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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 för 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.