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CASE STUDY: DISOBEDIENT PROTEST AND THE GLOBAL CLIMATE MOVEMENT
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Edmund Tweedy Flanigan
2023
Climate activists have pursued a wide range of disobedient protest
tactics in response to the threat of global climate change and to
what they see as the failure of world governments to adequately
address the problem. Consider, for instance:
- School Strike for Climate. In 2018, Greta Thunberg, then fifteen
years old, refused to attend school as a form of strike against what
she saw as insufficient action to address the climate crisis. Rather
than attend school, Thunberg held a sign reading "Skolstrejk for
Klimatet" ( School Strike for Climate ) on the steps of the Swedish
parliament for the three weeks preceding parliamentary elections.
The movement later became a long-term, global one, with Thunberg and
other activists striking every Friday. The movement has subsequently
organized strikes worldwide involving millions of protesters, many
of them school-aged children. School attendance, in Sweden and many
other countries, is legally mandatory (see Tumin, 2023).
- Kingsnorth Six. In 2007, six activists affiliated with the
environmental activism organization Greenpeace ascended the chimney
of Kingsnorth power station in the United Kingdom to protest a
plan by then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown to build an additional
coal-fired power station on the site. They caused the power plant to
shut down for a time, and they painted GORDON in large letters on
the chimney. In a rare acquittal, a jury subsequently found that
although the Kingsnorth Six (as they became known) had broken
property laws in carrying out their action, they had a lawful excuse
for doing so (see Bedell, 2009).
- Extinction Rebellion. In 2021, nine members of the group
Extinction Rebellion used chisels and hammers to break the windows
of the HSBC bank s headquarters in London. They wore patches reading
better broken windows than broken promises, echoing a slogan
originated by women s suffrage activists more than a century earlier
(Laville, 2023). Like the suffragettes, whose most famous motto was
deeds not words, a new generation of climate activists pursue more
disruptive and destructive protest, such as blocking traffic routes,
defacing paintings, occupying land, and engaging in hunger strikes.
- How to Blow Up a Pipeline. In a recent book, Swedish activist and
academic Andreas Malm argues that climate activists should go beyond
merely symbolic, and even disruptive, action and aim directly at the
destruction of polluting infrastructure instead. He notes that there
is a long and venerable tradition of sabotaging fossil fuel
infrastructure as a form of strategic intervention, as protest, or
both (Malm, 2021, p. 71). Ecotage, as such actions are sometimes
called, is against the law.
These examples are representative of the range of disobedient
positions taken up by the global climate movement: some opt for
restrained, symbolic disobedience, while others advocate much more
radical action. Many others fall somewhere in-between. What unites
activists across this range of positions is that they commit or
support what they see as justified lawbreaking. How can we square
this with the state s claims to authority and legitimacy?
As the Chapter explains, authority and legitimacy are components of
the state s right to rule. We can begin by considering authority,
which is defined as the state s ability to morally obligate subjects
through its say-so. When a state has authority, its subjects have a
corresponding moral obligation to obey its laws. By willfully
disobeying the law, climate activists may therefore seem to reject
the state s claim to authority.
Many of the examples given above involve indirect disobedience; that
is, breaking a law in one domain (property, public order, school
attendance) in order to protest or bring about a change in the law
in another domain (energy policy). We will return to this issue
below. However, to simplify things, it will help to focus first on a
case of direct disobedience: Imagine that the government requires
that citizens participate directly in the production of pollution,
say by completing a year of national service in a state-owned coal
refinery, or by paying a special levy whose purpose is to fund the
expansion of fossil fuel extraction. Climate activists might refuse
to obey these laws by claiming that the state lacks the authority
to demand that they participate in fossil fuel-powered energy
production. On what grounds could activists make this claim?
First consider procedure-based theories of authority. According to
consent theory, the state s authority depends on those it governs
giving it their explicit or tacit consent to govern; and according
to democratic authority theory, the state gains its authority when
its laws are the product of fair democratic procedures. These
two theories are sometimes connected: perhaps by voting in fair
elections, citizens signal their consent to be bound by the
government s laws.
Climate activists could object that they did not consent to this
form of national service, or to pay this fossil fuel levy, or they
might note that they voted against, or did not vote in, (say) the
referenda that established these policies. But notice the limits of
these objections. Rarely is it thought that we must consent to each
and every law we are subject to; and in majoritarian democracies,
those who vote in the minority, or those who do not vote at all, are
not typically thought to be exempt from the laws for which the
majority votes. Now, climate activists could still insist that they
never consented to the government under which they live at all,
or that the legislative procedures of the state are not fair
in general. These would be objections to the authority of any
law made in these societies, not objections to these climate
laws in particular. But does the state really lack authority in
general? Surely some laws traffic laws, laws prohibiting murder, and
so on command obedience regardless. This objection might thus seem
to prove too much.
What of membership-based theories of authority? According to
associative nationalism, it is our co-membership in a nation that
obligates us to one another, and it is the government s role as the
steward of the nation that obligates co-nationals to it. Climate
activists who object to our imagined year of service or fossil fuel
levy are of course members of society, and if this theory of
authority is correct, they are as bound to its laws on this basis as
any other member. However, climate activists might object not to the
idea that they have duties to their co-nationals per se but to the
way in which those duties are given shape by the law. That is, they
could object to the way the government carries out its role as the
steward of the nation. If it is failing to adequately lead the
nation, or (more plausibly) failing in the specific domain of energy
policy, it might be thought to lack authority, or to lack it in that
domain. To know whether this objection holds, however, we would need
a more detailed theory about the way that the duties of membership
translate into specific duties to obey specific laws and of how
authority varies across domains of law (more on which below).
