Confessions of a 'Failed' Climate Activist — Ep197: Kumi Naidoo

Kumi Naidoo  

We are constantly speaking to ourselves. We don't know how to humble ourselves and understand where ordinary people are. The main reason climate activism has failed is that we have aimed all our narratives at the brain — science, policies, degrees, parts per million — and we've completely ignored the heart, the body and the soul. Just as we're saying, it cannot be government as usual and business as usual, I would go so far saying it cannot be activism as usual as well. Because if activism was so great, we shouldn't be in such a deep crisis that we are in now.

Bryony Worthington  

Hello, I'm Bryony Worthington, and this is Cleaning Up. This week, I've been reflecting on how change that benefits the many comes about, and how that relates to the peculiar and particular risk of global climate change. My friend Mike Brune teaches a course at Stanford University entitled, "Mandates, Markets and Movements," which neatly encapsulates the main drivers of change. I'm risking accusations of plagiarism here, but my own alliterative summary would be "Profits, Politics and People." And on the Cleaning Up podcast, we love having guests who are experts in harnessing the power of all three. So this week, it was my pleasure to sit down with veteran activist Kumi Naidoo, who's been fighting for equality for 45 years in roles ranging from Teenage protester to head of both Greenpeace and Amnesty International. Today, Kumi is the Payne distinguished lecturer at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and has recently taken up a new role as President of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty campaign, established by fellow storied campaigner, Tzeporah Berman, who featured on episode 131 of Cleaning Up. The treaty calls for a legal road map to halt the expansion of fossil fuels and has been endorsed by 16 nations, as well as 131 cities and sub-national governments. My conversation with Kumi took place late afternoon on the Stanford campus, and we covered a lot of ground, from the inspiration he drew from the heroes of the anti-apartheid movement to how his family have shaped his goals, and his reflections on why activism has thus far failed to win the battle for a stable climate. Please join me in welcoming Kumi Naidoo to Cleaning Up. 

BW  

Kumi, thanks for joining me this evening. I'm really looking forward to this conversation, and I wanted to start as we always do, which is, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are and what you do? 

KN

Thank you, Bryony, for having me on board. I am a South African activist who was born in the anti-apartheid movement. I got involved at the age of 15 in a national student uprising against the inequality in the education system. Didn't really know too much at the age of 15, but knew enough. In fact, I like to always say that the slogan at the front of the march was, 'we want equality.' By the time the slogan got to the youngest kids at the back of the march, they were chanting, 'we want a color TV,' because they thought that was the slogan at the front. But if I'm brutally honest, at that time, I wanted equality and a color TV almost equally, and both appeared equally unattainable. I got expelled from school as a result of that, which was, in a way, the best thing that could have happened to me, because it set me on a journey of committing to a lifetime of struggling for justice. I then faced much repression but was involved in the anti apartheid movement intensively, and then fled the country in 1987. For my sins, I got a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. So I went to Oxford for my exile years, if you want, 1987 to 90.

BW  

Hang on, is that because you went from being exiled from school to suddenly, Rhodes Scholar in Oxford? What led to that?

KN

Oh, I was expelled from school for... 

BW  

How did you then go to university? 

KN

Oh, so that's a good question, because I self-taught myself, and I had a few progressive teachers that would come secretly at night and teach us at home. And then I wrote the exam, the school qualification exam, the university entrance qualification exam, for adults who drop out of school and they go back after certain years. So I got to university, I studied law and then political science, and then while I was writing my honors degree in political science, I was facing a trial where I was charged with violating the state of emergency, which carried an automatic prison sentence because it was under a special law called the public violence law. And it's very interesting, many countries still carry a lot of the British colonial laws. That were left behind, and one of the laws that was left behind was called the common purpose principle. So all the government had to show was that I was in that particular demonstration, not that I threw a stone, because there's no evidence of me doing any violence. But the logic of that law was so long as you were in a crowd, and if you had a common purpose with whoever was throwing the stone or doing anything (you were guilty), which is very problematic legal concept. So I thankfully had the scholarship, and my friends who were already in prison were all just sending me messages saying, 'Please, please, please, get out of here.' Because, you know, at that time, to be honest, there were a few people who used to be macho and say, 'Oh, they can torture me. I will be able to withstand anything.' But the majority of us actually knew that the torture techniques were exceptionally "good" — in inverted commas. And so people were saying, "Just get out." And then I was out for three years, and then came back immediately when Mandela was released, and I was part of the transition to democracy.

BW  

This is impressive stuff. Coming from South Africa, from KwaZulu-Natal, your home state… You obviously have a knack, and you've got a very agile brain to be getting academic results that get you into Oxford and Yale. Is that fair to say?

