Unherd’s billionaire owner (and also co-owner of GBNews) has $2.2bn in fossil fuel investments. I.e. he certainly doesn’t want to stop oil any time soon. Always worth bearing in mind whenever you’re reading this publication or watching gb news. As with politicians in the pockets of banks – follow the money and you’ll know their ‘principles’ before they’re proclaimed.
Thanks for the biography, but that doesn’t make Harris’s article less convincing or make me develop any sympathy for JSO.
A lot of ordinary folk don’t want to stop oil any time soon either – not because we’re pawns being manipulated by billionaires, as might be the predictable reply, but because we can smell the austerity this would entail by a mile away.
Yes I don’t think pro-environment policies should be implemented regressively either – they should focus on projects that enrichen rather than impoverish ordinary people e.g. don’t tax petrol, but do develop green industries that create skilled jobs.
Am heartened as well that you are critical of austerity which impacts the worst off. I trust then, that being consistent in this view, you didn’t vote for any of the Conservative governments that have unnecessarily inflicted it upon us these last 13 years while reaping in the benefits for themselves and their cronies?
Thanks for telling us that an oil investor also invests in media which promote broadly centre-right policies including free speech. Sounds like a great bloke.
So GB News, presented by, among others, Farage, Rees-Mogg and now Johnson (the last two members of a party which has clamped down on multiple freedoms, such as the right to protest and withdraw labour), which doesn’t meet Ofcom’s requirements to qualify as ‘news’ and which has advocated the illegal Rwanda deportation policy, is an example of media which promotes ‘centre-right’ policies that enhance freedom?
Unherd I’ll admit at least makes some effort at accomodating a broad church of commentators but GB News is a government mouthpiece not worthy of its name.
Whether a successful investor takes a stake in a fossil fuel business is a separate issue entirely from whether they support decarbonisation or not.
Waffles
5 months ago
Someone should start a group called Just Stop Just Stop Oil.
They have no perspective or nuanced thinking. You need to balance the possible consequences of climate change in the future against the known immediate consequences of stopping oil today (billions of deaths and societal collapse).
Fertiliser comes from oil. It sprayed by tractors using diesel. Transported on lorries using diesel and planes using aviation fuel. Without oil there would be blackouts, lack of refrigeration. They wouldn’t get their organic hemp seeds, flown in fresh from Peru; it would be a diet of turnips and carrots, a medieval diet of UK-only food (a time when people were significantly shorter due to malnutrition).
I would love to know what their master plan is for the day after we all stop oil, and how many people it could sustain. Do they expect people to meekly agree to starve to death, quietly at home, or will it be Darwinian carnage, a global bloodbath where only the strongest survive? Why does the BBC never ask these questions?
The only solution is technology. A rapid scale up of Small Modular Reactors (super safe super advanced fission nuclear power) to tide us over until we develop fusion power.
If global warming was really a problem, the government wouldn’t be playing politics like they are. All of their plans are wedge issues to get votes from vote heavy jurisdictions.
Perhaps I’m out of touch with more recent scientific consensus, but I was under the impression that even professional groups whose role it is to monitor climate change, like the UN IPCC, do not believe human extinction due to climate change is a likely risk.
So this is where groups like Just Stop Oil stop being climate protestors and become a millennial cult. Throwing paint around in art galleries a direct action version of those “The End is Nigh!” sandwich boards you once saw.
The thing with millennial cults is that when the apocalypse fails to turn up to schedule, the public soon loses interest.
“Just Stop Oil is the latest phase of evolution: its nimblest, most creative and worthiest form yet.”
I’m planning to start Just Oil to spread the word that fossil fuels are the best thing to ever happen to mankind.
So how do you think you acquired most of your civil rights and liberties? Reckon they were just handed down on a plate by powerful people who decided they wanted less power or were they fought for from below? Or do you wish those whob had fought for them never had because those people were just a bunch of self-serving activist busybodies who should have let the powerful be?
