Two guests, a climate scientist and a climate prisoner. Still on Parole for just talking about a protest, UK Co-Founder of Extinction Rebellion Roger Hallam joins us. Ironically his two latest books argue against any violence in the climate movement. As promised for listeners hit by extreme rains, world-recognized expert Dr. Hayley Fowler, Newcastle University, explains the latest on hard rains and flash floods on a warming planet.
Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (57 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)
A PRISONER OF CONSCIENCE
ROGER HALLAM
He left studies on civil disobedience to practice it. Roger Hallam was a founder of Extinction Rebellion in 2018. More recently Hallam received a historic five year prison sentence. He was accused of planning to block a major British highway – to protest damage to the atmosphere. While incarcerated in HM Prison Wayland, Hallam wrote a book: “Suicide: The Political and Legal Implications of Creating Endless Mass Death”. With the help of Robin Boardman and a Preface by Chris Hedges, the book was published in January 2026.
Just a year earlier, this supposedly dangerous climate activist wrote a passionate defense of non-violent action. In answer to Swedish author Andreas Malm, Hallam’s book is called “How to Blow Up a Society: The Derangement of Left Fascism.”
Here to talk about it all is Roger Hallam.
Listen to or download this 31 minute interview with Roger Hallam in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
At first “Endless mass death” sounds over-dramatic. Then a study published in Nature Medicine estimated over 60,000 heat-related deaths across Europe in 2022. Lancet Countdown reports half a million heat-related deaths globally – every year. We already sleepwalking our way into “endless mass death” as the planet heats up.
In speeches and writing Roger claimed four billion people could die because of climate change. What kind of fringe blogger or NGO makes such an extreme claim? No, this estimate of billions dead in a 3 degree C warmer world comes from British experts who assess risks for major corporations and governments. The report was jointly written by authors from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter, titled “Planetary Solvency – finding our balance with nature”. The report calls the 2 billion deaths at 2 degrees C and 4 billion at 3 degrees “illustrative” and not a definitive prediction. It is hypothetical, based on a worst case scenario. We seem to be suffering through opening signs of a worst-case scenario already, with no sign of a carbon truce with the atmosphere.
Hallam’s new book ( 2026) on the subject is “Suicide: The Political & Legal Implications Of Endless Mass Death”.
Roger’s 2025 book is in answer to a surprise stance by Swedish academic Andreas Malm’s book “How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire”. That came out in 2021 from Verso books. Malm suggested the climate crisis is so severe, and responses from government and industry so weak, citizens might have to resort to violence, like damaging energy infrastructure.
Strangely, two governments who deny climate change and love the fossil fuel industry are engaged in carrying out Malm’s ideas. Oil from the Middle East is shuttered in thanks to Trump’s war. The other giant oil and gas exporter – Russia – has refineries and fuels blowing up due to their war on Ukraine. Supply destruction by violent means is happening now by state actors.
But Roger, with his long history of pacifism, would have none of that. Violence he says, is never the answer. In the interview we discuss the apparent success of violent revolutions in China, Russia, and France. Note that all of those devolved into murderous Dictatorships (Mao, Stalin, Napoleon).
Hallam argues against violence for any allegedly progressive or necessary cause. He writes against “Left Fascism”. That concept seems strange in North America, which barely has a left-wing movement or history, compared to Europe, which went through Left violence in the 1970’s and 80’s. Resorting to violence, Hallam argues, will “blow up” society. That is all in his book “How to Blow Up a Society: The Derangement of Left Fascism”.
Drawing on the sociological research of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, Hallam contends that nonviolent civil disobedience is far more effective at building mass movements than violent or confrontational tactics – which actively scare off broad public participation and provoke police repression. He critiques traditional left-wing vanguardism – where a small elite claims to speak for the working class or the climate movement – arguing that it mirrors the authoritarian habits of the systems it claims to oppose.
Research by national security institutions (e.g., the CSIS, Europol, and academic violence-tracking databases) shows that left-wing violence is significantly less frequent and vastly less deadly than right-wing or Islamist political violence.
BRITISH “JUSTICE”?
In Canada, an environmentally-worried man named Weibo Ludwig was sentenced to 18 months in jail for blowing up a series of gas facilities. He acted only after years of protest about gas well emissions and miscarriages, a concern born out by scientific study (”Association of petrochemical exposure with spontaneous abortion” 1998). In Canada, eighteen months for blowing up infrastructure. A UK court sentenced Roger Hallam to five years in prison for just talking about stopping cars on a freeway.
I won’t go in to the whole story here, but dozens of British climate activists were sent to jail, for years, for non-violent protests. Four co-defendants were tried and charged alongside Roger Hallam for the same offense (conspiracy to cause a public nuisance related to the November 2022 Just Stop Oil M25 motorway blockades). All four were sentenced to four years in prison. They appealed and sentences were reduced to three years or so. Look up the “Whole Truth Five“.