KN

You know, people ask me sometimes, 'so you got the Rhodes Scholarship, how'd that happen?' I say, 'the selectors made a mistake.' When I went for the Rhodes Scholarship interview, it was very interesting. They asked me, 'So do you know what Cecil John Rhodes stood for?' One of the people on the panel said he was a colonizer and so on. And I was like, 22 years old, right? Sorry, 21 years old. And at that time, anything that you did as a young South African anti-apartheid activist, anything you did, whether you went to a party or whether you went for a scholarship interview, everything was a site of struggle. So me, when I went, there were 12 finalists, 11 of them white, and I'm the only person of color there. And they all add six As, you know, distinctions at high school, distinctions at universities. I didn't have that because I obviously was splitting my time between studies and activism. So I got asked this question by the one black woman interviewer on the panel of twenty. And she said, 'so why do you think so few black students have made it and applied?' And I said, because of the embarrassment of Cecil John Rhodes, and all of that. And so she said, 'How do you feel about it?' I said, 'Listen, I don't give myself much chance of getting this scholarship, but if I got it, I would take great glee from knowing that Cecil John Rhodes would be turning in his grave.'

BW  

This is such a story against the odds, managing to get to that kind of goal. What was the driving north star, that you believed education was key to basically unlocking some of the injustices? You clearly felt that was a...

KN

That's actually a sadder question than you can imagine, actually, because my mum committed suicide when I was 15 and she was 38 and that happened months before the national student uprising. And one of the things both my parents were super committed to, and many working class parents throughout the world know that the main route out of poverty is giving your children the best possible education. And when I was expelled from school at the age of 15, there were teachers and conservative people in the community where I lived, family members included — even though most of my family were supportive — they were saying things like, your mother will be turning in her grave now. You've ruined your life, you're going to be uneducated and so on. And to be honest, I thought I'd blown it, but then there were teachers who came up to me and said: Listen, you can go register for this exam. You don't have to give up. You have the intelligence to study alone from textbooks. In any case, the quality of education you're getting at the school is terrible anyway. And actually you can turn this into an advantage. And as Mandela often said, 'Education is the best weapon of liberation.' So we learned that very young. Mandela, even when he was president, was sending out those messages about educating yourself and so on. And I'm very grateful to my high school teachers as well as university teachers, who supported me throughout and especially for my mom. My memory of my mom, I felt I owed it to her to do the best, even after I got expelled, to give it the best shot. I didn't think I'd end up having a PhD from Oxford, but yeah...

BW  

Well, you achieved that goal, I think so. So let's fast forward. Mandela has been released. ANC is coming into government, and you'd had a really central role in some of the activism and the kind of calling for this moment. So were you tempted to go into the government at all? Talk us through that period.

KN

So I came back literally a month after Mandela was released. I was like, 'There's no way I'm staying here.' So I actually lapsed my status, which is a term that they have in Oxford where you stop the clock ticking, but you can come back at a later point. 

BW  

Like me with the House of Lords.

KN  

Exactly. So the clock stops ticking, but when you come back, you have to do some procedures. And so I go back (to South Africa), and I throw myself full time into helping to set up Mandela's movement as a legal political party to run for the first democratic elections. What I saw, even in those early days in 91, 92, 93, I saw the culture of the liberation movement changing. Whereas before Mandela was released and the organizations were legalized, we had a culture of sacrifice. If you participated, it was never about getting something for yourself, right? It was about what you gave and what you put in and what you sacrificed. But already people were positioning for this — am I going to be the mayor? Am I going to be the...  And you know, the words were not said as explicitly as I'm saying it, but you could see how people were behaving. And I decided I didn't want that. But I also saw that we were going to have a huge exodus of talent from civil society into the government, as it should be, because that's where most of the... because I say that during the anti apartheid movement, civil society was the biggest human resource agency in the country. The development agency, you know, giving people incredible opportunities to learn quickly, to learn on the job and so on.

BW  

 So let's fast forward a little so from this period you end up being head of Greenpeace International, then go on to Amnesty International. So what was it that propelled you from that national focus and this great passion for solving South Africa's inequalities to then suddenly, Greenpeace International? Tell us a bit about that.

