‘We have 1,028 days left.’
This is the simple message scrawled onto a white t-shirt worn by Alizée, a then-22-year-old climate change campaigner.
On June 3, 2022, she strolled onto Court Philippe-Chatrier, Paris, during the French Open semi-final and glued herself to the net.
Alizée sat there for some 10 minutes as Norway’s Casper Ruud and Croatia’s Marin Čilić left the court and the cameras kept rolling.
Along the neckline of the t-shirt were the words, ‘Dernière Rénovation’, the French climate group Alizée was a member of behind the stunt.
Campaigners created a website at least a few days after the stunt, according to internet archives, that features a simple countdown.
At the time of writing, the ticking clock reads: ’03 days. 09 hours. 10 minutes. 01 seconds.’
This is 10am on Friday.
But what exactly did the group mean by: ‘We have 1,028 days left’?
Other than a statement on the day from Dernière Rénovation that spoke of ‘1,028 days we have to determine the future of humanity’ and March 28, 2025, being ‘the date on which citizens entered into civil resistance’, campaigners have never exactly said what will happen when the clock runs out.
After all, the deadline seems almost reminiscent of the Doomsday Clock that estimates – in the stark terms of ‘minutes to midnight’ – how close humanity is to annihilation. As of January, it’s 89 seconds to midnight.
But it’s unlikely that the countdown signals a prophesied end of the world, the arrival of aliens or World War III breaking out.
It’s something simpler – but just as ominous.
What is Dernière Rénovation?
In the first 21 months since it was founded in 2022, Dernière Rénovation carried out 188 acts of ‘civil resistance’, often bringing roads, public buildings and sports competition to a standstill.
The 200-strong group’s slogan was: ‘We will do whatever is peacefully necessary. To protect our generation and all future generations.’
They campaigned for, among other things, reducing planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions and thermal building renovation.
But the group rebranding in 2024 to Food Response, which campaigns for food security in France, saying it had gone ‘to the end of what [they] could hope to gain’.
Food Response is part of an international campaign network called A22, which also includes Just Stop Oil.
‘We have 1,028 days left’ till what?
Climate change, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels in rich nations, has pushed global temperatures to new highs.
‘What will happen? It’s already happening,’ said a spokesperson from Just Stop Oil, a group that wants to prevent new oil and gas licensing in the UK.
A weeks-long 40°C spring heat wave that closed schools in India.Supercharged hurricanes across the US and cyclones in the Philippines.
The most destructive wildfires in the history of Los Angeles. Torrential rain that turned streets into rivers and killed 232 people in October.
These being just a few of the 151 unprecedented extreme weather events in 2024 identified by climate scientists.
Carbon dioxide emissions hit a record that year, and it was the hottest year in recorded history.
What happens next?
These ‘tragedies’, the spokesperson said, are being ‘repeated daily’. Flooding tore through Italy and Argentina earlier this month, which scientists say was ‘strengthened by human-driven climate change’.
‘This month, Spain has seen three consecutive weeks of torrential rains that have flooded streets, washed away bridges, paralysed transport and inundated crops,’ Just Stop Oil added.
‘None of us are ready for what is coming next.’
Alizée, however, had an idea even back in 2022 of what was coming next. She told Le Monde that wearing the t-shirt was an ‘act of desperation’.
‘We are all going to die if we don’t act on the climate crisis,’ she added.
What is being done to combat climate change?
Dernière Rénovation had hoped politicians would act. ‘France has been condemned by its own courts for climate inaction,’ it said.
‘The future of this country is literally destroyed. To waste time is to perish.’
For the past decade, the world has sought to squash – and, these days, slow down – climate change.
Nations signed the 2015 Paris agreement to limit warming to 1.5°C by investing more in renewable energy, reducing emissions and working towards carbon neutrality within the next few decades.
This, however, is now all but impossible. Nations would have to slash carbon emissions at an almost impossible pace to keep it anything around 1.6°C, scientists say.
And Chris Wright, the new US energy secretary, promised oil and gas executives earlier this month a ‘180 degree pivot’ from the previous Biden administration’s green energy policies.
The former fracking boss is one of US President Donald Trump’s loudest supporters of fossil fuels – and critics of almost any federal policy that aims to tackle climate change.
‘Our broken politics is failing to address the physical reality,’ Just Stop Oil explained.
‘Flirting with dangerous ideologies, promoted by hedge fund and tech bro billionaires, our politicians are prioritising endless growth, corporate profits and the wealth of the super rich over the wellbeing of ordinary people.’
Dernière Rénovation’s countdown continues to tick down. While one singular thing might not happen when it hits zero, Just Stop Oil says it hopes people ‘put their bodies on the line’ by helping to fight climate change – and far sooner than Friday.
‘We need to resist the politics of hate and come together to decide how we address the existential crisis we face,’ the spokesperson said.
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