-------------------------------------------------------------------
 CASE STUDY: DISOBEDIENT PROTEST AND THE GLOBAL CLIMATE MOVEMENT
-------------------------------------------------------------------

                    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.