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THE CLIMATE REVOLUTION PODCAST EPISODE 10:
This is a planetary emergency.
We’re in a war, and the polluters are winning – destroying lives by the million while hiding behind broken systems. It’s time to do things differently. It’s time to take power, unite the 99 per cent, and fight back with purpose, courage, and care for all life on Earth.
British sustainability strategist Joseph Gelfer calls time on weak incrementalism. He argues that the urgency of planetary collapse, combined with rising public frustration and disillusionment, will soon push even moderate citizens to demand bold, transformative change. When that moment comes, we must be ready. A peaceful political revolution for a pollution-free society is possible – but only if we dare to think big and act boldly on a planetary scale.
Enter: Our Fair Future.
WHAT’S NEXT
If you think what I’ve been talking with Joseph Gelfer about in this Climate Revolution podcast episode sounds interesting, then I invite you to join me on a journey where we explore what can be done more, taking it from here. I’m organising an online meeting with Gelfer in mid September. If you’d like to be there and maybe join the team, send me an email. The email address is info@climatesafety.info.
~ Mik
In service to life on Earth
A wholesale reimagining of politics and society in service to life on Earth
A deep cultural and political shift is coming, predicts Joseph Gelfer. The kind of incremental change that has defined climate action for decades is rapidly losing its appeal – and relevance.
As climate breakdown accelerates, and traditional political systems prove incapable or unwilling to respond effectively, Gelfer believes people will increasingly reject the status quo and begin yearning for something more radical: revolutionary political change.
In Gelfer’s view, what sets his thinking apart is not only the scale of ambition – a wholesale reimagining of politics and society in service to life on Earth – but also a willingness to speak plainly and strategically about the limits of conventional climate discourse.
He argues that the traditional climate movement has failed because it seeks to influence power rather than take power. Instead of appealing to policymakers through reports and protests, Gelfer calls for a movement that captures the public imagination and builds enough momentum to win elections and govern in the interest of the 99 per cent.
The rise of climate populism
At the heart of Gelfer’s project, Our Fair Future, is a departure from conventional environmental messaging. The campaign doesn’t lead with climate or net zero – terms he sees as politically charged, alienating, and ineffective. Instead, the focus is on economic well-being, clean energy, public health, and nature – the issues people already care about deeply. Climate is positioned as a co-benefit that arises naturally from addressing these priorities.
Rather than trying to win over sceptics with scientific facts, Our Fair Future aims to build real-world solidarity around shared values, through a “Turn On, Team Up, Take Over” strategy. It starts by raising awareness, then builds community in everyday spaces like pubs, churches, and sports clubs, and ultimately aspires to electoral success and governance. The goal is to unite people around fairness, health, and protection of nature – creating a movement that cuts across class and political divides.
Breaking out of the echo chamber
Gelfer is highly critical of what he calls the “exclusivity” of many climate movements, which have too often dismissed or demonised large segments of the population. Progressive campaigners, he argues, have alienated working-class and conservative voters by painting them as ignorant or immoral. Yet these people are not the enemy – the polluters are. For real change to happen, everyone outside the polluting elite must be seen as part of the same team, even if their views on immigration or economics differ. This means creating coalitions that include people you may not agree with, for the sake of long-term planetary survival.
“The climate movement has to grow up,” he says. “It has to stop trying to be liked by power. It needs to take power. That’s what people like Trump and Farage have understood. They’re taking the right steps in the wrong direction. We just need to course-correct.”
Language matters
Gelfer is deliberate about the words we use. Terms like ‘climate’ and ‘net zero’ carry too much political baggage. They also assume a level of scientific literacy that many don’t possess. Instead, he favours intuitive, emotional language like ‘pollution’, which is easier for people to understand and relate to. “Pollution kills five to eight million people every year,” he says. “That’s a holocaust. And we’re letting the perpetrators get away with it.”
He advocates reframing polluters not just as bad actors but as criminals: serial killers whose actions should land them in prison, not boardrooms. This bold framing, he argues, resonates with the public in ways that policy reports and corporate pledges do not. “You kill five million people a year, you spend the rest of your life in prison. Simple as that.”
Business must choose a side
While Gelfer is scathing about governments and the failures of COP-style diplomacy, he sees a major role for business in the coming shift. But it must be business redefined: no longer in service to profit alone, but to life on Earth. “If you’re not in service to life, you don’t deserve to be in business,” he states. “And when a movement like Our Fair Future takes power, those bad businesses will lose their licence to operate. If they resist, they’ll go to prison.”
This is not a gradual reform of capitalism. It is a moral reckoning. Businesses have five years, Gelfer warns, to transform their values, or face legal and societal consequences. He concedes that capitalism itself may take centuries to dismantle, but in the meantime, values can shift – prioritising ecosystems and human health over oil and profit.
A global movement, locally rooted
While Our Fair Future began in the UK, Gelfer envisions a decentralised, international movement with local flavour. He sees the potential for Our Fair Future chapters in Australia, the US, and beyond. Each country would tailor its message to the political and cultural context, but share a common mission: to unite around nature, health, fairness, and economic dignity.
Rather than building a single global party, Gelfer imagines a worldwide vernacular of climate populism – a grassroots language of disruption and hope that can take root anywhere. He notes how China, if it embraced ecological leadership, could radically reshape the global landscape through “ecological hegemony,” and how small nations like Denmark or New Zealand could spark domino effects through bold domestic action.
A second chance at legacy
One of Gelfer’s most moving observations is about the opportunity this moment presents for individuals – particularly older professionals in business and sustainability. Many of them, he says, entered their fields with idealism, but lost their way in systems that reward conformity and greenwashing. Now, as the system falters, those same individuals have a second chance to live their original values, to help build something lasting and meaningful. “How many times in life do you get a chance to fulfil your unfulfilled destiny?” he asks. “This is that moment.”
A hot war for the planet
The stakes, in Gelfer’s eyes, are existential. He describes the climate crisis as a “hot war” that’s already killing millions.
“In World War II, people didn’t send petitions to Hitler. They fought to the death. That’s where we are now. But people don’t realise it.”
He sees this mindset shift as inevitable – and urgently necessary. Waiting only makes the chaos worse. Acting now can make the transition more manageable.
Gelfer’s message is not one of doom but of courage. It’s a call for radical honesty, bold strategy, and solidarity across divisions.
“If we can course-correct,” he says, “we can make this the moment humanity learns to cooperate globally for the common good. That’s never happened before in our history. That would be a legacy worth fighting for.”
