On 5 February, Mark Maslin (UCL), Elizabeth J. Z. Robinson (Grantham Research Institute, LSE) and Clare Turnbull (Institute of Cancer Research) and Jason Scott-Warren attended a long-awaited meeting with Dame Julie Maxton (RS Executive Director), Jon Keating (RS Treasurer), Sir Peter Bruce (Oxford) and Eric Wolff (Cambridge). We delivered the open letter with its 2,600+ signatures in hard-copy form and discussed its demands for an hour.

To summarise the meeting:

• The RS team were keen to emphasise what they already do in this area, including digests of IPCC reports and commentaries on COPs, together with a range of reports on the challenges of decarbonisation. 
  
• They pointed us to the Manifesto for Science, which calls for a ‘road-map’ to Net Zero, and to recent Presidential Addresses which have spoken of a need ‘to pivot away from fossil fuels’ and have called on the fossil fuel industry to ‘do more’.

• We argued that these statements were relatively nebulous and that there was a need for greater responsiveness and immediacy. Non-specific pronouncements buried in reports will achieve little. 
  
• We also pointed to the institutions that had found a powerful voice on this issue—including not just the UN, the IEA, and the Parliamentary Climate Change Committee, but also the BMA and a range of professional bodies in the field of health.

• We encountered some resistance to the idea of ‘condemning’ the fossil fuel industry and/or the government, premised on a concern that condemnation is not a ‘practical’ response; that it is facile to tell oil companies that ‘you are bad’; and that condemnation strays across the lines dividing science from politics and economics. 
  
• We argued that there is nothing facile about pointing to the disingenuous behaviour of the fossil fuel industry, which is currently working to retard or derail mitigation through lobbying, advertising, and other forms of targeted action. 
  
• We asked if the RS had divested from fossil fuels; they said they had, almost entirely. We suggested that this already represents a recognition that the fossil fuel industry is bad. We also argued that (while the RS should not be afraid to take a holistic view and to comment on economics and politics) the question of oil and gas expansion is a scientific issue. The point of condemning is to make sure that everyone understands the science.
  
• We stressed the urgency of the moment, at 1.48 degrees of warming and with more than 200 days in 2023 setting a new temperature record for the time of year. We suggested that the RS’s strategy so far had been failing and that there was a need to shift up to a new level.

• Overall there was a supportive tone from the RS team and they said that they were on the same page as us, but were concerned about how to be most effective.

• They admitted that the Society had nowhere called for an end to new oil and gas exploration. 
  
• They said that they receive numerous requests to speak out on pressing issues, and that they could not turn themselves into a multidimensional campaigning organisation. 
  
• In conclusion, they recognised there was potential for more assertive statements and actions from the RS and they agreed to take the details of our discussion back to the Council for further consideration. They will report back on the outcome of this.