Cost of Living Crisis and Climate Crisis: The Same Crisis

Enough is enough. When did we decide to just sit there and be OK with people in the fifth richest country in the world having to choose between food and heating? When did that happen? When did we decide that we are just going to sit there and let civilisation as we know it to collapse because the government is refusing to cut carbon emissions in line with the cries of the world's most renowned climate scientists. When did that happen?

People have woken up to the fact that there is only one crisis – the crisis of an elite which cares no more about old people dying of the cold than it does about young people dying of hunger before they get to middle age. This elite refuses to see the misery it is already inflicting on the Global South. The global majority already faces looting, exploitation and climate breakdown. Know one thing for sure – this is murder, plain and simple. Today’s fossil capitalism profits from yesterday’s barbarous imperialism. And they will carry on unless we stop them. No one is coming to save us – not the politicians, not the NGOs, not the entrepreneurs – the only way things will change now is through People Power. It has been the case throughout our history, and so it is today.

We All Want to Just Stop Oil is bringing together the wider environmental and progressive labour movements, faith communities, charities, people from social institutions and famous people – along with thousands of ordinary people who have never before been involved in anything like this – to create mass civil resistance. This is how we will overcome entrenched power – ongoing organised peaceful civil disobedience – slow marches, sit downs, blockades, etc., week after week. They may arrest people but we will not be afraid. We will be courageous, and our contagious courage will spread. They may imprison people but that will make us even more determined to show our solidarity. Their time is up. Our time is now.

Thousands of us will come together for an Autumn of Action: strike, don’t pay, occupy: starting at 11 AM, Parliament Square, Westminster on 1 October. Like Extinction Rebellion did in April 2019, forcing the government to respond by occupying central London. But this time involving many more people from a wide coalition of groups, building a deeper, more powerful movement.

What do we want?

We are making demands – specific, concrete, and winnable. We are not going through the motions. The coalition will only stop this campaign when the government comes to its senses and acts. The demands lay out first step, common sense solutions to the big crisis of our time. We demand the government ends new fossil fuel licensing and production. We owe it to our young people to stop fossil fuels. We owe it to our workers to guarantee good jobs in a zero carbon economy. We owe our old people dignity. To do this, we need the money and we know who has got it. Shell recently reported quarterly profits of $9 billion. £91 billion was reported lost in tax avoidance in the UK in 2021, and that's just what was accounted for...

We demand that the government properly tax fossil fuel companies, the super richs and big business to force them to pay their fair share. We demand cheap, green public transport so people are less reliant on their cars. And the biggest no-brainer: we demand the insulation of all our homes, starting with the poorest – that way we can reduce energy bills and CO2 while creating hundreds of thousands of good, unionised jobs. There is a lot more to do than this but you have to start somewhere. This is what we all want apart. The only people that don’t are the oil companies and the super rich. We must all get together, support each other, and crack on with the job. We owe it to our kids and what could be more important than that?

So what's the plan?

This Autumn we are fighting back. We will bring together the tactics used through the ages by ordinary people standing up to injustice.

STRIKE: We aren’t putting up with pay cuts any longer. Using our trade unions, we are going on strike

DON’T PAY: We can’t pay so we won’t pay: hundreds of thousands of people are joining together to stop paying their unaffordable energy bills.

OCCUPY: Let’s stop fossil fuels by sitting down in Westminster until our demands are met.

This is going to be the big something we have all been waiting for. You don’t want to miss out.