This is just part of a long string of extreme sentences for protesters in the UK, supposedly a progressive and climate-aware country. It’s sick.
Despite the title, Malm’s book “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” was sold on Amazon in the U.S. In 2022 there was a feature film about it. We later learned the FBI issued advisories to energy operators regarding the book’s contents. Malm was not banned and executives of big oil and gas keep the heat profits and never get punished. What kind of a system organizes to censor and jail the most peaceful first responders?
Wiki tells us: “Roger Hallam is out of jail. He was released from HMP Wayland on provisional release on August 14, 2025, after his initial five-year sentence for conspiring to disrupt M25 traffic was reduced to four years by the Court of Appeal.”
HALLAM’S PATH
Hallam initially attended the London School of Economics (LSE) as a young adult, but left after a year to pursue full-time activism, co-op work, and later organic farming in South Wales. After extreme weather events destroyed his farming business, Hallam returned to academia in his late 50s. He pursued a PhD at King’s College London, on sociology and civil disobedience. Again he left to co-found Extinction Rebellion (now a global environment group) and Just Stop Oil.
ALEX: WHY I NEVER COVERED “HOW TO BLOW UP…”
In the politically charged atmosphere in America, self-declared king of fossil fuels, I might be taken off the air, or even charged with promoting “eco-terrorism” if I covered a book called “How to Blow Up a Pipeline”. That’s one thing. Second, when asked for an interview Malm declined. Did I ducked this battle to fight another day…? Is it safer to broadcast Roger Hallam who argues against violence – even though it was Hallam and not Malm who went to prison?
ALEX SAYS-
MEN NEED TO REFORM THEMSELVES
When we talk about potential violence in the Left, or climate activists, and when we talk about tendencies for domination and control, the real problem on both counts is male. To survive, and life decently, in a crowded world and unstable climate, men need to reform themselves.
As a society, we need to stop glorifying violence and pushing that storyline on boys. Blowing things up and killing people is not fun, it is not entertainment. As currently operating, men are the critical danger to our species and all species.
SEE ALSO: “Roger Hallam – 4 Billion Dead – ‘Suicide: The Political & Legal Implications Of Endless Mass Death”
Nick Breeze ClimateGenn June 28, 20206
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HOW TO SURVIVE A GHOST TOWN
Check out this graph from Axios. Millions of people stopped going to news sites for the news. The Google AI summary is enough for them and they click no further. Hundreds of millions of web site visits disappeared in the last 12 months. Thankfully, you are not one of those people.
Graph: Axios, designed by Erin Davis using data from Similarweb.
As web traffic crashes, so do advertising revenues that helped pay for pesky things like actual reporters who investigate things. The McClatchy news corporation found one answer. They fired tons of journalists and just get AI to produce “human interest” stories (which is basically anything that will get a click for their advertisers).
Here at the Ecoshock radio empire, this may be a fatal blow. As you know, I am not allowed to ask for donations on non-profit radio. The stations need their own fundraising all the time. OK, this show is low budget, if I just get about 40 or 50 people to contribute $10 a month, I can make it. I don’t get paid much but at least the show doesn’t cost me money.
Until recently, we had that many supporters. Some come and go, as people move on or get tight for money, but new folks find this information and find it useful, even important. They help. Now there is the usual drift away of a few people a month, but way fewer people making it here to the site. Eventually it looks like financing will crash. Then I guess the show stops.
This is a long way of saying: please support Radio Ecoshock now. Just click here to find out. (I don’t keep any list of names or information on users. I don’t sell any user information. There are no ads. You will not get any more emails from me. You help, I keep going, and that’s how it works, I hope.
Either way, thank you for listening and digging further in this blog.
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HARD RAIN GONNA FALL
HAYLEY FOWLER
Extreme rainfall hits keep coming. Nagoya Japan just got 4.1 inches, 104 mm of rain in a single hour. In July, Ottawa Canada got 6.6 inches, 167 millimeters in five hours. Edmonton Alberta flooded in July, not what anyone expected – and parts of New York and New England were drowned with 5 to 8 inches of rain, 125 to 200 mm. These big rain events are shocking and costly for folks who live there. Are we getting to the point where almost anywhere could flood? Is it climate change?
Let’s find out. Our guest Dr. Hayley Fowler is a world recognized expert in extreme precipitation and global warming. She is Professor of Climate Change Impacts, at UK’s Newcastle University. Hayley publishes papers, edits journals, and digs into the wet side of climate change.
Listen to or download this 27 minute interview with Hayley Fowler in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
While news in the American West and Southern Europe was about drought, the last five years in the UK set records for wettest winters (2023-24) in a country known for rain. A string of storms, extreme rains and floods popped up in places not seen before. Is this natural variability or is there a new pattern for UK rain?
Hayley just co-authored a paper on summer rainfall events and warming over Great Britain: “Scaling of Short-Duration, Summer Rainfall Event Temporal Profiles With Warming Over Great Britain” Open Access May 11, 2026 in International Journal of Climatology.