For activism to work it needs to spring from a need to uphold universal rights for all people. Much of the activism we see today is boutique activism. It makes participants feel good, even if their particular cause is naively stupid or massively unpopular.
Jim Veenbaas
5 months ago
I can’t imagine devoting so much blood, sweet and tears to a cause and know absolutely nothing about it. Do they know climate related deaths have dropped 94% since the 1900s and continue to drop year after year? Or shutting down Britain and the entire west won’t prevent a rise in CO2 emissions? If they really want to make a difference, they should agitate for nuclear energy. That would resonate with more people.
Western liberals are never going to allow the poor people of the world to have the cheap energy they need. We’ve lost thirty years of progress on nuclear power because hysterics like Caroline Lucas, who doesn’t even have an O level in a STEM subject, shrieked so long and loud that we gave up and abandoned it.
They should all go agitate in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, the Gulf of Mexico/ USA, China…that will stop the cult in its tracks! Same with Saint Greta. Stop coming to the UK. Start travelling to the great polluting nations on the planet and see what reception you get there!
Andrew Roman
5 months ago
Making a nuisance of yourselves through annoying disruptions is not persuasive. It is merely annoying.
Albireo Double
5 months ago
They’re just a bunch of narcissistic attention-seeking inadequates.
The cause means nothing to them. It’s part of an “omnicause” which is no more than a background for their deluded self-image.
As humans, they’re failures, propped up by misguided tolerance. In the animal kingdom they wouldn’t have lasted out their first year of life.
I wish that, just once, an interviewer confronted by a JSO activist making absurd claims, would slap a copy of the latest IPCC report on the table and ask: ‘show me in here where it says that’. I’ve never encountered a climate hysteric who can actually produce solid evidence for their apocalyptic predictions beyond repeating the nonsense that Hallam, a certifiable nutter, spouts during his incoherent rants.
They probably cannot read. Just tell them that their gas, electricity, water, clothes supply and transport will be cut off so they can genuinely claim their righteous living free of oil and its products.
Alex Carnegie
5 months ago
Roger Hallam is usually seen as the brains behind XR and Just Stop Oil. In his more candid moments he has been open that he is more interested in overthrowing the existing system than climate change – not least because he thinks the latter is a lost cause. He spent years studying revolutionary change at King’s and his formula appears to include
1/ the belief that if radicals can get the whole heated commitment of even 3 or 4% of the population then dramatic change is possible
2/ the starting point is to attract attention by being a nuisance
3/ then using the media to stress the moral superiority of the protestors – given their willingness to go to prison – thus attracting more followers i.e. a twenty first century updated version of Gandhi’s tactics.
4/ A number of other subsequent steps
Irrespective of what one thought of their demands, XR was very effective. It made climate a top 3 issue and forced politicians of all stripes to pay attention. Since Hallam was kicked out of XR, however, his successor vehicle has been far less successful. I think he has been overdoing the nuisance bit and singularly failing to get people to see himself and his followers as Gandhiesque saints. Instead they have come over as slightly deranged and selfish. It makes one wonder if some of the other quieter leaders of XR were not as important to its successes as Hallam. I suspect he has had his 15 minutes of fame but perhaps he will get a trial which enables him to play the martyr.
It is unfashionable to suggest that the Met or Home Office get anything right but they seemed to have judged this one well. Allowed the really extreme types enough time to alienate the public then drafted some new laws and carted them off. If one considers how much support XR was getting at one point and the risk of generating martyrs – which was part of the strategy – then maybe they should get some credit for once.
Climate change is as old as this planet. It is constantly changing which is why we are not buried under glaciers or sweltering in planet wide tropics. Species come and species go often as a result of climate change eg the wolly mammoths. Instead of trying to imitate King Canute and turn back the inevitable they would be better off thinking of coping strategies for what will have to deal with.
King Cnut’s point was the precise opposite of that which it’s portrayed as.
His point was to show his subjects that, in fact, he didn’t possess the power to turn back the tide, and thus make their demands upon him less onerous.
