Parts of the movement had previously assumed that climate science could speak for itself, and that enough public awareness would precipitate political change. The task was to leverage popular power to appeal to the state and private capital. This produced campaigns centred on the Green New Deal, a framework that revived Keynesian stimulus policies to turbocharge investment in renewables.

The mainstream British climate movement relied on vague appeals to ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ towards the planet. Yet this universalism papered over the role of imperialism in driving the climate crisis and its uneven effects across gendered, racialised and class lines. Demands to protect ‘our future’ from ecological disaster elided those in the Global South for whom that future had already arrived. The GND was a reflection of this narrow politics, based on national emissions targets and green jobs within Britain.

This solely national perspective opened the door to the strange convergences we see today: militaries commended for adopting sustainable aviation fuel reforms while remaining some of the largest contributors to the climate crisis and so-called ‘green transitions’ powered by extractivism of critical minerals in the Global South. A truly eco-socialist agenda, resting on democratisation, decommodification and decolonisation, was meanwhile pushed to the margins. The movement’s strategy of pressuring the state for concessions suffered a further setback when Keir Starmer scaled back his major green investment strategy and energy companies doubled down on profits from oil and gas.

Partly owing to its middle-class character and ‘post-material’ concerns, the British climate movement began to stagnate in the 2020s, becoming little more than a single-issue campaign. It missed a crucial opportunity to develop working-class power through an expansive green program. Its isolation from national liberation struggles in the Global South, and its failure to recognise the root causes of the climate crisis in capitalism and imperialism, echoed a larger structural weakness on the left.

This stagnation was deepened by surveillance, criminalisation and policing. Groups like Just Stop Oil were heavily repressed. The external assault combined with internal challenges: professionalisation, cults of leadership, unsustainable organising methods. Many young people radicalised by the climate crisis were absorbed into professionalised spaces, while grassroots collectives failed to translate the mass demonstrations into long-lasting structures capable of tackling the task at hand.

Covid-19 also exposed the fundamental limitations of a strategy based on demanding concessions from the state. As Andreas Malm has noted, capitalist states are repearedly proved incapable of anything more than ‘treating the symptoms’ of planetary crises ‘once they had blasted through the bodies of populations’. But even that seems generous: many Global North states preferred to let the pandemic run riot rather than risk the most minor disruption to accumulation.

Co-opted and hollowed out, the climate movement was powerless to resist the sequence of events that followed. The US, Europe and Britain abandoned meagre commitments to climate action, turning instead to a programme of rearmament unprecedented in the twenty-first century. Economic stagnation created space for climate denialism and fossil fuel accelerationism to take hold in British electoral politics, accelerating the rise of the far-right. Labour governments, first under Starmer and now under Burnham, have rowed back on climate commitments in pursuit of the illusory goal of ‘growth’.

October 7th crystallised existing contradictions both across the left and within the climate movement. Some climate organisations recognised that the same systems of fossil fuel extraction and militarism driving the climate crisis were also fuelling the genocide in Gaza; but the political space to make those demands was highly restricted.

When activists organised an open letter in solidarity with Palestine in December that year, leading climate organisations were notably absent. Their leaderships overruled internal dissent or found themselves constrained by funding models that place serious risks on criticism of Israel or support for Palestinian self-determination. This exposed a generational rupture, with the environmentalist old guard increasingly disconnected from a younger, more militant base radicalised in opposition to the genocide. While some leaders still urged activists to focus on simply lobbying national policymakers, Gaza revealed the need for internationalist climate justice, as the US, Britain and Israel collaborated in the annihilation of life and the eclipse of our planetary future.

This fundamentally altered the direction of the climate movement. Seasoned climate organisers pivoted to supporting Palestinian liberation: shutting down arms factories, resisting the expansion of state repression and forming new groups demonstrating the links between far-right politics, oil lobbyists and billionaires profiting from genocide.

This wasn’t all new: many who joined Palestine Action’s early direct action before 2023 were involved with Extinction Rebellion, knowing that British militarism and Israeli arms companies were among the primary drivers of the climate crisis. Yet 7 October expanded the boundaries of the climate movement, making its overlap with anti-imperialism more explicit. Since then, US aggression has escalated from Palestine to Iran, Venezuela to Cuba. While there has not yet been a unified response from climate organisations, individual climate activists like Greta Thunberg, who rose to prominence through the 2019 Fridays for Future school strikes, have actively tried to break the sieges on Gaza and Cuba, illustrating both the necessity to expand the remit of climate politics and the institutional inertia preventing a movement-wide shift.