ABOUT JOSEPH GELFER
Joseph Gelfer, 51, is a British-born sustainability strategist, author, academic, and green jobs advocate. He holds a BA from Bristol and a PhD in religious studies from Victoria University, Wellington. Started his career studying masculinities and spirituality, publishing books like Numen, Old Men and 2012: Decoding the Countercultural Apocalypse. Later pivoted into sustainability.
Currently:
Senior Manager, Research & Insights at Kite Insights, helping businesses reach climate goals
Founder of Ecotopian Careers, guiding individuals – especially mid-career – to green job transitions
Convener, Work & Careers Group at Climate Coaching Alliance, focusing on climate-focused career coaching
En-ROADS Climate Ambassador with Climate Interactive, leading workshops and simulations for businesses and students
He writes for The Guardian, The Conversation, Vice, Leaders In Energy, and maintains a Substack focused on climate livelihoods.
Joseph combines deep qualitative research and communications with actionable green-job advocacy. He’s worked with NGOs, businesses, educational institutions, and online platforms – touring between research, public engagement, and coaching.
Discussion of Joseph’s core messages
Listening tip
If you think an hour-long podcast is too long for you, we recommend you think about it diffently. The overall idea with us doing these long podcasts (we’ve done 570 of them by now, and they are all one hour long) is that our listeners listen to them for instance when they are in transport – sitting in a car or a train – and press the pause button in the podcast player when they reach their destination. Then next time they are back in transport, they press play and continue listening from where they left.
In other words, cut it up in smaller bits which are suitable to your life. You, or your transport situation, decide where to break the hour up in those smaller bits.
. . .
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“All revolutions seem impossible until they are inevitable.”
. . .
“The pace and scale of these changes are staggering. We need to move from reacting to really preparing before coping becomes too impossible.”
~ Dan Sherrard-Smith
“The clean energy revolution is unstoppable, but right now it’s being slowed down significantly by a handful of corrupt assholes, and this greed-driven slow-down is going to cause climate chaos, unless a mass movement of people organize to remove policy barriers to renewable energy development. This organizing will be hard and the outcome won’t be guaranteed. But it’s the only way out of this mess.”
~ Emily Atkin, Heated
“We are already living in a time of climate catastrophes, we can’t afford to keep making the same mistakes again and again.”
~ Imogen Lindenberg
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The missing attribution
Do floods and fires really change minds on climate? Apparently not. A recently published Nature paper explains why, and it might surprise you.
We often assume that people living through extreme weather will naturally become more supportive of climate policy. That if your town burns, floods, or bakes, belief will follow experience.
But a new global study – spanning 68 countries and over 70,000 people – shows this isn’t quite how it works.
Exposure alone doesn’t move the dial. Attribution does. The relationship held even when objective exposure did not.
Researchers found that while most people are exposed to extreme weather, it’s not this exposure that predicts support for climate policy; it’s whether people believe that climate change caused those events.
In short, it’s not what happens that matters. It’s why we think it happened that matters most.
This “subjective attribution” was a stronger predictor of climate policy support than actual exposure for 5 of the 7 types of extreme weather studied. That’s floods, cyclones, heatwaves, heavy precipitation and winter storms.
In many countries, especially across Africa and parts of Europe, the link between extreme weather and climate remains under-recognised, even when events are increasing. The study even suggests a kind of “ceiling effect” in some countries – especially in Latin America – where subjective attribution is already so high that further exposure doesn’t significantly boost policy support.
My Take
What caught my attention is the power of belief over experience. Even in regions hammered by heat or soaked by storms, policy support only rises when people believe in the connection between the event and climate change.
The science of attribution is evolving fast, but public understanding of attribution is lagging.
We spend billions modelling exposure, but we undervalue the power of communicating direct attribution. This research suggests that unless people attribute events to climate change, there is no automatic incentive for improved policy.
In one respect, this research is self-evident, but at the same time, the attribution of a single extreme weather event to climate change is a complex and challenging undertaking. The science behind communicating these links must evolve. Attribution isn’t just a scientific tool. It could be the most powerful lever we have for change.
~ Scott Kelly, Climate Risk Specialist, Net-Zero Strategist
Source: www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02372-4
Authors: Viktoria Cologna, Simona Meiler, Chahan Kropf et al
Will any surviving humans in the coming decades be asking why we let liars destroy our planet? Or can we find a way to stop their lies and fix the systems that spread them unhindered? www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/…
— Ian McKee (@ianmck.ee) September 11, 2025 at 7:02 PM
[image or embed]
Full transcript
Joseph Gelfer: (00:00)
The phrase I like to use is: ‘in service to life on Earth’. If you’re not in service to life on Earth, you don’t deserve to be in business. And I’ll tell you something right now: when something like Our Fair Future starts taking power, you will no longer have a license to operate. There is no future for the positive development of our planet where bad businesses are going to be allowed to operate.
António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General:
We are rapidly reaching the point of no return for the planet.
Marvel movie clip: Thor, in the scene where Kaorg speaks to Thor: (00:40)
Thor:
How did you end up in here?
Kaorg:
Oh well, I tried to start a revolution but didn’t print enough pamphlets so hardly anyone turned up, except for my mum, and her boyfriend who I hate. But I’m actually organising another revolution. I don’t know if you’d be interested in something like that? Do you reckon you’d be interested?
Young female voice:
The climate revolution.
Sir David King, former UK Chief Scientist:
We’re looking at potential global collapse.
ABC News reporting from South Australia:
They’re seeing absolute destruction of environment. They can’t find a fish.
ABC News reporter: (01:07)
Authorities have called the flooding an unprecedented disaster, which came with almost no warning. Severe thunderstorms have smashed Sydney and parts of New South Wales, leaving one man dead…
António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General:
Who pays the price for climate destruction around the world? Not the fossil fuel industry, pocketing profits and taxpayer subsidies as their products wreck a vogue. Everyday people suffer, with their lives and livelihoods, with higher insurance premiums, volatile energy bills and higher food prices.
Ban ki-Moon in 2011, United Nations Secretary-General:
We need a revolution. Revolutionary thinking, revolutionary action.
ABC News reporter:
A warning is in place for the entire country. Here it’s being called the Storm of the Century.
Marvel movie clip: The Avengers:
How bad is it?
That’s the problem, sir. We don’t know.
Sir David King, former UK Chief Scientist:
We’re looking at potential global collapse.
Mik Aidt: (02:02)
It should be breaking news, it should be on the front of our newspapers and the TV news screens: We are in a planetary emergency. But it’s not. Because we’ve known about it for years, obviously. For decades. It’s a war, and we are not winning. The polluters are winning, destroying lives by the million, while they’re hiding behind broken political systems.
