My colleagues in XR were displeased with me for not defending the claim. The weeks following the interview were hellish. I tried to find my footing, but as the follow-up questions came at me, I simply didn’t know what to do, and it showed. I had sat in XR meetings arguing for us not to use it simply because a few scientists had mentioned it.
I knew the attention-grabbing number wouldn’t hold up. A popular BBC week-in-review show invited me to appear as a spokesperson for the group behind much of the activism, Extinction Rebellion, or XR.īut the BBC producers had done their research well because the first question produced the kind of deer-in-the-headlights moment that makes for great TV, if not great reputations: What was the scientific basis for the claim made by one of XR’s co-founders that 6 billion people would die because of climate change by the end of the century? This was October 2019, and thousands of environmental activists were carrying out protests around London as part of a two-week campaign to force government and corporations to act on climate change.
It took just eight minutes to send me back to square one. It took nearly two decades of hard work to gain a platform to talk about climate change.
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