KN 

So I go from adult education to then setting up and being the founding director of the South African NGO Coalition (SANGOCO) for three years, which is the body then that united what was left of civil society, because a lot of civil society organizations also perished because of funding and so on. Everybody wanted to fund Mandela. Money that was going to non-profit organizations, was going to the government and all of that. And so I was the founding director of the South African NGO Coalition SANGOCO. I did that for three years, and then I got tapped to be the head of the global equivalent of the South African NGO Coalition called CIVICUS, the world alliance for citizen participation. So for your listeners, CIVICUS is the equivalent, if you want, of the International Chamber of Commerce, but for the nonprofit sector. And in making that decision, there were personal factors, but the political factor was mainly a deep sense that as a South African and as South Africans, we were beneficiaries of international solidarity on a scale probably up to today, not matched by any struggle that had that extent of solidarity and support that we had from around the world. And there was a sense that actually, it'll be good to give back something to the global cause of justice. And then after CIVICUS 10 years, I was like, 'Oh, I'm never going to do anything global again.' And I was on a hunger strike to put pressure on the South African government under Mbeki not to support Mugabe any longer. In any case, while I'm on hunger strike, 19th day with water only, I get a call from the Greenpeace folks saying, 'would you consider applying for this position?' And I said, 'I'm deeply honored, and all of that, but I can't make such an important decision at this moment'. And that evening, my daughter, who had seen me on BBC, where I'd actually lost, you know, I looked very different. I'd lost a lot of weight. And she called and said, 'Dad, why are you doing interviews? I thought you're supposed to be conserving energy.' I said, 'The only people I spoke to were these BBC people, they came to my flat. And I'm taking your call, and I took a call from these people from Amsterdam who had called about Greenpeace.' And she said, 'What? What? What? What about Greenpeace?' And then I said, 'They wanted me to apply for the job as their Global Head of Greenpeace.' And so what did you say? And I said, 'I said, Bad timing.' And she says that for somebody who claims to be educated, you don't understand how climate change threatens my generation's future, and I hope you'll consider it after you finish your stupid hunger strike.

BW  

Oh, gosh, children can be brutal.

KN

And I have to tell you, it shook me. And when I eventually get to Greenpeace, when anybody asked me why, I didn't say because the climate crisis is so serious and we're having biodiversity loss. I said, because my daughter helped me see that the future was at stake. So I spent six years at Greenpeace, started at Copenhagen, and made it to Paris. And after Paris I left, and I said, 'never again to international work.' Because you don't have a life. You're 24/7, you're traveling like crazy. And I did a passion project, something I really want to do, which was a vision we all had to build an African-wide social movement, which I'm happy to say is thriving today, known as Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity. It's a collection of trade unions, NGOs, faith institutions, cultural, creatives and so on. And then Mary Robinson gives me a call out of the blue and says, 'Hey, you know Amnesty is going through difficult times at the moment, and I think you should consider applying.' And then various people lobbied me and I accepted that position, and that's how I landed it.

BW  

So I'm going to go backwards in time now and go back to that Greenpeace era, because that's when I first came across you. Our paths would have crossed. I would have been, I think, at Friends of the Earth during that period. And it was a period where climate change was being taken relatively seriously, right? We had a growing awareness there was political consensus and some important places, Europe and the UK in particular, were leading. What are your memories of that period at Greenpeace? What were the highs and lows, because you had some quite remarkable adventures while you were there.

KN  

I think the high points were when we were able to actually communicate to people in a way, which was far too infrequent, where people understood what we were talking about and where people were moved into action, right? So the low point, of course, was the collapse of Copenhagen, the outcome of the Copenhagen climate negotiations. We went to Copenhagen saying we want a fab deal, not a fabulous deal, but a fair, ambitious and binding deal. What we got out of Copenhagen, and every year since then, is a flab deal, full of loopholes and bullshit. And I think Paris, and what we got out of Paris, which I, like thousands of people, like you, worked our butts off to deliver there. I never saw Paris as 100% of the solution, but I saw it as a better solution than many of us thought we would get in Paris, given the political configurations at the time. I suppose, personally for me, like I did things there, that I was totally incompetent. I didn't know how to do it. I'll give you one example. I occupied an oil rig in Greenland and was arrested. And my brother goes on national television in South Africa. He's a world renowned optometrist, so he goes on television. They ask him, 'So what exactly was Kumi doing there?' And my brother, this educated guy, says, 'You know, I really don't have a clue exactly what he was doing. All I can tell you is it must be really important, because this guy can't swim to save his backside, and for him to take a risk, to go into the Arctic, it must be really important.' And when I get back home, one of the kids in my family says to me, 'Uncle Kumi, what a stupid slogan. Stop Arctic destruction. It means nothing to anybody. You guys are constantly talking to yourself, right?' So I ask this kid, 'tell me what would have been a better slogan.' And she says, 'Save Santa Claus now.'  Think about the brilliance of what the kid was saying. We are constantly speaking to ourselves. We don't know how to humble ourselves and understand where ordinary people are. The main reason climate activism has failed is that we have aimed all our narratives at the brain, science and policies, degrees, parts per million, and we've completely ignored the heart, the body and the soul, and that's why we have to make our climate messaging moving forward significantly more people-centric than it is. It has to be about jobs and water and land and housing and transport and agriculture and so on. 