These wars of aggression have demonstrated the extent to which US militarism is driving the climate crisis. The US military is the single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels worldwide, its bases and warships frontline emitters of greenhouse gases. Our Resisting Rearmament report with Climate Vanguard details how Britain has subordinated itself to US monopoly capital, pursuing rearmament to maintain its ‘special relationship’ in this new and even more dangerous phase of empire.

If climate justice is concerned with protecting the conditions for human and ecological life, then struggles supporting the national sovereignty and liberation of the Global South are inherently climate struggles. The people of the global South are fighting to secure a future for us all against US-led global hegemony.

Eco-populism has recently surged under Zack Polanski’s Green Party. Parts of the climate movement have pivoted towards this electoral project and sharpened their emphasis on class politics. At the same time, ambitious ecological organising projects have emerged: Anakbayan UK has campaigned against British mining in the Philippines, the Palestinian Youth Movement has launched the People’s Embargo for Palestine, and local groups across Britain that have used direct action to target RAF bases and mass picket arms factories. Climate Vanguard have also developed radical political education for young people, who have in turn formed the Orbit cadre group with the aim of driving eco-socialist politics in various other left organisations.

In the labour movement, workers are now organising around anti-imperialist and ecological demands. Unite Hospitality members in Glasgow have launched a BDS-aligned service boycott at the Glasgow Film Theatre and are building an industrial strategy for Palestine. Workers for a Free Palestine is organising civil service workers to engage in work refusals; and Healthcare Workers for a Free Palestine is coordinating across the NHS to end the renewal of the government’s contract with Palantir. The Heat Strike campaign is pushing for a legally recognised maximum workplace temperature and a heatwave furlough scheme, providing a clear possibility for anti-war and climate organisations to link Britain’s involvement in the war on Iran and hosting of US bases to climate breakdown and rising prices.

The aim must be to bring these currents together in recognising that Britain’s role in the imperial system must be dismantled as a precondition of climate justice. We must push beyond eco-populism and build towards eco-socialism. By orienting the climate movement towards this horizon, we can begin to confront the underlying weaknesses that led to its stagnation. The old climate movement — with its professionalisation, its isolation from the left and its inability to confront imperialism — cannot and should not be revived. Something new must take its place.

Energy Embargo for Palestine was formed in the wake of Israel’s intensified genocide in Gaza at the intersection of climate, anti-imperialist, and Palestine organising. Since launching, we have run a concerted campaign targeting BP’s operations and its complicity in fuelling the genocide — targeting institutional partnerships with BP, mapping and exposing the supply of oil to Israel via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, and identifying points of disruption within Britain.

Climate justice should not be understood as an end in itself, a demand to be won and then set aside. It is a front in our broader struggle against capitalism and imperialism. The mass engagement of young people activated by the climate crisis, and the infrastructure developed from the past decade of movements, must be leveraged in a project that sees climate justice as inseparable from global class struggle, particularly the national liberation struggles of the Global South. The role of ecological organisations — and of those on the left more broadly — is to create the conditions for this project to emerge, and to join the fight for a just future.

AI is literally retarding our brains. If online media was once an echo chamber, it has now become a hellscape of algorithmic slop which heightens social alienation in ways that were previously unimaginable. A recent study shows that students who use LLMS to write essays exhibited reduced brain activity and diminished critical engagement compared to those who use search engines or simply their own unaided reasoning. Researchers at the MIT Media Lab found that the convenience of automated answers produces so-called ‘cognitive debt’: a clear, measurable contraction of human attention and creativity. Another study by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment identified a general fall in numeracy and literacy comprehension that coincides with the mass adoption of these technologies.

Behind AI’s consumer-facing slopverse there is a material infrastructure of staggering scale. Nvidia’s global supply chain, for example, draws tungsten from Brazil, gold from Colombia, and tantalum from Kazakhstan to manufacture GPUs at TSMC in Taiwan. These chips travel through a planetary web of logistics operators, miners, data labellers and e-waste dismantlers. Over 10,000 data centres now operate across 170 countries, but their distribution is profoundly uneven. Because the United States, China and the EU host more than half, computational power is highly concentrated in the Global North. The geography of AI thus reproduces old imperial hierarchies. The Global South provides minerals, labour and land; the North monopolises compute, patents and profit. 