And what’s clear is that whatever it is we think we are doing, or trying to do, in the climate action movement, it’s not working. It’s time to do things differently.
Sheldon Whitehouse, American Senator:
This conflict is a battle between truth and science and power and lies.
On climate we have to face facts. The facts are grim and the stakes are high.
SONG:
‘Time to Wake Up’ – audio – video
[Verse 1]
They sold the truth for a shipload of coal
Turned their lies into a platform for oil
Constructed pipelines where dark money could flow
Pulled all the strings so they could rewrite the rules
They bought the judges, and the media too
So when the rivers rose, and storms grew dangerous
We were asleep, we didn’t know what was going on
But we saw the sky turn red, and suddenly, all the fish were dead!
[Chorus]
Time to wake up – let the reckoning begin…
. . .
Mik Aidt:
So, welcome to The Climate Revolution, a podcast series – it is the 10th episode now – where we have been talking about ideas and exploring possibilities, which we’ll do again today. But it also might be the last time we do it, because at least if we agree with our guest today, he thinks that we should stop talking about climate altogether. Stop using that word. And why? The British climate activist Clover Hogan put it like this:
Clover Hogan, British climate activist:
What we really need is to get outside of the climate echo chamber and to really understand what motivates a whole diversity of people.
Movie clip: Monthy Python and the Holy Grail: (04:28)
“You seek the holy grail?” “That is our quest. Our quest is to find the holy grail.” “Yes, it is.” “Yes!” “And so we are looking for it.” “We have been for some time.” “Ages!”
Mik Aidt:
Our guest today in this Climate Revolution podcast series is a British sustainability strategist who actually calls for a revolution. We are in a planetary emergency, right? So why are we not acting and talking accordingly, and have ambition? I mean, now we have the court system… it’s finally woken up and we have the world court’s word for that what we are dealing with here, and I quote, the judge said: ‘It is an existential problem of planetary proportion.’ As we’re seeing it happen on our TV screens now…
NSW Premier Chris Minns on ABC News on 22 May 2025: (05:26)
I must also say that we’re bracing for more bad news in the next 24 hours. This natural disaster has been terrible for this community. It’s affected a wide number of people. It’s affected tens of thousands of houses and as a result we are bracing for more bad news. I can report that we’re expecting…
Joseph Gelfer:
I think we’re in a hot war, and people don’t even realise it. And here I think, you know, it’s interesting to look back on what happened last time that we were in a hot war. For many of us… in the kind of in the West, where we had that kind of aggression on our doorstep. So for most countries, that was probably like World War II. What did people do in World War II? They didn’t sit around sending petitions to Hitler, you know. They fought to the death. And I don’t want to say that lightly. You we’ve all got family members who did that. Men and women across the nation who fought to the death because they were in an existential crisis and they believed it was the right thing to do. That I don’t think is too dramatic to say we’re at that point, but people don’t even realise it.
Mik Aidt: (6:50)
Joseph Gelfer, he’s a courageous man on a mission and maybe – could it be? – maybe he has found that holy climate grail that we’ve been searching for in this podcast series, high and low, over the last many years. One that could actually deal with the problems that we are up against. Enter: Our Fair Future.
Joseph Gelfer: (7:17)
It started out last year with big abstract conversations around what we were describing as ‘climate populism’. And we were really trying to talk about: OK, these are some nice ideas, almost academic in nature, but, you know, how do we take those types of ideas into the real world?
And that’s kind of like in that process of translating those abstract ideas into something tangible. That’s where Our Fair Future comes from. So it’s really trying to break out of the standard climate conversation, reach a completely different type of people who are currently disengaged for one reason or another, or maybe even outright triggered by various climate conversations. So really, I guess, a democratising type of discussion.
Mik Aidt:
And talking then about economy?
Joseph Gelfer:
Yeah, so I mean, I mentioned this phrase, ‘climate populism’ at the beginning, but the paradoxical thing is that Our Fair Future doesn’t have climate up in the top level. So the idea is, by all means, if you look around globally, there’s a new project that says that 89 per cent of people globally are worried about climate. So that’s a fact. The problem with that reasoning, they’re thinking, ‘OK, loads of people are worried about climate, therefore we’re going to get loads of climate action,’ is that it’s not really true. Because while 89 per cent of people are worried about climate, they’re more worried about other things. So whatever survey and whatever country you look at, number one, typically cost of living. Underneath that, you’ve got things like health, housing, education, crime, law and order, those types of things.
But anywhere between six, 10, 12 on that list, people certainly aren’t voting on it. So the idea that somehow you’re going to be able to capitalise upon all of that concern for climate just isn’t true. So really about leaning into the things that people care about most. Cost living being number one. We’ve got energy, we’ve got nature, which is another really big unifying subject across the political divide. And we’ve got health, which again, everybody cares about. And then you bring in climate as like a co-benefit, as a horizontal across all of those things.
Mik Aidt:
And then what’s going to come out of it in the other end? I mean, yes, I agree with you. This sounds like exactly how it is in my community anyway. I can, you know, when I talk with my neighbors and so on. But then what do you do to actually get climate action out of it without using the word?
Joseph Gelfer:
Yeah, well, we got kind of what we’re describing as a three part Theory of Change of ‘Turn on’, ‘Team up’, and ‘Take over’. So at the moment we’re in that first phase of ‘Turn on’, which is really just about building awareness around the ideas, which is pretty much what standard climate campaigning does, right? You do an information exchange, you give people some knowledge and you hope that they think differently about it.
But one thing that we know from previous, well, the whole of the history of the climate movement is that giving people information and hoping that they’re going to live differently and make different choices as a result doesn’t really work.
So that’s where we get into kind of like Part Two of ‘Team up’. That’s where we’re taking those ideas that we’ve developed and we’re starting to translate them into real life. So, you know, in the pubs, in the churches, in the, the housing estates, on the gardening allotments, on the football clubs, all of the places where people are at, where they’re in real life and starting to bring people together to think about this stuff, to start doing things together, developing a bit of agency, developing trust between one another, right? Because there’s so much discord, so much fracturing in society, and that doesn’t do the us any favours. Maybe we’ll talk a little bit later about who ‘us’ is…
Mik Aidt:
Let’s talk about that right now, Joseph, because I think a big, big change that there has been in the last year in the climate movement is that there is now Trump in the U.S., and there is the Reform political party in the UK. And we have various players in Australia as well who are all saying climate is a big scam, or they’re saying we certainly don’t want these new transmission towers built or wind turbines, ‘wind turbines are bad for the environment’, and so on. So there is a polarisation at the moment between those who want a green transition and then others who are like really aggressively opposing it.
