The UK's Number 1 Climate Campaigner

Roger Hallam is one of the world's top campaigners, famous for being a founder of Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, and Just Stop Oil—the most prominent social movements of recent years in the UK. He has worked as an advisor around the Western world, facilitating the creation of significant climate campaigns in Italy, Germany, and Sweden. Roger has been committed to social justice for decades - dropping out of LSE in his 20s to join the peace movement. Afterwards, he worked as an organic farmer in Wales for 30 years before unprecedented rains destroyed £100,000 worth of his crops. 

Having experienced climate breakdown first-hand, Roger recognised the need for societal change and became a researcher at King's College London. There, he produced award-winning research on the psychology of mobilisation and the design of civil disobedience. In 2018, he wrote the Tate Modern book of the month, Common Sense for The 21st Century - an introduction manual to Extinction Rebellion. In 2023, the New Statesman rated him as the 34th most influential progressive person in the UK—the highest position of any environmentalist apart from David Attenborough. In 2024, he wrote the introduction to A Green Day: Embracing Climate Action (Hachette India). 

In 2024, a British judge had Roger dragged out of court by police for refusing to break his oath to tell the "whole truth" to the jury in a climate protest trial. For his efforts to speak publicly about the greatest crisis in human history, he was given a five-year prison sentence in July 2024—the longest sentence for civil disobedience in the UK since the Second World War. His prison sentence was front page news in The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian and The Daily Mail. He has written for a broad political spectrum, from the Guardian to The Daily Mail. On TV, he has appeared on BBC HardTalk GB News with Nigel Farage and has starred in several films about his civil disobedience, including The Troublemaker and Conscientious Protectors.

Roger continues to work from his prison cell.

DISRUPTION WORKS.

DISRUPTION IS JUSTIFIED.

Only mass civil resistance can stop the top global 1% imposing mass death on billions of people.

We are out of time for anything else.

“The essence of what is human is the ability to make a decision, a conscious decision, about what is right in life.”

As an organic farmer for over 20 years, I could no longer sustain my vegetable growing. The impacts of climate change were decimating the livelihoods of farmers such as myself. Something was very wrong with the world; I could feel it, I could see it and I knew that something had to be done about it as our entire food production system was at stake.

I studied the science and realized beyond unequivocal doubt that the extinction crisis was upon us and that our impending annihilation was being perpetuated by psychopathological criminals who have no interest in the wellbeing of the average human being or the natural world.

Something needed to be done; I gave up everything I had and left for Kings College where I spent the next 4 years sleeping in my car in order to complete my studies in the science of mass mobilization in the tradition of Martin Luther King and Gandhi. I found the answers to the questions I had been seeking. I discovered the actions that we need to take in order to buy ourselves as much time as possible and mitigate indescribable suffering that awaits us as most of the planet becomes uninhabitable and we risk unspeakable horrors such as mass slaughter, starvation and rape, and the rise of fascistic regimes as the scramble for water and land takes off.

HOPE DIES, ACTION BEGINS.

I’ve been accused of many things, most of them are true.

Some of them however are carefully crafted media propaganda, which even my own movement has used against me.

This is something that you can expect unfortunately when you use your voice and stand out from the crowd. The only way we’re going to sort ourselves out is if we realise that this is not about us, but about our children and everything we hold sacred. Something bigger than us. About all that we hold to be sacred.

We’ve got to get ourselves and our egos out the way if we are going to make a change. We are going to have to be willing to make sacrifices because what we are facing is worse than World Wars. It threatens all life on this planet.

We have to let go of who we thought we were and how we thought life would turn out, and be willing to step into service for the sake of all that we hold to be precious. We need a revolution.

In 2018 I co-founded Extinction Rebellion. I have lost count of the number of times I have been arrested. I have been on two hunger strikes

I have been to prison three times in the last three years and I am waiting for three jury crown court trials in the UK.

I started Burning Pink in 2019 to create a direct action movement which would stand in elections to create a political revolution: legally binding citizens assemblies to take over from politicians. We have painted the buildings of NGOs and political parties that refuse to tell the truth and act upon it.

The Manifesto: What is to be done

It is clear that catastrophe is now locked in. Short of a technological miracle being rolled out in the next five years, global heating will force around a billion people to leave their homes within the next two decades as the world heads over 2C – that’s 7C in inland areas, 15C on a “hot day”. The global economic system will collapse and impoverishment will hit billions of people. Revolutions are now inevitable. Functional human extinction – only around a billion people located about the polar regions – is not. The key question for humanity now is whether the revolutions will be fascistic or democratic – based upon hate or popular deliberation, enacting escapist nihilism or compassionate realism. So what is to be done?

