. Kind people have often cautioned me “it's a marathon not a sprint” when I’ve been in “action mode” for prolonged spells and the impacts are starting to show. For a long time this kind of advice grated, because I felt like it was undermining the urgency: “what if we need to be sprinting this particular marathon?”, I’d usually push back. But what I now understand they were trying to warn me, was that consistently exceeding your own limits can be destructive and is often at odds with sustaining effective action. It is not an easy balance to strike, but deciding not to do something that seems like it could be worthwhile can be the strategic choice, provided we are being honest with ourselves about our motivations and capacities. 

🫶 The power of community, care and collective action. Very few people have ever, or will ever, significantly change the course of our societies by themselves. Even where we have figureheads attached to great achievements, they are usually part of a much bigger ecosystem that has enabled those successes. My maybe-naive-maybe-a-bit-arrogant “lone crusades” have invariably been less effective, less sustainable and far less enjoyable than the campaigns, actions and projects I’ve worked on with others. The relationships forged in the process have been so rich and so supportive: they have sustained and informed so much of what

🐝  That I won’t regret trying, even if we don’t “succeed” in obvious ways. My friend Shana’s words in the final essay of our book are often ones I've quoted at the end of screenings and on panels. I hope it'll be clear why. 👇

* Or more - one scientist was denied bail (on spurious grounds) and spent several days in custody. 

† We were mostly treated with basic dignity by the police but we witnessed far less respectful, more aggressive treatment of others less privileged than ourselves. 

‡ This included, for example, public bodies being deluged with Freedom of Information requests designed to drain resources rather than to increase transparency and accountability genuinely in the public interest.

§ Contrary to what I‘d like to believe about myself, I realise I self-censor regularly in my work (as well as outside of it).  I really hesitated to share this post, particularly at a time where I’m actively looking for jobs/contracts, because I know organisations are increasingly wary of being perceived as “activist” (even if their stated reason for existing is to push for some form of progressive change).  In multiple projects and roles I’ve been involved in, we have (strategically?) shied away from talking directly about extremely important, relevant issues of systemic injustice, fearing that if we openly acknowledge these issues we will be immediately dismissed by influential people/groups. 

‖ For protest rights information in England and Wales, see the Green and Black Cross’s guides and trainings