Joseph Gelfer:
For sure, for sure. So that one of the failings of the climate movement over the decades is it has been quite an exclusive environment. You know, kind of have these people who believe that they’re right. And for the most part, they are right. You know, they’re right on climate and the environment and all of that stuff. But they’ve got a bad habit of demonising other people. You we remember the classic thing of Hillary Clinton when she was campaigning, describing the basket of deplorables.
There’s this palpable disdain amongst a lot of these kind of middle class environmental campaigners. So they go out there, they look at Trump voters in the U.S., they look at reform voters in the United Kingdom, they assume that they’re all kind of racists, far right extremists, that they need to be defeated and, you know, just somehow taken away from, you know, even like the whole public domain, you know, you’re giving people kind of having been deplatformed, being cancelled, you’re not allowed to say this, you’re not allowed to say that. None of that works.
And I think so one of the really uncomfortable things that a lot of progressives need to kind of figure out first is just how much they are alienating those people, how much they are misrepresenting them. Of course, there are some racists and nasty people in those movements, but most of them are not. Most of them are regular folks trying to get by and they’re clutching for straws and the people that should be looking after them, are not looking after them, they’re just being misrepresented and being described as a bunch of racists. So it’s not good enough.
So in Our Fair Future, we’ve only really got two groups of people. We’ve got the polluters, they’re the enemy, and we’re being very clear about who the enemy is. And then we’ve got the rest of us. So we can think about this as like the occupied, 99 per cent. So if the rest of us are the 99 per cent, that’s got to be really diverse. It’s like, you’ve got to, I mean, people talk about diversity, but they… that’s actually quite a limited way that people are thinking about it. Here we’ve got to be like super diverse.
And the challenge of that, and here’s where the real challenge for most progressive people is, is it means that you’ve got to be around the table with people you probably don’t like, that you disagree with. There have got to be things that, okay, I don’t like your take on immigration. I don’t like your take on economics. I don’t like your take on culture. We’ve got to find a way of putting that on the back burner for a while and by a while, I mean like 50 years, something like that. And actually come together as the 99 per cent on those things that we care about most, fairness, a future for the world, for the planet, right? And push that agenda and fight against the polluters together.
That’s the way that we do it. And no one’s really doing that. People are talking about it. They’re talking about it from World Economic Forum in Davos. Why does everybody hate us? We should do something about it. They’re talking about it in little meetings at Extinction Rebellion and Just Up Oil and everybody in between, but not many people are actually doing it because it’s hard. It’s really uncomfortable. That’s what Our Fair Future is about.
Mik Aidt:
Well, there is also a power structure in this and the so-called ‘state capture’, which has been described very well, I think, by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse in America, who gave his 300th speech, and we’ve been mentioning it in The Sustainable Hour recently, you know, where he talks about, for instance, there is actually a flow of money from government to the fossil fuel industry of billions of dollars. Just in America, it’s $700 billion a year that is subsidising the fossil fuel industry. And then, for instance, to pay 1 per cent of that back as dark money going from the fossil fuel industry back into politics is not very much. It’s a 1 per cent investment in that you keep things as they are, or that you make sure that the laws are benefiting the fossil fuel industry and not the green transition.
And we see very similar patterns, I would say, in Australia, where there’s a large gas and coal industry and money is flowing quietly into politics, either legally or as dark money. And I think that structure is very, very difficult for the climate movement to find a way to approach, and to change.
Joseph Gelfer:
It’s difficult and one of the reasons that people are finding it difficult to respond to is because they’re not actually thinking big enough, I would argue. So everything you’re saying, absolutely right. Jane Meyer’s book ‘Dark Money’ from like a decade ago was fantastic at starting to bring form to all of that type of networking. So ultimately you’ve got a bunch of corrupt politicians. I’ve got no interest in the Democrats or the Republicans or Labour or the Conservatives.
It’s all much of a muchness. I’m pretty on board with the idea of two wings at a uni party. They’re never going to change. The time for influence is finished. There’s no time to reform this system. It’s utterly corrupt. It’s got to go. You need a completely revolutionary type of thinking. And I don’t say that in any naive way. I mean, if you look at Trump in the US, you look at Farage in the UK, they’re actually quite revolutionary.
Indeed, in a press conference just a few weeks ago, Farage was talking about revolutionary politics. He actually used that word. What politician would say that anymore? Farage does. This is a revolutionary moment. So the thing about climate is it’s got to think much bigger. Forget about trying to influence power. You take power. That’s the answer.
Now, of course, mechanics of how you go about doing that are all open for debate and there’s different ways of doing it, right? But ultimately, if you can’t… constantly titting around doing petitions sitting in streets, demanding change and politicians, they don’t show interest in people demanding change.
You have to take power and enforce change. You do what Trump did, right? You you get into power. Whatever it takes. As Malcolm X said: by any means necessary. And you flood the zone with climate policies, with nature policies, with economic fairness policies, and you just… the opposition just cannot even keep up. They don’t know what’s going on. But you do it because you’re doing it for the 99 per cent, and they’re going to love it.
Mik Aidt:
What’s your vision? What does that positive development look like, step by step?
Joseph Gelfer:
I think there’s a couple of different ways that it could work. So, you know, there are some people who in both the US and the UK, and probably in Australia and other countries as well, who are starting to play some kind of lip service to the types of things that we’re talking about right now. And but it doesn’t feel particularly genuine. It feels a bit like cosplay. It feels unlikely to me that they’re going to pull it off, but maybe they will pull it off and we’ll get some kind of evolution of these types of traditional political parties.
I think what Reform shows in the UK is that you’re probably not going to get significant change through those traditional parties, and that you need something new.
So my expectation is that within the next five years, we’ll start seeing the emergence of new political movements that don’t exist today, but could easily win the election. If not in the next one in the UK in 29, certainly in 2034, or if you were in the US to 2032, whenever that election is going to be, that’s probably the kind of timeframe that we’re looking at.
It’s going to be unprecedented and people around, know, all of the political pundits are going to be shocked. It’s not shocking. It’s completely predictable. It’s going to change. Everything’s going to change at mind boggling pace. Climate is going to do it. And the response to climate is going to do it. It’s inevitable. The only thing that’s up for question is how it’s going to change.
And there, I think the kind of like the responsibility for those of us who have got our mind in the right space really comes to the fore. Because if we, as people who are mindful, hopefully with integrity, right, and good intentions for the future, if we do not take control of this quite chaotic energy that’s starting to emerge and guide it in the right direction, the bad guys will. We don’t want that.
Mik Aidt:
I think that’s what people really already have felt. And there’s a lot of apathy and fear. And the fear often means that people stop doing anything active. They go out in their backyards and take care of planting some tomatoes.