BW  

It's an interesting point, because it was the green groups, really the green movement, Greenpeace included, and Earth scientists, who brought climate change into the public realm and raised it up the agenda. But then that did sort of cement it as something to do with polar bears and rainforests, rather than what it really is, which is a huge disruption to humanity's growth and prosperity, with a massive amount of burden falling on the people least able to afford it. So it's far more of a social and human story than an environmental story. But I guess it's just about where it emerged from. I guess that gave it that color. But there was a period — we were probably in similar meetings around the same time — when the UK was leading, say, the Gleneagles Summit. And I can remember a prep call with Tony Blair, the Prime Minister at the time, and it was clear to me that there were these two competing ideas trying to get his attention. One was Make Poverty History, and the other was a climate focus. We need to put climate on the agenda. And there was kind of an unhealthy competition between those two things. And yet, as you've just said it, the two things are totally intertwined and both are arguably incredibly difficult. So what do you focus on now, right now today, that gives you hope that we can position this challenge in the right way, use the right language, and then ultimately get to that hopeful future where a new energy system is going to both reduce pollution and parts per million in the atmosphere, and also hopefully bring a lot more people into prosperity and eradicate some of those inequalities. 

KN

So we have to recognize the moment we're in right, and we have to remind ourselves what Einstein said, when he said, 'the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, trying to get different results right.' And while, as one of the people who fought desperately to get the Paris outcome together with thousands and thousands of people, I am committed to making sure — imperfect as the Paris outcomes are — all of those things we need to hold on to. But we have to answer this question. What is the main cause of climate change? And we know that at least 85% of the problem can be attributed to our addiction to burning oil, coal and gas, which we call fossil fuels. And therefore it's unacceptable that it takes us 28 years of negotiations before we can even get the term fossil fuels mentioned in a climate negotiations, in one of the COPs. So right now, the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative. Again, I told myself I'm never going to do anything global again because it means you have to travel. And, you know, I just turned 60 a few days ago, literally, and I was like, I want to spend more time at home. But it was really hard when I was approached by the campaign to join, because when I look around, it's the only initiative I see that is at least being brutally honest, which is saying, 'whether we succeed in getting this or not, this is what gives us the best path forward.' Which is, we need to bring the global community of nations together for them to agree to a binding agreement where we can phase out fossil fuels, stop new investments. Given what we know now about how fossil fuels is the biggest driver and how close to the climate cliff we are, it should be easy, if we were thinking about our children's futures, to say no future investments, right? I'm not saying it's economically easy, but I'm saying in terms of the threat of climate change. And of course, we need to do that in a just transition way. But there's one point that I think that you and I, from your Friends of the Earth days, my Greenpeace and other roles, we failed very badly in not lifting up this argument a little bit more, right? And it's come to me in the last couple of months: assume for a moment, right, that the burning of oil, coal and gas, or fossil fuels, as we call it, did not contribute to climate change. Should humanity build its energy system on a source of fuel or a commodity that, by definition, is finite on a finite planet? It almost tells you that those in power don't understand — as all indigenous cultures do — that we borrow the Earth from our children, right? We're not giving it to them as a gift, right? We are in an addictive state, and with all addictions, it's very hard to break. We're addicted to fossil fuels. But the bottom line is, I don't know any moment in my life where there is such a high level of appetite by people around the world. Yes, we do have backward movements, right-wing shifts and so on. But still, I still say that. I can sense we have the largest constituency of people right now who are wanting to make big changes. They're wanting to build an energy system that is sustainable, durable, fair, equitable, all of that. They want to see changes in transport. They want to see changes in agriculture and so on. And I think even though people might feel very pessimistic about where the politics of the world is right now, I want to say that the optimism they can take from this current moment is the appetite for big, structural and systemic change, even though it's not necessarily 100% of the people in the world, is much higher than it's ever been before.

BW  

You've touched on a kind of feeling that everyone has at the moment, that the headwinds for this alternative energy system have increased quite a lot recently. Is there a sense in which you think that's because we're getting closer to that reality? It's darkest before the dawn? You know, that there's an increasing recognition that there is a change happening, and the people who benefit from the status quo are upping the ante to slow it down?

