*This is a free/PWYC event, but if you would like to support the bookshop you are welcome to donate when reserving your ticket*

‘Green populism’: a good, bad or ugly idea?

Reform has risen dramatically in the opinion polls, and won a swathe of seats in local council elections: alongside their anti-immigrant rhetoric they advocate for ripping up the UK’s climate change targets, and dialing up the production of oil.

With the prospect of far-right populist ideas moving into the political mainstream looming large, the idea of ‘green populism’ as a counter to Reform has started to gain traction. The Deputy Leader of the Green Party Zack Polanski, plus a range of activists and strategists, have started articulating what green populism could look like, and how it could rebuild fraying public support for key climate policies (which too often are unaffordable for people focused on getting to the end of the month, before worrying about the end of the world).

Can a more populist economic approach to green policies build support and win over reform-curious voters? Can green populism redirect people’s legitimate anger and disillusion towards the right targets? Or is any kind of populism playing with fire?

Three Bristol-based speakers give their perspectives in a panel discussion and Q&A with the audience:

Becca Massey-Chase - Head of Citizen Engagement, IPPR
Becca is head of citizen engagement at IPPR.She leads on participative research at IPPR, developing and using participatory methods and deliberative democracy to co-create policy solutions. Becca was formerly co-deputy head of the Environmental Justice Commission, leading the commission’s citizens’ juries across the UK.

Rob Bryher - Bristol Green Party Councillor (St George West)
Rob is the Green Party Councillor for St George West. With a background in urban planning and campaigning for low-car cities for a climate charity, Rob has been central in discussions around the trial of the East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood.

Adam Corner - Climate//Communication//Culture
Adam has worked on public engagement with climate change for the past 15 years, leading research projects on public opinion and narrative testing, and writing reports and commentary on climate change communication for NGOs, policy makers, cultural & creative partners and with academics.


EBB Talks: Climate. Avoiding the end of the world, navigating the end of the month

In 2008, Mark Fisher popularised the idea that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism in his now-classic Capitalist Realism. In the years since, it has become ever-easier to imagine climate collapse than truly transformative solutions. So much of what is written, said and done about climate change is driven by the urgency of preventing ever-worsening climate impacts, imagined as “the end of the world.”

But climate activism and green politics don’t happen in a vacuum. They also need to navigate the paycheck reality of the end of the month, and the real-politik of the world as we find it, increasingly featuring climate-hostile far-right populism. As apocalyptic climate futures loom ever larger, systemic political change can feel less and less possible.

EBB’s Climate Talks ask what links the big, abstract questions around the end of the world with day-to-day concerns about making it to the end of the month. What role do energy, art, agroecology, food systems, policy and perhaps even (green) populism play in bringing the climate crisis into the kitchen table calculations of everyday life? In a series of events from autumn 2025 to summer 2026, East Bristol Books hosts authors, artists and specialists whose ideas give different windows into climate activism and politics in an era of populism, a prolonged cost-of-living crisis, and political upheaval.

Entry requirements: no age restrictions — Read more — Read less