Keep it in the ground’: what we can learn from anti-fossil fuel campaigns

From the fossil fuel divestment movement to the Stop Adani campaign, in recent years we’ve seen a wave of climate activism that directly targets fossil fuels — both the infrastructure used to produce, transport and consume them, and the corporations that finance, own and operate that infrastructure.

Former Liberal Party leader John Hewson at an event
 protesting Adani’s Carmichael Mine in October 2018.

What makes targeting fossil fuels so attractive for activists, and can we learn anything from them?

Climate change became a topic of mainstream international concern in the early 1990s. For the first two decades of international climate cooperation, until the failed Copenhagen climate conference in 2009, the international environment movement embraced a more “technocratic” approach.

 Professionally-staffed environment groups made technical arguments aimed at persuading politicians and the public to adopt global climate treaties, national greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, and complex market-based policy mechanisms such as emissions trading schemes.

Read the piece from The Conversation by a PhD Candidate in Political Theory from the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Fergus Green - ’Keep it in the ground’: what we can learn from anti-fossil fuel campaigns."