Exit reformism to begin the revolution

Reformism makes sense when the structure of society is sound. When it is about to collapse then it becomes at best a displacement activity and at worst an active block to effective collective action. Preparing for the revolution means two things: first to give up our jobs and “go to the people”, working 60-70 hours a week – leafleting, setting up stalls, door knocking, creating public meetings for working class orators who can move people to tears, and also people’s assemblies where people reconnect and discover the ecstasy of solidarity. Second, a growing alliance of the willing needs to shut down “the economy” – that is, the death machine that is taking us to extinction – blocking roads and transport infrastructure, city centres and financial districts, week after week until arrests lead to violence by the state and imprisonment. Absolute nonviolent discipline will need to be maintained so that an internal open democratic culture can flourish, and we can appeal to the general population to join with us. The revolution will be led by women and the young and old, not by aggressive men, or it will turn into civil war and fascism.

Enact a radical democratic takeover of the state and institute citizens’ assemblies

Only a revolution can save us now because what objectively needs to be done to slash carbon emissions cannot be done by the gradualist carbon addicted regimes. This is not a “radical” position. It is a position held privately by government insiders and experts all round the world. The present regime has utterly failed and it will not save us. Going to more COPs is fucked! What is needed is a pincer movement – to stand in elections as ordinary people to uncompromisingly tell the truth and call for legally binding citizens’ assemblies to take over from politicians, and at the same time to organise mass civil disobedience in capital cities to last for two to four weeks – until the central demand for citizens’ assemblies is agreed to. This how rapid political change takes place.

Citizens’ assemblies – legally binding and independently organised, followed by a second revolution on the streets.

Permanent citizens’ assemblies need to become the new legislative arm of the state. This is the precise constitutional definition of a democratic revolution in the twenty-first century. They are legally binding so they cannot be ignored by parliaments and are organised by independent civil society groups and social movements rather than by the government and elites. When they announce their decisions, the carbon elites and their political administrators will break the rules and use lies and violence to try to take back power. This happens in all revolutionary episodes. We have to be prepared for this. As soon as citizens’ decisions are made millions will have to come back onto the streets to ensure the people’s will is done. That we demand life not death. And nothing will stop us.

All hands on deck for zero emissions and geo engineering

Citizens’ assemblies need to be asked how to get to zero emissions within 2-4 years, an 80% cut in two years. Not “net zero” which enables the carbon addicts a get out clause of “over shooting” and bringing down the temperature with technologies that do not yet exist. People in the citizens’ assemblies will be selected randomly from the population and will need to have their deliberations shown live on TV so that the whole population can learn about the horrors of our situation. Cities and regions should hold their own assemblies and debates so legitimacy for a complete emergency draw down of the carbon economy wins popular patriotic support – that is, our country, all our traditions, are at stake unless we completely change course. Outcomes will involve decisions such as:

• Halving of the total national energy requirements within weeks: through banning of flying, fossil fuel car use, non-essential consumption, with all ongoing material production designed to last for the longest period possible (similar to a covid lockdown scenario but with local people being able to meet, socialise, and be politically active).
• The reappropriation of 90% of the assets of the top 10% income bracket of the population to fund this emergency transformation, as would happen in wartime.
• Massive investment in renewable energy and retrofitting of housing to the extent of removing all fossil fuel inputs into the economy within two years. A ban on all new construction and the appropriation of all empty housing to give to those in housing need.
• Massive investment in creating natural carbon sinks and geoengineering – the latter being used to the extent necessary to return to 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere.

All of this is beyond politics, it is objectively necessary. It will only be opposed by carbon psychopaths on the left and right whose pursuit of their private interests undermine the common good – that is, the need for our families, communities and nations to continue to exist. The situation is like a war or a national emergency – like covid. Everyone will have to come together. Otherwise we are done for. It’s as simple as that.

This is what needs to be done.

THE CLIMATE REVOLUTION IS BEYOND POLITICS

At 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures it will be 4C or more inland, 10°C hotter on a “hot day”; too hot for billions of people to grow food. A thousand million people will be forced to leave their homes ( ref: Future of the human climate niche )

The climate crisis is creating social collapse which will get worse and worse each decade.

Conservatives:
Allowing this to happen violates all our traditions, destroys families and communities, destroys our nations.

Liberals:
We face the destruction of all the progress towards freedom and prosperity built up over hundreds of years.

Radicals:
Corporate capitalism doesn’t just create vile inequality, it now creates global mass death. It has to be stopped.

Only a revolution can bring us together. Only when we remember that we are all connected, only when we remember we are not separate from nature but part of it, only then can we come together on the basis of the one human value on which we all can unite: that life is good and we must preserve it at all cost. Whatever it takes.

“We face a stark choice: Resistance or Complicity”

TAKE ACTION

“Only by engaging in civil resistance: breaking the laws of governments,
leading to arrest and prison, will we force them to change.
It’s too late for anything else”