Joseph Gelfer:
There’s no choice but fear, right? We’ve got two options. is, and they’re both, they’re both scary, right? You’ve got the option of putting up with the status quo, which is scary. Maybe there’s three options. One, you put up with the status quo, it’s scary. You pretty much end up dead. Number two, you kind of invest all of your energy into influencing power and trying to reform an incremental change, that’s probably not going to work either. I mean, most progressive people have been trying to do that for the past 20 or 30 years. So that’s also a very scary choice.
And then you’ve got the third choice, the kind of stuff that we’re talking about right now, which is this explosive revolutionary change, which is also terrifyingly scary, but there is a possibility that it’s going to work. All the evidence suggests that those other two options lead you off the cliff.
So this is the paradox, I think, of the types of stuff that we’re talking about, this kind of revolutionary change, is that while it ostensibly appears scary, if you think rationally about it, it’s actually the safer choice, because it’s the only one that takes any proportionate response on this kind of planetary crisis. So when you think in a slightly bigger frame, it becomes the sensible way forward.
Mik Aidt:
So let’s talk about language because for instance, I’ve run a series of podcast episodes that I call The Climate Revolution, actually. But ‘climate’, hmm, maybe not so smart to talk about climate anymore. Maybe we need to move that discussion into, like you’re saying, cost of living and other aspects. And ‘revolution’, maybe also not the best word if you are going out to campaign. So how do we deal with the language, even if what we want to create is a ‘climate revolution’? We don’t want to use the word, do we?
Joseph Gelfer:
Well, as I say, Farage is using the word ‘revolution’ right now. mean, think we need to let’s break up the idea of revolution climate as kind of language groups for a moment. So we’re at a particular moment in time, right? So politically, so the political zeitgeist is revolutionary.
Trump got in to deliver revolution. Farage, who I’d imagine will win in 2029, if you look at the polls today, he would win, he is going to get in.
So this is about disruption. People want disruption. They are so exhausted by the political status quo in most countries, that they’re actually willing to have a pump on the craziest of ideas just to get something different.
People absolutely want to break the system. So I think actually revolution is a reasonable word to use. Actually, if we’d have had this conversation 10 years ago, I would have said, don’t use that word, that’s nuts. Today, I actually think it’s probably the right word to use. But if we go into climate, for sure, so you know,
Climate is a politically charged word, as is ‘net zero’. And you get stuck into this issue around whether or not climate is real. So there’s a whole bunch of conversations that you don’t want to get stuck in. So if we start talking about other issues, and also you have to assume that someone knows something about climate science and carbon emissions and all of that stuff. People have a loose understanding about it. But it’s difficult.
That’s where other words are easier, words like ‘pollution’, for example. Pollution’s fantastic. So if you kind of think of like a blanket of pollution that’s around the world, we all know that when you sit under a blanket, you get hot. So of course, that’s global warming for you right there.
Now, ‘pollution’ does not tell the whole story. I get that. Scientifically, it’s not the whole story, but it’s intuitive. People understand it.
And then you can point to the polluters and say, all right, well, they’re the guys that are actually doing it. Maybe you notice. How many people do you think die every year from the pollution caused by fossil fuel emissions?
Mik Aidt:
Well, it’s millions. I think the figure is, like, eight million people?
Joseph Gelfer: (17:47)
Depends which study you look at, somewhere between five and eight million. That is a Holocaust. I don’t use this word lightly. That is a literal Holocaust every single year caused by the polluters. That’s it. You don’t need any more. Lock them up. Another thing we’re getting at the moment about, let’s criminalise disinformation so that these people can’t do greenwashing. What? Why are we talking about disinformation? They’re serial killers, they’re genocidal maniacs, lock them up!
Everybody gets it. You kill five million people a year, you spend the rest of your life in prison. Simple as that.
You put enough of them away, it stops. I mean, I know, that’s not simplistic, that’s simple. And it’s common sense and everybody gets it. But what we don’t have right now is a conversation where people are hearing that type of message from credible sources. It sounds like the kind of crazy shit you’d hear down the pub, right? But it’s actually exactly what people want to hear. So part of Our Fair Future is also about that. It’s just stating the obvious.
What everybody understands, what most people actually agree with, you kill millions of people, you go away to prison for the rest of your life. That will change things radically. That’s not giving someone a, you know, a $20 million fine that they’ve probably already got a line on the budget for, and then they carry on with their job. That’s the way that the high ups and the elites typically get criminalised, right?
Then there’s loads of examples of that type of thing happening. You put the executives into prison. How many would it take? I it’s an interesting exercise, right? The polluters – so maybe one polluter to get some media headlines. 100 polluters to make governments start getting scared. 1,000 polluters sent away for life – you changed the global system.
Mik Aidt:
I’m thinking: Who’s going to take this globally? Do we need a Greta Thunberg to speak for us? Or is it gonna be you?
Joseph Gelfer:
It is not going to be me. I’m just speaking what feels like common sense, right? I think one of the interesting things about this is that it’s going to look different in different countries. I like it sounds a bit academic, but I like to describe this as like a vernacular. There are certain kind of horizontal themes that land globally, but the conversation is going to look different in different places.
So if you are a relatively small democracy like the United Kingdom or even smaller, like, you know, your home country, it’s going to have particular characteristics. You’re going to work probably within the standard democratic system. You bring up that you have a policy platform, you campaign on it. You convince people why it’s the truth, blah, blah. If you were to look somewhere like China, it’s completely different.
So that China and… you know, I think China are an extremely interesting place to look to for how this kind of stuff might unfold because China has this unique political culture where you could roll if they were inclined, you could roll these kind of policies out quite differently. So right now, know, China are trying to establish some kind of maybe not global global hegemony through economics, but getting their seat at the table that they rightly deserve because the billion people, through the standard mechanics of macroeconomics. But that’s like old paradigm thinking, right?
So if they were then to look forward into the new paradigm, you wouldn’t be seeking economic hegemony, you’d be seeking ecological hegemony. And you would say, all right, we’re going to pose these types of policies. And if you want to engage with us, you’re going to have to start getting on board, we’re going to roll it out in our country, and then we’re going to start rolling it out with our partners globally.
So those, whether or not you were a small country like Denmark or a huge country like China, you could have these kind of like similar endpoint objectives, but the way that you would roll it out would probably look quite differently. So from a small country, I could imagine like a domino effect where if it happened in Denmark, then you could imagine it happening in other small states. Maybe then hops over to New Zealand, for example.