It’s always worth making that correction. It would be interesting to trace exactly why that ancient tale got so completely turned around.
Emmanuel MARTIN
5 months ago
These affluent spoilt brats impose heavy costs on sociiety, and should be held financially liable for that.
Jane H
5 months ago
Wait until the WHO get their legally binding Global Pandemic Treaty signed off by almost 200 countries next June. They will then get their teeth into declaring a ‘climate change health emergency’. Just Stop Oil disruption will pale into insignificance once their restrictions come into effect.
Bret Larson
5 months ago
I don’t understand the logic. If people are going to die in mass because if human made warming, wouldn’t an equilibrium be achieved in time?
Paul T
5 months ago
The problem is that the left – because “they” are always bedfellows of the left – are deeply enamoured of the monosyllabic and utterly politically and socially moronic idea of the change they want, without debate and whatever it is “NOW”.
Last edited 5 months ago by Paul T
Christopher Chantrill
5 months ago
The thing about climate change is that CO2 concentration of 400 parts per million (OMG! PER MILLION!) reads a lot bigger than 0.04 percent or one in 2,500.
And you did know, you peaceful protesters, that C3 photosynthesis stops at 150 parts per million in the middle of an ice age. Right?
“400” is a big number though, and “a million” is an even bigger one.
John Caddle
5 months ago
The truth is that the UK is doing a relatively good job in reducing oil consumption. I’m sitting here about to fly (apologies) back from 3 days in UAE. This is where JSO should concentrate their efforts. After three days stuck in traffic jams from hell, I think “we are all doomed” no matter what we do in the UK.
Excellent idea! JSO should protest in Saudi Arabia and UAE!
Derek Bryce
5 months ago
Nuke ‘em ‘til they glow.
Steve Everitt
5 months ago
Please make punching JSO activists legal.
Jerry Carroll
5 months ago
Annoying people by interfering with their busy lives is not going to work. Only an unstable person could think otherwise.
Nardo Flopsey
5 months ago
Like the endless stream of lefties who oppose bombing civilians in Gaza, they have no practical alternative to offer. It’s easy to see difficult choices in simplistic terms, when one has no skin in the game. As George Carlin observed many years ago, “If you want to see humanity return to the stone age, take away electricity for one month.” It’s difficult to gamble on avoiding long-term chaos, when short-term chaos can be easily envisioned if we are to follow the advice of the JSO types.
What if the uncomfortable truth is that NOBODY has a clear idea of how to transition away from fossil fuels? Supplies are in decline, regardless of the spins JSO or their conservative opponents put on things. Long before oil runs out, the price will begin to rise, as it has been, and various economic activities will become untenable. Nuclear can potentially solve most of the grid-power challenge, but does nothing for the liquid-fuel challenge. Solar and wind are rather dubious.
The most efficient way to transition from fossil fuels is to allow economic pressures to spur innovation, as in every other area of technology. Neither panicking about climate change nor insisting that oil & gas are sustainable indefinitely is addressing this problem. Nor is insisting that we can keep on expanding wind and solar deployments and hope that things will improve at some later date. Every month there is some breathless news story on a revolutionary new type of grid battery, but it’s mostly just vaporware.
Last edited 5 months ago by Nardo Flopsey
Benedict Waterson
5 months ago
It’s clearly politically pointless and meaningless. The purpose of it is to act as a form of self-therapy for dimwitted middle class people
Andrzej Wasniewski
5 months ago
JSO opened a lot of people eyes. Genocidal cult crowled into the open where everyone could see them and ask the question: what JSO would really mean for the poor and the people who consume 1% of energy of the avarafe houshold in Europe or America. Genocide, plain and simple.
Chipoko
5 months ago
Just Stop Oil activists = ‘eco-zealots’? More like eco-fascists.
James Kirk
5 months ago
Same fools camped outside Greenham Common years ago. Did no good.