All this will get worse as the different Big Tech players struggle for dominance. Amazon plans to invest $150 billion on data centres over the next fifteen years, while Meta’s projected spend on data centres was $37 billion in a single year. The United Kingdom aims to build 100 data centres by 2030, including a £10bn AI data centre in Blyth consisting of 10 buildings covering 540,000 square metres. These will all consume vast quantities of energy and water, straining local ecosystems while producing tons of greenhouse gas emissions and e-waste. 

The global data cloud has a greater carbon footprint than the aviation industry. Energy consumed by data centres alone accounts for 0.3 percent of global carbon emissions. AI advocates argue that as more hyperscale centres get built, efficiency will improve and green energy will be used more — but similar ‘net zero’ pledges by European energy companies from Shell to BP have been exposed as simply crass greenwashing scams. There’s little reason to think AI will be any different. 

People across the globe are now recognising these social costs. Between 2023 and 2025, activists blocked $18 billion worth of data-centre projects and delayed another $46 billion across 24 US states. Outside the capitalist core, similar movements motivated by environmental and infrastructural concerns are taking off. In Cerrillos, Chile, communities led by local activist Pamela Ramírez halted Google’s water-intensive facility amid a historic drought. In Dublin, Ireland, the ‘Press Pause on Data Centres’ campaign has been fighting back against data infrastructure that threatens to consume 27 percent of national electricity by 2028, while in the Netherlands the Save the Wieringermeer campaign has defended farmland and aquifers from Microsoft projects. 

The resistance to data-centre development in the UK combines struggles over land, energy, water and urban space. From East London to Buckinghamshire and Fife, objections around housing, energy grid capacity, water, pollution and work converge as communities are expected to surrender socially necessary resources to privately owned tech infrastructure, to enable AI expansion that nobody wants. 

The dispute over Brick Lane in East London, recently written up in these pages, makes this especially stark. There, the government is determined to redirect resources that could be used for housing and other social needs towards a highly capital-intensive data centre. There are over 192 data centres operating or being built around London: infrastructure won’t provide jobs or benefits to the community, but will simply become another tributary to US tech oligarch fortunes. Any opposition to them is cast as an impediment to ‘growth’. While Brick Lane is being forced through by Burnham’s cabinet despite the local mayor blocking it, Buckinghamshire was successfully stopped.

In light of the dangers of Big Tech, the scholar Dan Mcquillan advocates what he calls a ‘decomputing society’, involving the dramatic reduction of datafication and computational energy from infrastructure to culture. Decomputing requires democratic limits on data extraction and energy-intensive computation, prioritising socially beneficial technologies over capitalist efficiency. The campaign known as ‘Welcome Spring, Burn a Tesla’ has targeted Elon Musk’s Gigafactory in Berlin along with his dealerships across Europe, and the Algorithmic Sabotage Research Group has drawn up a manifesto for algorithmic disobedience: disrupting AI systems through data poisoning, misinformation loops, and ‘tarpit’ traps that flood data-scrapers with nonsense content. 

These disruptive strategies are one thing, but building a compelling social alternative is another. The classic left critique of technology reminds us that it is never neutral: that relations of power are reflected in its design, and that it therefore reproduces the capitalist imperatives of competition, scale and profit. Today, with politics lurching even further right, new technologies are absorbing reactionary tendencies from society at large. As oligarchs advocate a return to monarchy and promote conspiracy theories about the Antichrist, their fantasies become embedded in the algorithms that they own. 

The history of class struggle from the Luddites to the Writers Guild of America shows that the emancipatory potential of technology never comes from the technology itself. It comes from building enough power to fundamentally remake these infrastructures. Hence the recent movement for digital sovereignty: public clouds and computational models with transparent safety frameworks which are democratically designed, rather than imposed by the superrich. The Non-Aligned Technologies Movement aims to translate this demand into an international campaign against the unequal digital world-system. 

For such movements to succeed, they would need to be aided by a state-led industrial strategy to decommission data infrastructure or reorient it towards socially necessary functions, set by workers and users. A process of collective decomputing could meanwhile ensure that all data contributions remain in open commons, controlled by everyone rather than enclosed by rentiers. This might seem like a distant prospect. But the fact is that any technology that emerges out of intellectual monopolism and extractive supply chains will be marked by these destructive forces. Remaking the former inevitably means destroying the latter.