Post by @adamgreenfield@social.coop

Sooooo I went to see the People’s Emergency Briefing, and I have to say the whole thing left kind of a bad taste in my mouth.

The screening was organized by a local solar installation company, and it amounted to a 90-minute infomercial for their services. However much I believe in those services, that’s just Not On.

It’s not so much that anything the film lays out is inaccurate – in fact, it was far and away the most Lifehouse-y presentation of climate-system collapse I’ve ever seen from an even remotely mainstream outlet – but that it’s couched in a normie-friendly, problem/solution framing where the “solutions” are…lobby your MP and install solar panels. In the home you own. And here’s Steve to tell you how.

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Adam Greenfield

@adamgreenfield@social.coop 3 days ago

In fact the only real call to action involved pivoted on consumer choices you could make as an individual: eat more plant-based foods, ride the bike to work, install a heat pump and so on. (They even used the term “carbon footprint,” and were surprised when I pointed out where that term originated.)

And I was like, my brother in Christ, every single last person in this room could do all of those things, but it won’t move the needle when the government just approved the development of a new North Sea gas field, a third runway at Heathrow, etc. etc.

Adam Greenfield

@adamgreenfield@social.coop 3 hr. ago

Continuing to hear from people that the ostensible “People’s Emergency Briefing” is not being received at all well, in various places around the UK.

Part of the problem I have with the film is that it positions itself as demi-official, and comes very close to outright deception in its graphic presentation. And it arrives at a time when, it has become known, the Starmer government actually suppressed the release of a reasonably comprehensive (and terrifying) report on the near-term implications of climate-system collapse for the UK. The clear insinuation is that the “People’s Emergency Briefing” *is* that document, finally being shared with a broader public.

It is not. What it *is* is a slickly produced packaging of excerpts from an event where a series of legitimate subject-matter experts presented their domain-specific findings, these clips shown in couch interviews with “ordinary Brits,” who are then pressed for their reaction.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/24/explainer-uk-climate-crisis-national-security-report-suppressed

the Guardian

Why is the UK’s suppressed climate national security report significant?

Warnings about the catastrophic effects of vital ecosystems collapsing were not published under previous prime minister

Adam Greenfield

@adamgreenfield@social.coop 3 hr. ago

(Between my faceblindness and my obliviousness to most mainstream culture, it escaped me completely, but I’m told that some of these “ordinary Brits” are well-beloved, household name-level celebrities.)

What really struck me as a failure about the film is that it pulls out all the stops in an effort to convince its audience that climate-system collapse is a real and present danger — and you know I think this is both entirely appropriate and well overdue — but gives people absolutely no clue what to do with that information.

No preparedness advice is offered, nor any sources thereof pointed to. No attempt is made to connect structural causative factors to their baleful consequences. The single explicit call to action in the film involves petitioning the prime minister to make a televised, nationwide, prime-time address about the crisis, like it was 1973 or something.

It was good at putting The Fear in people, but in an avowedly “apolitical,” infantilizing way. Pointless, infuriating.