KN

Yes, and the reality is that it makes economic sense. Today, solar and wind are getting cheaper and cheaper, right? Battery storage facilities are getting stronger and stronger. And irrespective of what President Trump might say in the US — "drill, baby drill" — or a few remaining governments. By the way, right now, the only government in the world, the only elected leader in the world who denies climate science, is the President of the United States. Even the Saudis, for example, don't deny the science of climate change, right? And so basically, the reality of the economics of the energy system right now is that irrespective of what the few hold out governments in the world might be doing, the energy revolution from an economy driven by dirty fossil fuel based energy, to an economy driven by clean renewable energy, is unstoppable. In my judgment, I cannot see it being stopped. All these setbacks that we have, I would say, will slow things down a little bit, but I think it's a moment. Even in the United States, because there's enough states in the United States who are so advanced — including, ironically, red states — who are so advanced in terms of wind and solar and possibilities of geothermal and other things economically, it's not going to make sense for them to turn away. And I guess I should say to you, Bryony, that the one sentence I say most in every speech I give these days, or any engagement I have, is that in the moment of history that we find ourselves in, pessimism is a luxury we simply cannot afford.

BW  

I just want to go back to this point, though, that if all of that's true, all the economics of the technologies are inevitable. What role are movements playing today? 

KN  

So you might be surprised to hear my self description, as somebody who's been in movement since the age of 15. I start off by saying, If I were to write a book now, it'll be called reflections of a failed activist, right? Because success cannot be what we had in our heads. Success has to be read by what society needs us to deliver. And let's be blunt and brutal and self critical, right? Let's claim no lies and claim no easy victories. Where we are right now is absolutely where we should not have been. When we went to Copenhagen in 2009 we said, 'This is the moment we have to get it done and get a deal and so on.' And here we are in 2025 and if you ask yourself, yes, we have made progress here, progress there, but it's baby steps and incremental tinkering in the right direction, where we needed bold action. So where we are now, movements play a very, very important role. But we must be completely honest, we live in a world where 88% of the population of the world lives in the Global South. 70% of the countries in the world are in the Global South. When we look at our movements at the global level, our movements don't come anywhere towards reflecting that reality. We need to use arts and culture more. We need to speak in a more people-centric way. We need to draw on science, but don't try to pretend that we are scientists and sound like scientists, because most scientists are not understood by ordinary people. And most importantly, we have to, in this moment of uncertainty, recognize we're dealing with a massive eco-anxiety and climate-anxiety problem, and we need to create multiple options for people to be able to participate in generating the solutions. Because the biggest antidote to the global mental health crisis that climate change has brought will be participation and people being encouraged to do something positive, even if that action in itself might not deliver the full result. And I'm totally, totally committed to the idea that participation is going to be the biggest antidote to despair, anxiety and distress that people are going to be feeling when they think their children and their children's children's futures are being wiped away.

BW  

On that thought though of participation. I mean, my experience of being involved in a movement, to ask for something to change, is to use parliamentary democracy as the main mechanism. So you could go and talk to your representative, your MP and ask them to sign up to certain new law, and you could create a groundswell of opinion that led to a political pressure that was then resulted in an Act of Parliament, and at the national level, that's possible, but when it comes to the international level, we don't have a governance system that lends itself to that kind of representative democracy. So what's the proxy? 

KN  

So we have to do what you were saying. To use our defective and rather weak parliamentary processes and political systems that we have. I push back very strongly when people look at the United... I agree that if you take the United States, it's not a democracy, but a liberal oligarchy, right? And by the way, way before Elon Musk and so on, if you really analyze who has power. But the tendency in some movements to say politics is dirty and we stay away from it is defeatist. It cannot be the right strategy. I will put my neck on the line and say broken as our — I mean the UK system is built on a minority, basically. If you look at any ruling party in the US, over the last 20 years, they've had the equivalent of a 30% mandate at most, right? When you look at the absence of proportional representation, the people who don't vote and so on, they actually have mandates at about 30-35%. Modi in India, same story, if you look at it. So it's not by any way a genuine expression of the full will of the people. Be that as it may, we cannot abandon the most powerful sector of society, and we have to do our best to get the best out of a broken system. But it, of course, cannot be putting all our eggs in just the election process. We have to understand where the other power centers in society are. We underestimate the faith community far too much. If we can get our faith leaders who actually command the biggest constituency of any organized forms of civil society, if they can be mobilized. Right now, the faith leaders are coming forward. We need to bring them and make them be in the front line of our movements. The other movement that is critically important is the trade union movement. When I joined Greenpeace in 2009, people used to talk about red-green tensions. Sharon Burrow, the first woman to lead the global trade union movement, and I had a relationship from the global Call to Action Against Poverty, and we then started building what we call the Red-Green Alliance. And we, in fact, in Rio+20, we were about to meet with Ban Ki-Moon, and we were looking at each other's notes, and she's as naughty as I am, she said, "Why don't you use my notes and I use your notes?" So we did something like that. And there she was, she went before me, and she was banging on about climate change, and you could see poor Ban Ki-Moon wondering, "why is this trade union lady going on about climate?" And then she said, "Secretary General, you might wonder why, as a trade unionist, I am so committed to climate change? Because as a mother and as a human being, I realize there are no jobs on a dead planet." So movements basically are critically important, but we should not accept, just as we're saying, it cannot be government as usual and business as usual, I would go so far saying it cannot be activism as usual as well, because if activism was so great, we wouldn't be in such a deep crisis that we are in now.

