Rupert Read argues that climate breakdown is no longer an abstract danger parked safely in the future. Talking to The Mint, he warns of clear and present danger with artificial intelligence (AI) at the helm.
Read: “We really can’t think climate now without thinking AI as well.” But Read’s concern goes beyond the direct emissions. If AI works as promised by its promoters, he argues, it may accelerate the very economic system driving ecological collapse. It could, he asserts, make fossil fuel prospecting more efficient. It could intensify growth. It could turbocharge disinformation.
That is one side of Read’s view of the emerging predicament. The other is the collision between climate instability and geopolitical shock. He points to the possible disruption around the Straits of Hormuz and the prospect of a major El Niño event as an example of how crises may now combine rather than arrive neatly one by one. The result, he says, could be “unprecedented challenges from the adaptation and resilience perspective”.
For Read, the central shift is that climate has moved from being “an abstract problem for our children and our grandchildren” to something “here and now”. Worse, it now overlaps with other destabilising forces. We are no longer facing a single-issue environmental campaign. We are facing a polycrisis.
That does not mean despair. Indeed, Read sees the next wave of disruption as a grim but important opportunity. “We’ve got to use this crisis for all it’s worth,” he says. It may become, he suggests, “a sort of dress rehearsal” for the wider societal and civilisational collapse risks now being discussed, however reluctantly, inside government.
“There are people within government who are as concerned as many of us are. They tell us that the government is trying not to let the citizenry know about these facts.”
Read refers to two suppressed or partially suppressed UK reports that, in his view, show that serious people inside the state understand the danger. One is from Defra. The other is a National Security Assessment on “loss and ecosystem collapse”. He says the latter is particularly concerned with Britain’s food resilience, or lack of it. His interpretation is stark: “There are people within government who are as concerned as many of us are. They tell us that the government is trying not to let the citizenry know about these facts.”
This is where resilience becomes political. If governments will not speak honestly, civil society has to create the spaces where honesty becomes possible.
But Read rejects the idea that previous disasters have had no effect. The Australian wildfires, he argues, did leave a lasting mark on Australian politics. Flooding disasters in Spain have shifted the politics of climate planning there. Covid, despite the squandered opportunities, changed some people’s relationship with nature and locality. None of these was the great awakening. But each created openings.
The task, then, is to be ready before the crisis hits. That means warning people without exaggeration, and offering routes into action rather than paralysis.
“There isn’t any kind of one wake-up call that has the kind of dramatic effect of changing everything forever,” he says. “But these big events are potentially open to being wake-up calls.”
The task, then, is to be ready before the crisis hits. That means warning people without exaggeration, and offering routes into action rather than paralysis. It also means reclaiming some unfashionable words. One of them is stockpiling.
Read knows the image problem. Stockpiling conjures up the isolated “mad prepper”. But he argues that, done early and collectively, it is common sense and socially responsible. “Stockpiling at the last minute, clearing out your local supermarket, when everyone else needs to get something from it, is obviously antisocial,” he says. “If you stockpile in advance and encourage other people to do so, that’s prosocial.”
He is not talking about hoarding for individual survival. He is talking about households, neighbours, community groups and governments building buffers before disruption arrives. He says some of the food he is storing is explicitly intended for others: “This is not necessarily for me, this is stuff that I can give away.”
In Britain, this remains a difficult conversation. Read contrasts the UK’s silence with countries where governments have encouraged citizens to prepare and where strategic food reserves are being reconsidered. “We should be doing a hell of a lot more at the national level in this country,” he says, especially because Britain is unusually vulnerable on food.
The Climate Majority Project, where Read works, is trying to build the social infrastructure for this shift. Its SAFER campaign — Strategic Adaptation for Emergency Resilience — works with communities on preparedness over the coming months and decades. The work ranges from stockpiling to citizen science, from influencing councils to building local resilience networks.
Fire is a recurring concern. Britain is not used to thinking of wildfire as a serious threat, but Read believes that will change.
Local government matters. Read believes councils may become more important as national governments become overwhelmed by serial crises. Even modest council involvement can help sustain local initiatives such as climate cafés, resilience networks, flood monitoring, water monitoring and, increasingly, fire preparedness.
Fire is a recurring concern. Britain is not used to thinking of wildfire as a serious threat, but Read believes that will change. Speaking in Ilkley, near the Yorkshire moors, he asked a local climate group what it was doing on adaptation. It had strong work on mitigation, transport and carbon reduction, but little on resilience. His suggestion was direct: communities in such places may need fire watching, local plans and practical preparedness.
The deeper point is that resilience is not only about emergency equipment. It is about social connection. “For so many actual unexpected disasters, it is citizens who are first responders,” he says. Any activity that builds community solidarity — even a rugby club — can become part of climate resilience. People who know each other are more likely to help each other.
This is why Read speaks of “silent majorities”. Many people are frightened or concerned but believe they are alone. The Climate Majority Project’s recent report, Mobilizing Silent Majorities, argues that this silence is partly an imposed illusion. People need spaces where they realise their private fears are widely shared.
The People’s Emergency Briefings are one such route. When 20 or 200 people gather locally to watch and discuss the crisis, Read says, the key is not just the film or the briefing. It is what happens afterwards. Do people meet again? Do they form a network? Do they join an existing group? Do they begin practical work?
For some, adaptation still sounds like defeat. Read thinks that objection is fading because reality has overtaken it. “We are, as Churchill would have said, in the age of consequences now,” he says. The conventional climate strategies — COP diplomacy, business-led change, party politics and activist mobilisation — have all achieved something, but not enough.
His argument is not adaptation instead of mitigation. It is adaptation as the route back to agency. Community resilience gives people visible, near-term results. It builds confidence, solidarity and collective efficacy. From there, Read believes, mitigation and decarbonisation may be rebooted.
“If we take adaptation seriously,” he says, “it gives us our best chance, probably not a great chance, but our best chance.”
Read and Caroline Lucas are working on a report on “climate popularism”… It is an attempt to speak to where people are, not where campaigners wish they were.
There will also be anger. Anger at governments that failed to prepare. Anger at fossil fuel companies, disinformers, the super-rich and the far right. Anger, Read predicts, at data centres consuming water and electricity while ordinary people face rising costs and insecurity. That anger will need to be harnessed politically, without collapsing into polarisation.
Read and Caroline Lucas are working on a report on “climate popularism”: a politics that connects cost of living, adaptation and ecological reality while building a depolarising majority. It is an attempt to speak to where people are, not where campaigners wish they were.
The mood is frightening, but not hopeless. Read reaches for the phrase used by his late mentor Joanna Macy: “active hope”. This is not optimism. It is a discipline of action under conditions of danger.
“It’s a time for courage,” he says. “It’s a time for realism and deep pragmatism. And it’s a time when we find what we’re really made of.”
The crisis, he concludes, could still be “the making of us”. Not because it will be benign. It will not. But because it may force the return of seriousness, solidarity and practical common purpose. In a brittle society, those may be the most important reserves of all.
