It's 2025 now what?
Key Messaging
This pack aims to help you and your groups to talk about 2025, backed by science and research, helping you stay on point, while giving you space to bring your own voice in as well.
We will be adding to this pack over time, so do check back in for new information.
Key links
2025: Statement to the movement
2024 Was the First Year Above 1.5C of Global Warming – Here’s How We Should Respond
What's the big deal about 2025?
In 2018, the XR co-founders, after much deliberation and conferring with leading scientists and other climate and environment experts, set the deadline by which the UK should reach net-zero carbon emissions for the year 2025. The science proved that we needed to rapidly decarbonise, there were already various blueprints from organisations proving it was possible, and for the sake of those already impacted by climate change (almost entirely communities in the global south) it was the morally right thing to do.
As to HOW this was going to be done, XR's third demand is that people should decide this together. Everyday people, who are impacted by the changes, who are not influenced by lobbyists and money, who think long-term, and work together as a group to find solutions that work for everyone: a citizens’ assembly.
Now it is 2025. And our demand has not been met.
Don’t sugar-coat the truth
There is no denying that we have reached a catastrophic state of impending collapse. The crisis has arrived on our doorstep sooner than anyone expected and it’s only getting worse.
Pretending otherwise is not only untruthful but also unfair to those who are already severely impacted by environmental and societal collapse - whether in Greater Manchester from floods, California from wildfires, or Sudan from extreme drought induced famine.
Let’s tell the truth, however uncomfortable it is.
It’s not too late
The narrative that “it’s too late why bother” is a tactic used by the fossil fuel industry and the right wing media to normalise the climate and ecological crisis and to make the public feel there is no point doing anything anymore. It is not too late. Every fraction of a degree makes a difference.
The emergency is here and now
The climate and ecological emergency is not something that will happen in the distant future in far off lands. It is happening here and now on our doorsteps.
If you need some examples, since the start of 2025 alone, we have seen extreme flooding all over the UK and beyond. Crops are set to fail because it is too wet, houses are becoming uninsurable because of flood risk. Extreme storms came back to back at the end of 2024, and each year is confirmed the hottest year on record year after year.
What could have been
A visioning exercise...
Imagine what 2025 could have looked like if we had achieved our three demands. A world where ordinary people make decisions together, not based on profit and personal gain but on helping your fellow inhabitants of this earth.
Imagine how much worse it could have been if we didn’t act, if XR never came to be. Who knows? Maybe the government still wouldn’t have declared a climate emergency for example. We have achieved some incredible things over the last six years which have left a lasting impression. Let’s celebrate those achievements, the big and the small because it could have been so much worse.
Key Facts
Byline Times: 2024 Was the First Year Above 1.5C of Global Warming - Here’s How We Should Respond
This piece was written by the XRUK Press team in collaboration with many people from different circles. It contains some killer facts that will be useful for interviews, rebuttals, or even just conversations on the street during an action:
- 2024 was the first year that global average temperatures exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels according to the EU’s Copernicus Earth Observation Programme. In fact it’s worse than that. It’s 1.6°C.
- Every 0.1°C places 100 million people (or more) in unlivable temperatures.
- BUT this also means that any 0.1°C temperature increase we avoid, could save 100 million people.
- It will get worse faster: heating amplifies feedback loops in the climate system, and as we move past 1.5°C we increasingly cross tipping points. This means that things will not only get worse, but will get worse faster.
- A threshold could be passed where feedbacks uncontrollably tip the system into a Hothouse Earth scenario resulting in 4-5°C higher than pre-industrial levels and with sea level rise of 10-60m higher than today.
- Feedback loops are not yet fully integrated into climate models. Current emissions plans "might fall short in adequately limiting future warming,” leading climate scientists warned in October.
- One explanation concerns recent regulations which have cut sulphur pollution in the shipping sector. Sulphur emissions had been masking the true rate of global warming, but have now been reduced. This is affecting cloud cover (and hence reflective capacity) in the northern hemisphere and tropics. James Hansen has been talking about this for some time and it is now getting wider traction.
- Yes, too late to stay within 1.5C - No, not not too late to prevent the worst outcomes: “Avoiding every tenth of a degree of warming is critically important.”
- There is already evidence that that the cumulative effect of stronger policies around the world can make a difference: Climate Action Tracker estimates that, since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, stronger national climate policies have brought their end of century temperature projected temperature rises down from 3.6°C to 2.7°C. Sadly, this ambition has stalled since COVID.
- Concerned citizens have to keep going but we also need to raise our game strategically.
- Only rapid action to phase out fossil fuel use can impact the trajectory we are on.
Examples of tipping points:
- Melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets will catastrophically raise sea levels.
- The death of warm-water corals destroys a natural carbon sink.
- The melting of permafrost releases powerful greenhouse gasses.
- The breakdown of Atlantic ocean circulation changes how heat is distributed across the planet.
Social Media
You can use the following link to download XRUK’s social media posts from Canva or ‘copy’ and ‘edit’ the below Canva file as you wish:
Alternatively you can share XRUK's posts on Twitter, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok:
Handle
@XRebellionUk
#HereAndNow
#NotTooLate
#ExtinctionRebellion
#TellTheTruth
Press
We will be adding to this list, but here are some useful articles to help with the 2025 messaging:
- 2024 first year to pass 1.5C global warming limit, BBC, 10 January 2025.
Announcement of the Copernicus Institue's report, which should have made headlines, but of course didn't.
The BBC's response to XR's 2025 demand back in 2019: The BBC, and all the other media, immediately picked XR up on the 2025 target, which they all said was unrealistic. The truth is, we never even tried. Imagine if we had tried, and it all would have achieved net zero a few years later. We would still be in a better position than we are now.
A useful quote from that article:
"The honest answer about whether you can hit net zero by 2025 is that until you go for it, nobody knows if you'll get there," said Andrew Simms from the Rapid Transition Alliance, which promotes solutions to climate change that could transform the world over the next 12 years.
"We tend to forget what can be achieved in really compressed periods of time when the whole of industry and the whole of government put their minds to it. It's like the speed with which we responded to the financial crisis in 2008."