Michael Liebreich   

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BW  

When you were talking there about the way in which parliamentary democracy is never truly representative of all of the will of the people, apart from maybe Australia, where it's illegal not to vote, but in our international governance structures, we have this kind of quite weirdly enforced view that everything has to be consensus, even though the building blocks that have led up to this, these nation states negotiating is not, they're based on majority. In the process of negotiation, we require 100% consensus, which is a recipe for disaster. Is it not time? I think Al Gore at Davos very recently said we need to be getting into qualified majority voting in order to make the right decisions and not be held hostage to one or two or five countries for whom the fossil economy is their economy, and you could probably put the US in that category now. So at what point do we say we need better rules at an international level that allow us to solve this, you know, impending crisis which affects absolutely everybody?

KN

At what point? 30 years ago. So that's clear. I mean, that's one of the downsides of the COP climate negotiations, right? Because it is on consensus. And basically, I've been to many COPs, and I know you have as well. The last days of the COPs, you know, there's the two week scramble, and then they extend a little bit. And I also looked at it, and I used to say to myself, 'this is consensus by fatigue.' You know, literally, people are just like, 'oh my god, let's just sign this thing and get home, otherwise it's never going to end.' And that's why the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative is saying what we need to do is get the most ambitious countries who are serious about doing what humanity needs to do to secure our children's future, to take the lead, right? So yes, as I talk to you, there are 16 countries that have endorsed it, including two fossil fuel exporting countries: Colombia and Timor Leste. And once we get 30 countries... I mean, with the landmine treaty, we didn't have every country involved, right? There were 50 countries coming together, and what they did was they created a draft at the first meeting that Canada convened, they put forward an ambitious treaty, and they didn't want everybody. And we as well, don't want everybody coming now, because if you brought, say, the US and Saudi Arabia in, they're going to water down the commitment, and we'd be having the kinds of fights we have at the COP. What we are looking at, at the fossil fuel treaty, is a standalone process that we get the most ambitious countries to step forward and start the negotiations. You want to join? One: commit to no more fresh investments into fossil fuels; Two: the fastest possible phase out on a country by country basis, where you can put your interests forward as a nation and say, 'Listen, we have such a high level of dependency at the moment. We know this is the right thing to do, but we need 15 years by the time we can phase out what we have and build other non-polluting economic activity.' And Three, and the most important part of it, obviously, is:  do that in a just and fair transition way. So nobody is suggesting that any of this is easy to do, but I am totally convinced right now that the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty process can give us a breakthrough. I mean, if you look at what we can learn from history, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty didn't come from government. It came from citizens from your country, CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and similar movements around the world. And that's what you're seeing here. What's interesting, even in the United States, and in many parts of the rich countries of the world, maybe the national governments have not yet joined, but here in the US, California, Philadelphia, you know, states and cities, and in Europe, states and cities and so on, are stepping forward and endorsing the treaty. And of course, in the end, they are not the ones who have power to negotiate, but that's going to percolate up. That’s what our hope is. 

BW  

And as you were talking there, I was just thinking those conditions could be met by the UK, for example, potentially. If, at the moment, we're saying the North Sea is kind of done right, if we're getting money from the North Sea in the future, it's from offshore wind. Don't you need a European nation, like Sweden or the UK involved in this process? It can't really just be absolutely Southern Pacific. 

KN

No, absolutely. And so through this podcast, I call upon any European leader listening to this, right? You carry a major historical obligation. It is your part of the world that told the rest of us that fossil fuels was the way to go, historically speaking, 

BW  

The UK particularly, yes.

KN

And the UK particularly so. I would say that there is a possibility here for redeeming activity on your part, also to deal with the horrible legacy of slavery and colonialism that you gave to the rest of the world, to step forward and do the right thing now, to actually ensure that we can save our children and their children's future. So right now, when we look at Europe and the politics in Europe, we hope for countries like Iceland, Spain and Ireland and potentially Belgium, with this new government now stepping forward. We think that the UK absolutely should join. If we go with what words have come out of the mouths of the citizens of a particular country, and the government of the country, the UK should be able to be on board right now.

