#108 Rupert Read & Liam Kavanagh – Bring climate action outside the bubble

Rupert Read was until recently an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. He is a former spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion and co-director of the new Climate Majority Project. He has written several books, including This Civilisation is Finished, Parents for a Future and Why Climate Breakdown Matters and has been many times on the Today programme, QuestionTime, Newsnight, Politics Live, Al Jazeera, and more. Liam Kavanagh is also a co funder of the Climate majority project and a Cognitive & Social Scientist devoted to using his understanding of human motivation, ideology, and economics to aid more effective responses to the climate crisis. He has worked on three continents over 20 years doing applied social research, co-founded Life Itself, a community for responding to the poly-crisis, and written a book on how Western ideology contributes to climate change inaction. I met Rupert and Liam on zoom on October 6th to talk about the newly founded Climate Majority project. They work to accelerate citizen climate action towards system change, and help a mass movement to see its own power. They support promising initiatives organising citizen action in local communities, workplaces and professions.  The Climate Majority Project aims to help a majority of people in the UK who care about climate change to understand that they are powerful together, and take meaningful action, relevant to themselves and their communities. As well as ‘practical’ action, the project advocate the importance of cultures of support, political inclusivity and resilience: to help us face the trouble we’re in together.