If China were doing it, it would be a completely different dynamic and but and maybe there will be other Kind of middle points. So I don’t think there’s like this singular global solution rather these different regional expressions of similar ideas, similar thinking and also maybe the ideas about language.
Mik Aidt:
So take me through a little bit of your vocabulary. What should we be talking about then, if not ‘climate’?
Joseph Gelfer:
Yeah, so no one likes ‘climate’. We’ve talked a little bit about ‘pollution’. I think it’s really about what are the themes that people are interested in. So for example, in New York, we’ve recently had Zohran Mamdani win for the Democratic primaries, and the word that he used was ‘affordability’. So in New York, affordability seemed to be a fantastic word to use. Does that work for everybody? I don’t know, but it was a really good example of somebody that hit upon a word that just resonated with people.
There are various universal themes that people are interested in. Everyone’s interested in cost of what I’ve been calling cost of living. He’s a little bit more gracious calling affordability. Everyone’s interested in energy that is, know, there are various things. They want clean energy. They really want energy sovereignty. So they’re not stuck in these dangerous geopolitical, you know, relationships with people. And most people want clean energy.
Again, that’s pretty broad across the political spectrum. Cost of living, energy, nature – everybody loves nature. I remember like a year or so ago was the big nature march here in London. It was orders of magnitude bigger than any climate march I had ever seen. There were people, the whole spectrum, was like, crazy hunt saboteurs in the mix at the most militant end. And then there’s like, the National Trust and English Heritage and RSPB in the mix, right? These really large, quite conservative organisations and everybody in between. So everybody loves nature, that’s a good one.
And then probably health. You we’ve already talked a little bit about all of the health, well, the death that comes from air pollution, right? But there’s loads of things, air pollution, microplastics, forever chemicals, plus standard kind of heat deaths that are coming, water, you know, purification problems. Everyone’s interested in health.
So those are like the four pillars really of Our Fair Future: economic wellbeing, energy, nature, health, and then you kind of bringing in climate as a co-benefit that cuts across those four pillars.
Mik Aidt:
So what’s the next step for someone like me who really want to be part of this and maybe, you know, do what I can at my end in Australia?
Joseph Gelfer:
Yeah, well, I mean, I can imagine something like Our Fair Future working globally again with those regional kind of with that regional vernacular with that regional expression. you know, Extinction Rebellion did a pretty good job of being an international movement. I guess.
First of all, you’ve actually got to break open a space to make it happen. So I’ve spent the past couple of years trying to push people quite hard to have more honest conversations about what is and is not happening. I work in the corporate sustainability space. I have the mixed blessing of engaging with a lot of very senior people in the climate and sustainability world. And for a long time, this was just about making a safe space for honest conversations. Because a lot of these people are, you know, they have that kind of orthodox message in the public domain where we should support big businesses to transition into blah-blah-blah. We’re to have this small steps, you know. They go to COP and they celebrate the nothing that happens at COP. But when you get them in private, if you can create that safe space and then kind of do a bit of ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours’-kind of stuff, people start having a bit of a different opinion.
There’s, I know… no one gets into, so let’s say for argument’s sake, you’re 50 or 60 years old and you’re a chief sustainability officer at some Fortune 500 company. I’m quite certain that the majority of those people did not get into the sustainability space to be greenwashers. They did not get into the sustainability space to be apologists for the status quo. They got into the sustainability space to make radical change. That’s at heart who they are. And then along the way they get co-opted, they hit the roadblocks, they become disillusioned, they become practical, and then they end up being cogs in the machine. But in their hearts, there is this revolutionary spirit. There is a spirit of wanting to make the world a better place. And I think we just kind of need to start unlocking that and untapping it.
And the other kind of, this is what I’d term like: appealing to people’s personal issues is most people, again, if you’re a bit older and that’s where the power, I’m focusing on slightly older people because that’s where the power lies, right? They’ve got professional capital, political capital, maybe even a bit of financial capital. A lot of those people have kind of resigned themselves to not being the people that they thought they were gonna be. They had a kind of a vision for themselves when they were 25. That vision slowly started ebbing away over the decades. And then typically, you know, in the kind of mid to late 40s, they hit that trough of disillusionment. They realised that ‘Actually I didn’t have the life that I thought I was gonna have’, and that’s dark. That’s not a nice place to be.
But here’s the beauty of this, here’s the silver lining: If you take something like Our Fair Future, it doesn’t have to be Our Fair Future, you know, this kind of vague range of ideas. You get this incredible second bite at the cherry. You can actually be that person again. And, like, you can deliver on what you thought your life was going to be about. It’s almost like delivering on unfulfilled destiny. How many times in life do you get the chance? To do that, to have a second go. And this, I think, is what this particular moment in time is about.
And again, five or 10 years ago, it was a different conversation. Right now, it’s at this inflection point where there is an opportunity to do extraordinary things if those people who have the ability to embody that extraordinary energy take it and capitalise upon it. That, I think, is an interesting moment. And that’s why ultimately I’m feeling more optimistic today than for years. And it’s purely because of the chaotic moment that we’re in, because while that chaos is horrifying and terrifying, there is opportunity in it.
And the bad guys, they know that. That’s why you kind of got that whole ‘blood on the streets’ philosophy of business and investing and all of that kind of stuff. You know, like Reese Mogg’s sovereign individual book and all of that. They know what opportunities lie in these moments in history. But for the most part, the good guys don’t. But we can capitalise upon this.
Mik Aidt: (29:56)
That’s right. I mean, we’ve almost moved from believing in peace to that the world is now in war, a state of war. And certainly mentally.
Joseph Gelfer:
I’d go further than mentally. I think we’re pretty much fully in a hot war. If we go back to those five million people a year who are dying, and that’s just on air pollution, doesn’t even get into all of the rest of the stuff, and it certainly doesn’t get into the future. That’s just today. I think we’re in a hot war and people don’t even realise it.
And here I think, you know, it’s interesting to look back on what happened last time that we were in a hot, you know, for many of us in the kind of in the West where we had that kind of aggression on our doorstep. So for most countries, that was probably like World War II. What did people do in World War II?
They didn’t sit around sending petitions to Hitler. They fought to the death. And I don’t want to say that lightly. We’ve all got family members who did that. Men and women, across the nation who fought to the death because they were in an existential crisis, and they believed it was the right thing to do.
I don’t think it’s too dramatic to say we’re at that point but people don’t even realise it. And that’s where when you get in that mindset the kind of the responses that are open to you change radically.
So the idea that somehow all you can do is try and improve your business or write another policy report or worry about whether or not you’re going to get the sack because you say something a bit too edgy on LinkedIn, that is completely irrelevant. And the risk management that is required, the risk assessment that is required when you’re thinking in that hot, warm mentality, everything changes.