BW  

I'm just thinking rather than... I mean, I agree with you appealing to the moral. The moral case actually works very well. When we were asking the UK to lead on a legally binding carbon budget process, we used moral arguments and said, you know, as the home of the Industrial Revolution, we should do this. And we also said, if we lead, others will follow. And in this case, I think there's an additional argument which is very persuasive, which is: if you want to leave any of your oil and gas reserves in the ground, it's a hard case to make if you just think your neighbor is going to pull out more. So an international approach, where there is some kind of plan to do this collectively is the only way that's going to work. Otherwise, you just get this waterbed effect where sacrificing the part of one country is disregarded, and someone else just produces more. So there's a need for a plan. But the problem we have, of course, is it always comes down to politics. It can always be spun that this is somehow activists calling for all fossil fuels to be stopped. "Tomorrow, you're not gonna be able to drive your kid to school. Your bills are gonna skyrocket." And that's the weakness, isn't it, that when you're trying to get through to everyday people, it's very easy to spread fear. And how do we counter that? We've had a wonderful episode with John Marshall of Potential Energy, who said the only way out is to sell love, the love for the things that we all value. And out of love, we're going to have to do this. We're going to step up and protect what we care for.

KN

What we say in the fossil fuel treaty is we have to get people to protect what they love: our families, our communities, the natural assets around us, whether it's a park, a forest, a river and so on. And we have to do this in a way that is hopeful. Guilt alone and historical responsibility alone cannot be what we're going to shift people on. We have to convince the UK and the countries in the north and south that actually this is going to be of benefit to your people, to your societies. And yes, the transition might have some inconveniences and some pain in it, but actually, to be honest, we're not asking people to give up anything. We're saying give up pollution. That's what we're saying.

BW  

But not to end on a negative note, though, Kumi, but in this idea of prosperity and everything, there's a hopeful vision out beyond fossil fuels. I mean, Greenpeace is famous for being anti-nuclear, and if I've looked at this technology. I don't want to come across as a complete fan girl for nuclear, but it is providing a big chunk of clean electricity. It's not going to be in every country, everywhere, but say for China, who has such a high dependence on coal and has got the engineering capabilities to bring nuclear into the mix at an increasing capacity, are you still vehemently anti-nuclear?

KN

Okay, so where I stand is this right? In retrospect, if I think about it, for Germany, where they had functioning nuclear plants...Probably shutting it down when we pushed to shut it down, in retrospect turns out, especially with the war in Ukraine and Russia and all of that, because they've gone back to coal. However, in terms of fresh new investments today, the economics don't make sense. So the way I put it in very simple terms is that nuclear power is still too expensive. It's still too dangerous. And I'll tell you the dangerous thing. And as a solution to climate change, it will deliver too little too late. So let me just take those words very quickly. So on expense, you can look at the International Energy Agency's projections of a unit of nuclear and so on, and it is far too expensive compared to solar and wind, which are on a declining cost level.

BW  

I'll obviously give you a chance to get through your points. And I'm not here to disagree, but the difference that nuclear gives is it's an infrastructure investment and it's a cost that's amortized over 80 years. And solar, whilst it's wonderful, it's quick, but it only lasts for 15 to 20 years. We do need speed, so I'm not anti-solar, I think solar is amazing.

KN  

So then the second thing is the danger of it. So assuming we accepted, if the nuclear industry came to us and said, 'we can guarantee you that there will never be any human error in the building of a nuclear plant.' And we believed that. If they said, 'we can convince you that there will never be any extreme weather events, like a tsunami that will have the impact that it had on Fukushima.' We accept that. Then they say, 'There won't be any technical failures.' We accept that. The one thing that they cannot convince us of, and by the way, not that we can generally be 100% convinced with those statements, but let's say, for argument's sake... But the storage of spent nuclear waste at the end of the nuclear cycle is still an issue that remains unresolved. But on the too little too late question, let me pose a question to you, what is the fastest it takes to build a nuclear plant? 

BW  

Well, I think there's a difference between where you're building. UAE, Korea, China, we've got a good track record. Western democracies like the US and Europe are terrible. But it's also the choice of reactor. So we have these very large cathedral scale reactors, which definitely have cost overruns, complexities and it is slow, right? There's no doubt about it. I suppose the hope is that this is both a sprint and a marathon, right? We need solar, and when sprinting ahead, and my sense is to get China off coal, 1,000 gigawatts of coal, we need a marathon of using everything we can to get that reliable system that's got a billion-plus people relying on electricity and electrifying their economy really fast with electric cars everywhere. That's going to need everything we've got, and nuclear is part of that. 