A second kind of membership-based theory is fair play theory,
according to which it is our receipt of the benefits of society that
obligates us to do our part by upholding society s laws. Now, many
present-day members of society surely do benefit from society s
energy policies: they enjoy cheap energy and cheap goods as a
result. But climate activists could object that these benefits are
the product of unfair burdens imposed on future generations. Because
the distributive scheme that generates these benefits is unjust,
they could argue, they have no duty to do their part in contributing
to it.
Thirdly, we can consider outcome-based theories of authority,
according to which it is in virtue of the state s success at
realizing important outcomes for example, at enabling subjects to
better conform to their reasons; or at promoting justice, welfare,
or virtue; or at solving important coordination problems that it
possesses the ability to morally obligate its subjects. Yet climate
activists could object that states are in fact failing on any of
these grounds, at least within the domain of energy policy. The
state is not, they might insist, adequately conforming to reason, or
realizing the demands of justice, welfare promotion, or virtue, with
respect to energy policy; and moreover, the state is conspicuously
failing to coordinate society to meet the challenges posed by
climate change. If outcome-based theories of authority are correct,
these failures could undermine the authority of the state.
As we have seen, then, there are some theories of authority on which
climate activists could plausibly object that states, through their
failures to address climate change, lack authority. Notice, however,
that the most plausible versions of these objections concern not the
state s authority in general but its authority in the specific
domain of energy policy. For these objections to hold, therefore, we
would also have to take the view that the state s authority can be
disaggregated into separate domains, such that it could possess
authority in some and lack it in others. This view faces challenges,
however. On theoretical grounds, as long as we are disaggregating
the state s authority, we might wonder why we should stop at broad
domains of law. Why not disaggregate all the way to individual
laws? But the idea that the state might possess or lack authority on
a per-law basis might seem absurd, and perhaps also incompatible
with authority s point: to obligate based on say-so rather than on
the content of each law. What this indicates is the need for
principled grounds for distinguishing between authoritative and
non-authoritative domains of law. On practical grounds, it might
be doubted that laws fall neatly into non-overlapping domains
that enable subjects to make judgments about obedience on that
basis. Take our imagined levy for fossil fuel extraction, for
example. Is that to be considered a law in the domain of energy
policy, or in the domain of tax policy? It seems that the answer
must be both. But could injustice in the domain of energy policy
also undermine the authority of the domain of tax policy? Since real
policies often involve many domains of law, it is easy to see that
things may quickly become very complicated.
Unlike our imagined example policies, many real-life policies
objected to by climate activists are only indirectly related to
those that climate activists disobey. For example, Greta Thunberg
violated rules regarding school attendance, and Extinction Rebellion
activists violated criminal damage laws, not because they thought
school policy or criminal damage law to be unjust, but in order to
protest climate policy. But can failures of climate policy undermine
the authority of laws in other domains? This might seem doubtful,
for some of the reasons already discussed. Or is there another
explanation for why laws in one domain may be disobeyed in response
to failures of authority in another?
A variety of explanations might be offered, of which we can mention
only a few here. One idea is that while failures of authority in one
domain do not eliminate authority in others, they do affect it,
perhaps by changing the strength or shape of the attendant moral
obligation. A simple version of this idea posits that the importance
of combatting unjust climate policies overrides the importance of
obeying (say) traffic or property laws. Alternatively, maybe the
injustice of climate policy justifies disobedience in other domains
for the purpose of combatting that injustice that is, as long as the
disobedience serves to improve authority elsewhere. A different idea
is that instead of yielding justification for disobedience, failures
of authority in one domain might yield justified excuses for
lawbreaking in another. So, climate activists might have a morally
valid excuse for, say, interrupting operation at a power station,
even if they retain a moral obligation to abide by trespassing and
property rules. (This is broadly similar to the legal defense
successfully mounted by the Kingsnorth Six.) Each of these ideas
requires us to say more about the way that authority interacts with
other moral duties and about how authority in one domain relates
to authority in others. Many theories of civil (and uncivil)
disobedience seek to develop precisely these kinds of answers to
when and why disobeying the law is morally permitted.
We can turn, finally, to the question of legitimacy, which the
Chapter defines as the moral permission to coerce. In many ways,
authority and legitimacy may be thought to rise and fall together:
many theories of legitimacy parallel the theories of authority we
have considered, and so climate activists objections to the latter
may apply equally to the former.
But authority and legitimacy might also come apart. For instance, it
might be thought that the state can legitimately enforce certain
laws even when they are non-authoritative. Thus, activists might
possess a moral permission to protest climate policy by (say)
unlawfully breaking the windows of energy company headquarters even
while the state possesses a moral permission to arrest and punish
them for doing so. This aligns with one understanding of a
traditional tenet of civil disobedience: that lawbreaking in protest
is justified only if disobedients willingly accept the legal
consequences of their disobedience.
We should also consider the possibility that radical climate action
could be legitimate even when it is not authoritative that is, when
it could justify coercion without generating moral obligations on
the part of the coerced. Stringent or radical climate action,
whether undertaken by the state, non-state organizations, or private
individuals, would surely impose coercive demands on others. We
can also imagine scenarios in which, perhaps through failures
of procedure or associative fairness, such demands would lack
authority. On some views of legitimacy, however, such as the realist
theory discussed in the Chapter, successfully acting to address the
climate crisis could be legitimating in itself. That is, the
importance and urgency of addressing the crisis might itself justify
action taken to address it, even if those actions fail to meet
standards of authority.
2,312 words
References
Bedell, G. (2009). Why six Britons went to eco war. Observer.
Laville, S. (2023). Jury clears climate protesters of causing damage
to HSBC London HQ. The Guardian.
Malm, A. (2021). How to Blow Up a Pipeline. London: Verso.
Tumin, R. (2023). Greta Thunberg Ends Her School Strikes After 251
Weeks. New York Times.