And that I think is like a mindset shift that people need to get into. It’s certainly coming. It would be better if it comes sooner rather than later, because the sooner it comes, the more managed the process is. The later it is, the more chaotic it becomes.
Mik Aidt:
Hmm. It sounds to me like that the business world could play a huge role in this because a lot of the initiative and innovation and a lot of the good thinkers in the world actually go into business and make changes, but not in this field that you are talking about. What do you see in terms of the opportunities of working with business on this and actually pushing like a business revolution forward?
Joseph Gelfer:
Yeah, well, you know, it requires another mindset shifter around responsibility because at the moment, too, unfortunately, too many people in business, you know, unpack the responsibility of change to government. So they’re saying, you we would like to produce more electric cars by 2030. Unfortunately, the policy environment is not stable enough. If the government can get it together to create better policies, we will be more comfortable investing in electric cars, for example.
But we know that the government’s useless, they’re a bunch of cronies in the pockets of the polluters, so that’s lost. So it’s not good enough to wait for policy. It’s not good enough to wait for laws, especially as whether or not you’re in the US or in the EU or in the UK, all of the laws are getting diluted on a daily basis. So that’s a catastrophe. So the issue for businesses right now and in over the next day, next days and years, decade or so, is that I’ve got to take a completely different type of responsibility. I have to completely reimagine the way, transformation, disruption are words that are doled through repetition in business circles. I hesitate to even use those words because they’ve become meaningless. But it is mind boggling change, historically unprecedented change, that is what is required.
It needs a completely different understanding of who the stakeholders in business actually are, who you’re in service to. And the I like to use is in service to life on earth. If you’re not in service to life on earth, you don’t deserve to be in business. And I’ll tell you something right now. When something like Our Fair Future starts taking power, you will no longer have a license to operate. There is no future for the positive development of our planet where bad businesses are going to be allowed to operate. You’re going to be put out of business and if you resist, you’re going to prison. It’s going to be as simple as that. It’s going to be pretty blunt.
So the issue for businesses now is, you know, and this is a standard business case for sustainability, but it’s, it’s always been performative, right? If you don’t change within the next five years, you’re probably going to end up in prison. And I’m not talking about going out of business because going out of business is quite gentle. I’m not talking about consumer pressure. I’m talking about the hard edge of legal ramification. and businesses can do that. You know, there’s
And maybe this is actually kind of bring back into other problems of like the climate movement is it inherently ends up being, we’re going to, we need an end to capitalism. I mean, I would like a world where there’s no capitalism. I could imagine a world where that happens, but I also think it’s probably going to take us about 200 years to get there, even if everybody was on board. Right. So we need to work loosely within the economy that we’ve got.
We can change values to assets, know, we could put nature up, we could put oil down, that type of stuff. But the infrastructure of economy is loosely going to stay the same for quite a while. So business absolutely has a major part to play with this, but they’ve got to change who they’re serving. In service to life on earth, to regular people, to animals, to trees, to water, to air, all of that type of stuff. That’s where legacy is built.
That’s how you make the change. Businesses that do that today, in 100 years time, people will be singing songs about them. Now, if you want a legacy, that’s how you do it. It’s like maybe you could use it. It’s a legacy that lasts for thousands of years, right? So just for like the personal egocentric nature of it, why wouldn’t you do that? Why wouldn’t you want to be a hero that lasts in history?
Mik Aidt:
We do have examples of that, like Patagonia.
Joseph Gelfer:
That is, you know, it’s the classic example, right? And it’s a good one, but there’s not many of them. There are not many. I actually struggle to think of a business that operates at scale other than Patagonia. I mean, and even they’ve got loads of problems, right? But they are going in the right direction and have actually taken some unprecedented steps to try and be bigger. And I think they’re doing it in good faith and I’m grateful to them.
But I genuinely struggle to think of any other business that’s kind of thinking at the appropriate scale about actually how they could exist in harmony on this planet. And that’s actually quite mind-boggling when we think about how long we’ve been, the decades that we’ve been having this conversation now, not just about sustainability in general, but about sustainable business, you know, what used to be CSR – for those who are old enough to remember it, you know, it’s gone through various waves of nomenclature around it. But we’ve been having this conversation for decades, but almost no large business does it.
And, you know, there’s some small businesses doing it, but their impact is negligible. It’s got to be those massive businesses that do it. And they’re not going to last long unless they do. They will be put out of business.
And again, not through kind of consumer pressure, but through legal pressure and probably sooner than I imagine. Initially, I imagined Our Fair Future as an ideas platform that would exist globally. That was before I kind of assumed that you actually need to take power.
And then because you need to take power, it needs to work at the national level because that’s how it’s organised. So Our Fair Future, for the moment, is a UK organisation. But I’ve had conversations with people in Sweden, had conversations with people in the US. I could easily imagine Our Fair Future Australia, Our Fair Future USA, for sure. It needs…
I’ve got www.ourfairfuture.com for somebody already. It needs people to drive it. So there needs to be that kind of general belief in the principles of it and the overall direction of travel and strategy with that overlay of regional specificity and with the ability to drive it forward with all of the strategic thinking that that takes.
I think there’s a lot of benefit for international versions of Our Fair Future. There’s pros and cons. The pro would be the branding is already in place, the thinking is already in place. You just go and kind of do it with local content. So it’s relatively easy to get going. The downside is I can’t think of a precedent where an international party in power replicates through to other countries. But maybe that’s not a problem. Maybe this is because we’re in this unprecedented moment. Maybe that’s what you get. I think it’s up for debate.
Mik Aidt: (40:54)
Joseph Gelfer, I think with all the ambitions that you have, we need to know who you are and where you’re coming from. How did you get to this level of ambition that you’re presenting to us today?
Jospeh Gelfer:
I think really it’s just about intellectual honesty. I’m 51 years old, I’ve been around for a long time. I grew up as like a classic leftist, traveled through the world trying to survive with values in a world that does not really reward having values. I find myself these days working in the corporate sustainability space, a double-edged sword of seeing some amazing people trying to affect change, but on the other hand, seeing people not managing to effect change, it’s really okay.
And I think also just having a general interest in politics, right? What’s actually happening in this world. And the other stream there of being largely from a working class background, having a better understanding about what, you know, the mythical ordinary people, how they feel and how they respond about things. So these are kind of like different streams that have kind of fed into this river.
And then again, the intellectual honesty, how do we bring about change? Everything has failed. That’s a painful thing to have to hear, right? Maybe it’s simplistic, the only thing that I’m looking at are carbon emissions. And it’s going up, up, up, up every single year. Now, if you could have some arguments and a lot of people at fancy conferences will give you arguments, if we hadn’t done this, that and the other, it would have been even worse. Okay.
