Book Review: Love, Anger and Betrayal

Jonathon Porritt’s challenging book brings together a review of climate change facts and implications, together with the experiences of young climate campaigners under the NGO Just Stop Oil (JSO). These activists, operating within a policy environment that increasingly constrains meaningful activism, seek to give voice to their belief systems and fears for the damaged world they are inheriting, yet hope still to shape.

Although famously ‘hanging up its high vis jacket’ in March 2025, JSO was one influential strand within a dynamic nexus of activist NGOs addressing the multiple ramifications of climate change through non-violent direct action (NVDA), legal, and other routes. Love, Anger and Betrayal is inspiring and, at the same time, challenging and harrowing when one considers the diverse consequences locked in by gases already emitted into the atmosphere and further feedback loops. This is exacerbated by the evident wilful blindness and collusion of vested interests in politics, media and corporates (particularly the petrochemical industry) to maintain a self-interested status quo. Maintaining economic growth is mis-sold as beneficial for future generations, when the objective reality is that it inflicts upon them multiple dystopian ramifications consequent from climate disruption. Jonathon highlights that even this economic myopia is fatally undermined by authoritative figures, who describe how the current model of insurance and reinsurance may become non-viable as damages increase through climate disruption.

Testimony from young JSO activists is extensively quoted throughout the book. This demonstrates significant understanding of the science, but also a visceral realisation that their futures are stolen as they inherit a blighted world. Many have abandoned prospects for enjoying formerly conventional lifestyles, such as home ownership, families, and careers. They regard protest as the only sane response to an insane world. Climate change constitutes a totemic issue deeply interdependent with ecocide, injustices and inequalities, including genocide, colonialism, famine, soil degradation, food insufficiency, flood, drought, wildfires, sea level rise, heatwaves, rising numbers of environmental and climate refugees, rising fascism, and civil instability. Appreciating that the freedoms they enjoy today have been won by those who put their lives on the line – the Suffragettes, freedom riders of the civil rights movement, LGBT activists and more – these young people feel they have no choice but to fight through NVDA for the creation of a human-oriented world built on foundations beyond profit.

This weight of anticipatory grief about losing supportive capacities of the environment provides these young people with empathy for the powerless and for future generations: the ‘love’ of the book’s title; ‘anger’ and ‘betrayal’ need little further explanation. They find strength and coping mechanisms in acting faithfully with their beliefs and values, and in the kinship with others undertaking actions. They suffer perceived wrongful arrest and, not infrequently, imprisonment. They are given recognition in April 2023 by UN Secretary General António Guterres, saying, “Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals. But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels. Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness”.

The activists realise they have been consistently lied to throughout their young lives, with so much of their futures already lost under the collusion to self-beneficial inaction by the ‘death machine’ of politics, media and the petrochemical industry. Along with this has come a rising tide of repression of both facts and civil freedoms to protest about very real and clearly evidenced threats that are almost entirely dismissed or sanitised by news media and political discourse. The book highlights how the UK is increasingly becoming authoritarian in its treatment of protest. The Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing Act 2022 seems designed, at least in part, to stop non-violent protests against established vested interests. The 2023 Public Order Act includes stringent measures such as a ‘National Infrastructure’ clause that effectively removes rights to protest in relation to ‘climate crimes’, turning non-violent protestors into political prisoners and imposing injunctions and legal costs upon them. Surveillance has ramped up – the Whole Truth Five activists were arrested and subsequently convicted simply for participating in a Zoom call. Judges deny defendants their right to refer to the climate and have directed juries not to be guided by their consciences. This is in flagrant disregard of a marble plaque in the Old Bailey explicitly stating: "Jurors. You have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to your conscience”. As Porritt concludes, “…non-violent protest is routinely treated as a more serious crime than most forms of violence” and “When the maximum sentence for chaining yourself to railings is more than twice the maximum sentence for racially aggravated assault, anyone who cares about justice should be appalled”.

The facts and testimony of the young activists synthesised in Love, Anger and Betrayal highlight how future generations and all in the present have been let down not merely by a politics that fails to constrain (or even actively supports) a growth model dependent upon fossil fuel exploitation, but also by past generations of environmentalists through the effective failure of mainstream campaigning. This gives serious pause for reflection for environmental professionals to think about how we can marshal our efforts in the light of the real and urgent threats made plain to us by robust science. The book closes with another quote from António Guterres: “We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands”. There is no cavalry arriving at the eleventh hour this time around. The choice to act, or indeed not to act, is indeed very much in the hands of every one of us. The young JSO activists have manifestly demonstrated true leadership that is found wanting elsewhere in the policy environment.

Love, Anger & Betrayal: Just Stop Oil's Young Climate Campaigners
Jonathon Porritt | EAN/UPC: 9781912945542 | Published: July 2025 | Publisher: Mount House Press