Flash-floods can pop up almost anywhere. It doesn’t have to be in damp UK. Fowler co-authored a study on the strange 2024 floods in the United Arab Emirates and Oman. “Application of the Davies four-stage conceptual model for life-threatening rainfall extremes on the April 2024 United Arab Emirates and Oman floods”.
In 2024, one of the most severe inland hydrological catastrophes in modern U.S. history struck North Carolina. The ground was already soaked when as much as 30 inches of rain, 762 millimeters, arrived as the tail end of Hurricane Helene. It was called a 1-in-1000-year event. Americans are still talking about it.
THE BIG FLIP
At least a half dozen times I’ve covered long droughts, years long, which end not with a slow build-up of replenishing rains, but with a deluge that sits on drought-hardened land like new lakes. That happened in East Africa after the three year drought up to 2023. Then exceptional rains flooded Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya. Why do droughts often end with a bang rather than a restorative return of rain?
Climate change is increasing the frequency of both droughts and floods, and that means that back-to-back extreme events are also on the rise. These rapidly alternating crises can harm people in complex ways. For example, back-to-back climate extremes can stress crops, reducing yield. In addition, the ability to prepare for one emergency is likely reduced if people are still recovering from the last emergency.
In addition, low-income populations are likely to see the steepest relative increases in exposure to rapid hydrological transitions. According to the authors, the findings show how climate change is likely to be a regressive force, deepening the divide between the resilient wealthy and the vulnerable poor.
PAPER HERE “Warming accelerates drought–flood oscillations and stratifies socioeconomic exposure “ September 15 2026. Wei Qi et al. PNAS. “Our results demonstrate that the temporal compression of hydrological extreme reversals creates a class of compound risk that reduces preparedness windows and stratifies vulnerability along socioeconomic lines.”
2024 is known as the hottest year on record, at least so far. Less well known – it was one of the wettest years with “record-breaking extreme precipitation events across the globe”. Is there a direct relationship between extreme heat and extreme rainfall in a particular year – or are these events more driven by slow increases in global mean temperature over decades? See: “Precipitation extremes in 2024” April 11, 2025.
Very extreme rain dumps can be quite local, even hitting one side of town and not the other. Scientific This damaging aspect of climate change could be missed because the targets are so small. Speaking of small targets, Hayley Fowler also participated in research into short-duration precipitation extremes, sometimes called hourly events: “Consistent Large-Scale Response of Hourly Extreme Precipitation to Temperature Variation Over Land” January 2021 in Geophysical Research Letters.
ANOTHER FOWLER PAPER OF INTEREST
“Anthropogenic intensification of short-duration rainfall extremes”
Hayley J. Fowler et al (many authors) in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, Published: 15 January 2021.
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ALEX ON EXTREME RAIN EVENTS
Reasons for more extreme rain events are plenty. A warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor, about 7% more for every degree of warming. That is a humongous amount of water transferred to the atmosphere, likely too large for any human measurement.
A warmer atmosphere CAN hold more water, but is that capacity being met? What if soils already dried by drought can give no more? We know the oceans never experience drought, and they are the majority of the planet’s surface. Uptake – evaporation – of water depends partly on heat, which is increasing, winds we are not certain of, and clouds which are even harder to quantify.
Some climate predictions suggest a “stilling” with reduced winds in a hotter world. Others find aerosols and equatorial clouds could decline greatly, allowing more solar energy to reach the sea surface. My guess is water vapor is increasing but not reaching full capacity available from warming so far.
THE REAL QUESTION: why is the rainfall not more evenly distributed? Why are there broad blocks of drought and stupidly intense rain hovering over parts of continents? Why are experiences of climate change so different, and is that difference emphasized into a problem in countries large enough with separate zones and separate ideas of what climate change is?
For example, most people in Belgium might share a more or less common climate and experience of change. However,the United States or Russia are large enough to have hot drought in one part of the country at the same time as cooler rainy floods in another. This means a common experience of what climate change is – may not form in large countries. Does that affect the will to climate action? Or does it create a stress between whether tax dollars should go to fire control or toward flood control and better drainage?
Why are blocks of extreme weather hovering around? Why are some countries in a wet storm track for months – and then get a drought the very next year? Are planetary waves creating and holding these patterns? Is this new? How do the patterns of 2026 compare to living in the 1980’s? The search for answers continues.
NEXT WEEK
Jeremy Rifkin, author of 24 books and the big idea man, returns to Radio Ecoshock next week. We talk about his new book “Rescuing the Future”. There is an AI twist. Then it’s back to the science.
I think hot oceans and marine heatwaves don’t get enough news coverage. As land animals we can’t see it and don’t think much about it. As you might guess, ocean heat can interact with the super heat waves now appearing on Planet Earth. We talk with marine heat expert Dr. Claire Bergin in Maynooth Ireland. You won’t hear this anywhere else.
Thank you for listening, for supporting the show, and caring about our world.
Alex