KN 

So what my understanding is, I'm not a specialist in this, is that when Russia, for example... if you look at Russia and right now, let's be blunt about it, given geopolitics, the country that would be best placed to do nuclear expansion of technology is not the US in terms of where they have support in the Global South, it's going to be Russia more than any other country, right? That's the reality, through BRICS. Russia, and obviously China. So when I look at say, let me talk about my country, South Africa. Because of the scale of corruption that is so endemic and so on, I would not trust my government right now.

BW  

And as you said, it was a deal with the Russians. 

KN  

But if you look at Russia... When Russia builds a nuclear plant in Russia, start to finish, before the global need for environmental impact assessments and so on extends it a bit as well, you're talking about seven years. When Russia builds a plant outside of their own country, there are cases where it's dragged on for as many as 30 years, or never got completed in one or two cases. So if we're saying that we need to move quickly, I'm not sure that this is the solution. The only other thing I would say is that we cannot separate the question of water scarcity, right, to the question of what energy choice we make.

BW  

No, agreed. 

KN  

Coal, obviously, is a big water user, and so is nuclear.

BW  

I think we're going to wrap it up here, but I did want to, just for our audience's sake, explain that we are here at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. Why are we here, Kumi, what brings you to Stanford?

KN

I'm a visiting lecturer here. I have a grand title called the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute, that's the umbrella body. And I'm sitting at the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law. And I'm here till June of 2025, and I've been using this opportunity to reflect on the question of how activism can win faster and bigger. When I was approached for this role, I was told by the very nice head of the Freeman Spogli Institute, Mike McFaul, who used to be President Obama's ambassador to Russia. He said, 'We've had heads of state, ministers, heads of UN agencies, the head of the CIA. We never had an activist before.' And so I've used this time to do the work that I've been doing on artivism, to do the thinking and engage intellectually. And as you know, when you're in movements, especially when you're running something with Greenpeace and Amnesty and so on, your brain almost switches off. So I've at least been able to insert myself back into double checking the sort of things that I'm saying in speeches and so on, so that's been helpful. But to be honest with you, the main reason I'm here is also for personal healing. My wife and I are dealing with the loss of our son through suicide, and she wanted to be in a place which was a bubble so she could heal. And you don't get any more of a bubble than Palo Alto, California. And we are also dealing with some other very difficult traumas. And I have to say that this place, this opportunity, has been good for healing. Now that there's a new president in place, I don't know how good it's going to be for healing, so I'm glad I'm at the end of my time here. We cannot be in a state of defeat right now, we need a state of optimism, and I really believe that there might be something good in having the kind of administration we have in the United States right now, because it might help different parts of the world unite in different coalitions and then encourage the vast majority of Americans actually who really want to hold on to the international conventions and norms that we've built. So I would urge people that this is not a time for anti-Americanism and that kind of nonsense. Now is a time to build alliances with those within the United States who are wanting to do the right thing. And I can guarantee you, it doesn't matter if President Trump pulled out of the Paris agreements. You will see in Brazil in November this year that there will still be delegations from the US, from different states, from different cities and so on. And let's work with those folks, and ultimately, let's hope sanity will prevail amongst the US electorate, as well as amongst the current government in power.

BW  

My sense is that the performative nature of this kind of very polarized swinging of political discourse in the US is that it doesn't change the fundamental economics of the global energy system, and it doesn't change physics, and physics rains down upon us ever, ever more frequently — the impacts of climate change. So there's momentum, there's movement, there's a need that needs to be addressed. And if the US steps back for a bit, other people will step forward, and there'll be lots of south to south collaboration that we'll see more of. 

KN  

Yeah, the difficult thing is the money.

BW  

But there's money in other parts of the world too, right? It's not all in Palo Alto,

KN

Too much is here. 

BW  

Thank you so much 

KN 

Thank you for having me, thank you. 

BW  

So that was Kumi Naidoo, activist, President of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. As usual, we'll put relevant links in the show notes. My thanks go to Oscar Boyd, our producer, Austin Downs, our videographer, Jamie Oliver, our editor, and the rest of the team who make the Cleaning Up podcast and the Leadership Circle possible. We hope you enjoyed this conversation, please join us at the same time next week for another episode of Cleaning Up.

ML  

Cleaning Up is brought to you by members of our new Leadership Circle: Actis, Alcazar Energy, Davidson Kempner EcoPragma Capital, EDP Portugal, Eurelectic, the Gilardini Foundation, KKR, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation, SDCL and Wärtsilä. For more information on the Leadership Circle, please visit cleaningup.live, that’s cleaningup.live. If you’re enjoying Cleaning Up, please make sure you subscribe on Youtube or your favourite podcast platform, and leave us a review, that really helps other people to find us. Please recommend Cleaning Up to your friends and colleagues and sign up for our free newsletter at cleaninguppod.substack.com. That’s cleaninguppod.substack.com.