I don’t find that a particularly compelling argument. I need that graph to be going down precipitously. So given everything’s failed, why did it fail? It failed because it seeks to influence power and power has no interest in being influenced. So the ultimate distinction I always make between climate activism and climate populism is that climate activism seeks to influence power, and climate populism seeks to take power. It’s honest. And when people have a think about it and get over the initial shock of what that implies, my experience has been one of relief because they know that all of the existing theories of change are broken, where then they never work at all.
They know that they need something else, but no one has given voice to what that something else actually is. I mean, this is not, it’s not like it’s new. You take power. I mean, it’s classic political stuff, right? But we have become so depoliticised by design, by the system, right? We have become so defanged to the point where people look at somebody like Extinction Rebellion and just stop oil and think that they’re radical, which is utterly absurd because it’s a bunch of pensioners sat holding bits of cardboard. The idea that that’s radical is just ridiculous, but it just goes to show how our very imagination of what radical looks like has been completely closed off by design, by the system.
So we just need to recapture possibility, a bit of agency, a bit of understanding about what could actually happen. And then start looking around to some of the examples of how it’s already happening, but in different ways, people like Trump, people like Farage.
And, you know, philosopher Zizek has this nice phrase that I like to use of the right steps in the wrong direction. And that’s what we got with people like Trump and Farage right now. They’re taking the right steps, but they’re going in the wrong direction. We just need to course correct. Take all of the things that they’re doing, course correct it, put it in service to life on earth, and we’re good to go. We can change this around. I expect to see the course correction within my lifetime. We’re not going to fix it, but we can course correct. That’s the timeline I’m thinking of.
And then just imagine what then happens to those people who then grow up. So I’ve asked progressives to do some painful things in this conversation. I’ve asked them to put issues that they care about onto the back burner while we then come together on these important things. Here’s the good news: once we’ve come together on those important things and we’ve course corrected it, my expectation would be that young people start growing up and they’re saying, ‘Well, hold on a minute! Why aren’t we dealing about that racial tension over there? Why aren’t we dealing about this malnutrition in that country or any number of other injustices?’
And now all of these global problems, which today have no precedent for us being able to fix them, now we have a precedent. We came together on climate and nature and we fixed it as a global problem. Now we can come together. We’ve got a precedent for all sorts of other issues, which in my mind makes like the next century look really quite phenomenal.
For the first time in human history, you have an example in place. I mean, this sounds a bit new age, but take it seriously. For the first time in human history, you’ve got an example in place of global cooperation coming together to do something for the collective good. It’s never happened before in the history of humanity. It’s probably going to happen in the next 30 years. That’s special. That makes me feel good about the future.
So I see lots of good things. This will ultimately, I think, the legacy of the climate crisis for humanity. It’s going to be lots of really horrific things are going to come down the pipeline because of climate, right? But that legacy, the silver lining to the climate crisis will be coming together for that precedent in global cooperation that will enable us to do other things. And I think in a long enough timeline, people will see it as a really positive moment in human history.
Tv-series clip: ‘Black Sails’, Season 2 Episode 1, at 52:15:
The relentless pursuit of a better world… Great men don’t give up that pursuit. They don’t know how. And that is what makes them invincible.
Mockingbird movie clip:
This revolution is about everyone. It’s about all of us, and we need a voice.
Documentary film clip: Sir David Attenborough, in BBC’s ‘Greta Thunberg: A Year to Change the World’:
There just could be a change in moral attitude from people worldwide, politicians worldwide, to see that self-interest is for the past, common interest is for the future.
Mik Aidt: (55:20)
If you think what I’ve been talking with Joseph Gelfer about in the last 45 minutes sounds interesting, then I invite you to join me on a journey where we are exploring what could be done more taking it from here. I’m organising an online meeting with Joseph Gelfor in the coming days. That’ll be in mid September. And if you’d like to be there and join the team, send me an email. The mail address is info @ climatesafety.info.
Movie clip:
All revolutions seem impossible until they are inevitable.
. . .
SONG:
‘Time to Wake Up’ – audio – video
[Chorus]
Time to wake up – let the reckoning begin
Time to wake up – there’s a storm breaking in our skies
Time to wake up – this is a battle we need to win
The battle between truth and science – and power and lies
[Verse 2]
They dressed up greed in a righteous disguise
They built their fortunes on a thousand lies
Bought the silence of elected leaders
Wrote the rules that protected their business
But hey! Science speaks, and our children know
We can’t buy back that world we let go
There’s no hiding, no place to run
The ice is melting, the damage is done
[Chorus]
Time to wake up – let the reckoning begin
Time to wake up – there’s a storm breaking in our skies
Time to wake up – this is a battle we need to win
The battle between truth and science – and power and lies
[Bridge]
Time to wake… time to wake…
Time to rise, we’re under attack
Time to wake… time to wake…
We see the danger, we’re fighting back
[Final Chorus]
Time to wake up – let the reckoning begin
Time to wake up – there’s a storm breaking in our skies
Time to wake up – this is a battle we need to win
The battle between truth and science – and power and lies
. . .
Voices and statements in the song:
Sheldon Whitehouse, American Senator:
This conflict is a battle between truth and science and power and lies.
On climate we have to face facts. The facts are grim and the stakes are high.
An economic storm is coming, driven by climate upheaval.
We are sailing toward economic catastrophe.
We’ve now entered the year of consequences that was so predicted is now starting to actually .
We’re heading into that storm unprepared while being lied to at industrial scale.
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Great interview – thought-provokingly radical! What Joseph is suggesting, however, is likely to be very late in coming, and correspondingly ‘chaotic’ as he says – a euphemism for widespread disregard for the law and even blood on the streets as inequity and personal / family disasters deepen and widen. Populations are likely to drop and possibly collapse in some countries, giving rise to massive refugee flows. Once the genie is out of the bottle, a planetary population of 10 billion people will be very hard to control. Perhaps we need to be a bit careful what we wish for.
One aspect of Joseph’s predictions that he didn’t cover (after bagging any material input from government and the corporate sector) is the judicial system- separation of powers being a core element of democracies. Would governments and business continue to have recourse to the courts when challenged by ‘the bottom-up revolution’ (e.g. ‘business leaders being jailed for operating undesirable businesses’?)
As things stand the role of the courts is to uphold legislation, not to create it. The courts are there to penalise individuals who the police charge for defying the law. What will be the role of the police, and who will decide that? How do elections get managed as we break into the new paradigm? How does that all that fit with a popular revolution?