Cerebus
Extinction Rebellion told us the world was ending.
The climate was going to kill us all.
We were staring down the permanent end of the human species. The foreclosure of all future experience, consciousness, and civilization.
The last possible category of urgency.
Radical disruption was justified because extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, and when the species is under immediate threat, blocking a road is a modest response.
Gluing yourself to a government building is practically restrained; the urgency demanded nothing less.
So where did everybody go?
The activists who chained themselves to bridges, who glued their palms to roads, who informed commuters, construction workers, and nurses trying to get to their shifts that the planet was dying and that this was the only rational response – they’ve all largely moved on.
The XR chapter accounts that posted daily CO₂ readings and heat-death projections now repost “From the River to the Sea” graphics.
The people who told you that climate change was an extinction-level event, that every other political concern was secondary to the survival of the species, are now marching for a different cause entirely.
So what does it mean that the people who literally named themselves after the idea of mass extinction have, in significant numbers, moved on to something else?
What happened to the emergency?
Since approximately 2023, a significant portion of the climate activist ecosystem – particularly the more radical end, the extinction-or-bust crowd – has shifted its visible focus toward Palestinian solidarity.
The road-blockers, the headline-grabbers, the people who threw tomato soup at various paintings, who insisted that climate change was the singular civilizational issue of our time, are now at pro-Palestine marches, posting about Gaza, organizing around a very different and very local emergency.
Nobody in this space wants to talk about this openly, because doing so feels like a trap – you’re either attacking Palestinian rights or defending climate inaction.
But it’s not actually about Palestine.
It’s about logic.
And what it means to declare something an existential emergency and then visibly redirect your energy elsewhere while the emergency remains unresolved by any of your own metrics.
Taking the measurements XR et al wanted us to accept seriously, the climate hasn’t improved. The global average temperatures they chanted about keep rising.
The IPCC timelines the movement cited as proof of urgency haven’t been revised in a hopeful direction.
The tipping points are no closer to being avoided.
On practically every benchmark used to justify their own radical framing, the situation has worsened.
Logically, the extinction must still be underway.
And yet.
Think about what it actually means to believe – really believe, not rhetorically believe – that human extinction is the most likely outcome of current climate trajectories within a generation or two. That millions - billions - of people are in immediate danger.
How do you behave if that’s true?
The argument for climate activism at the extreme end was “this is the problem; nothing else matters until we solve it; the house is on fire, and we refuse to argue about the curtains.”
XR’s founding principles explicitly framed climate change as an existential threat, rendering ordinary political activity inadequate.
That’s why road-blocking was justified.
That’s why disrupting infrastructure was justified. Normal rules don’t apply when extinction is on the table.
If you genuinely believe that human civilization faces imminent collapse due to climate change – not disruption, not hardship, extinction – that belief carries an enormous logical weight.
You have to treat your chosen threat as categorically different from every other political concern, because by your own account, it is.
You don’t take breaks from it.
You don’t decide that another cause is more pressing this news cycle, because there is no cause more pressing than the elimination of the species.
You don’t pivot.
You can’t.
If climate change is genuinely an extinction-level event, then every other political cause is a rearrangement of various deck chairs.
You can’t claim the stakes are civilizational and then treat the cause like a hobby that competes for time with other hobbies.
There are two ways to read what’s happened:
The first explanation: any extinction framing was always emotionally manipulative and instrumental; a way to claim moral urgency, to justify disruption, to demand that their concerns be treated as non-negotiable.
IE: it was never a sincere assessment of existential risk.
But of course, if you block a road and tell someone they’ll be complicit in the death of the species if they don’t listen to you, and then six months later you’re blocking a different road for a different cause, the broader public will start to suspect that the blocking was the point, and the cause interchangeable.
Explanation two: they did believe it, and this is who they are anyway. This is, in some ways, more troubling. It suggests a coherent internal logic unrelated to threat assessment. The activists who believed climate change was an extinction-level event and still abandoned that focus for a different issue are ideologues. Their activism is tribal, not intellectual. They go where the energy goes. They follow the movement, not the argument. And if that’s true, then the entire discourse around existential risk, tipping points, and civilization collapse was never really about any of that in the first place. It was about belonging to something that felt important.
Neither interpretation suggests that the activists were engaged in a serious, analytical assessment of threats to human welfare and responding accordingly.
Both suggest something more like a social and emotional ecosystem doing what such ecosystems do: chasing intensity.
If climate change is a serious problem – and I believe it is, even if the extinction framing oversold it – then it needs advocates who stay with it; who do the long, unglamorous work of policy change, legal challenge, tech development, and cultural shift. Who are still there in year ten and year twenty, when it’s no longer the most emotionally intense thing in the news cycle.
What it doesn’t need is a movement that uses extreme claims to generate maximum visibility, extracts whatever social capital is available, and moves on when the cultural moment shifts.
Social media “cause du jour” activism // shiny object syndrome damages the odds of anything productive being accomplished.
Your opponents point to the pivot as evidence that the movement was never serious, and you exhaust the goodwill of persuadable people who were starting to pay attention.
Activist movements in liberal democracies have increasingly come to function as social ecosystems rather than strategic interventions. The goal isn’t always to change a specific outcome; it’s to maintain a position of moral visibility. To be seen as someone who cares, who acts, who stands against the right things at the right time.
The underlying mechanism was “locate the most morally legible cause in this moment and align with it publicly.”
Climate change served that function for a period.
The conflict in Gaza now serves it.
It’s hard not to imagine that tomorrow it’ll be something else.
Climate change is not necessarily an extinction-level event in the dramatic sense that XR oversold, but it is a profound and accelerating problem with consequences that will be felt worldwide for generations.
That argument deserved better advocates; or at least believers, people who would stay with it past the point where it was socially rewarding and offered a viral high ground.
Instead, it got a movement that burned bright, made extraordinary claims it wasn’t prepared to sustain, and moved on when something more emotionally immediate and more social media-friendly came along.
The house may well be on fire.
But the people who told you to call the emergency services have already left for a different emergency, and they don’t seem particularly troubled by the contradiction.
That should tell you something about how seriously you should take the next group that arrives at your door with news of an imminent extinction.
Ask them where they’ll be in three years. See what they say.