Shrunken Genepool
5 months ago
The Canadian Green Party lost half their front bench in ‘scandal’ over accidental misgendering. XR take time off to protest ‘TERF’ academics in Bristol. XR activist academic at Jesus College Cambridge (arrested for the cause) has a side hustle in direct action to prevent Helen Joyce doing a talk on sex-based rights another Cambridge college. Saint Greta of the West Bank….Quebec Green candidate disbarred because of pro-life commitments. Climate Action conference starts with a discussion of pronouns. It’s almost like people who say they are convinced that human civilization is in an existential struggle to survive, don’t actually believe it. They certainly don’t seem to think it is essential to build the broadest coalition in support of actions that will hurt and certainly generate high levels of class conflict and polarization. Who the hell needs Catholics, people who live in Alberta (or Middlesbrough, or Dresden), Christians, old-fashioned feminists, conservatives, classical liberals….or just middle of fetch road normies. Climate crusaders must be pure of heart. They’re the chosen ones. I think it is time that strategically minded environmentalists got their house in order, or accept that their best intentions will be consigned to historical irrelevance by the company they keep.
John Riordan
5 months ago
Robert Conquest’s observation that the best way to explain the behaviour of many organisations is to assume they’re secretly controlled by their enemies seem to be relevant here.
XR, JSO etc are so good at alienating the people they claim to want to persuade, that it is difficult not to believe that their real intention is to make everyone love hydrocarbons. In my case that’s pushing an already-open door of course, but there are millions of people who aren’t presently aware of exactly how stone-age their lives would become if we stopped using hydrocarbons at any point in the next hundred years. These activist organisations not only infuriate decent people who are just trying to go about their lives, they are provoking a global debate on the subject in which millions of people are educating themselves on the issue and discovering that there is no prospect of stopping fossil fuel reliance without economic collapse, social breakdown, and eventually the deaths of about 75% of humanity, probably including themselves.
For me and many others, who knew this already, we couldn’t have come up with a more effective way to win an argument than this.
Last edited 5 months ago by John Riordan
ELLIOTT W STEVENS
5 months ago
“Just Ligma Bosack”. That’s probably the best, most sane, and most worthy response to the psych-ward-escapees of JSO.
Doug Mccaully
5 months ago
Just stop oil really needs to sort itself out and change its tactics, but we still have the right of peaceful protest in this country and we mustn’t let authoritarianism take that away from us.
They have billions of government and international organisation spending backing the green message – they are pushing at an open-door politically – look at the billions being spent on renewables and carbon credits.
The problem is that people on the ground – regular folk – are increasingly skeptical because of the name-calling, exaggeration and daily costs they see (blaming Big Oil being another exaggeration). Just Stop Oil then simply adds to the skepticism by associating ‘green’ with ‘unfriendly’, ‘antisocial’ and ‘inconvenient’. The public becomes more ‘anti-green’ because of their actions, not less. It is entirely counterproductive to their cause.
Totally agree, they have gone about it all the wrong way with their partisan approach, which may feel to them like they are doing something tangible but the result is a fail.
What they need is a PR company to come up with something legendary cynical, such as one’s ‘carbon footprint’ – which is of course the creation of BP, and subtly shifts the blame from them to the individual.
I’ve seen lots of Exxon and Shell commercials preening about their commitment to reducing emissions. Can’t quite recall the ad campaign questioning the science.
Read a former, serious environmentalist, Michel Shellenberg, who now takes the view that radical environmentalists are indeed generating widespread antipathy to the cause and thus will fail to convince the public of any threat if indeed one exists. Doomsday approaches, unsupportable as they are, merely generate distrust of the media, public figures and experts. Of course, it doesn’t help that doomsday never happens.
If they are not bright enough to reach that obvious conclusion one has to wonder about their other conclusions, and the quality of thought in reaching them.
I’m sure JSO has changed a lot of minds, from ‘Hmm, maybe they have a point’ to ‘Goddamn, these people are assholes’.
to “what a bunch of c…. !”
Yes, it has changed minds.
Any sympathisers they once had are now vehemently anti-JSO because their method has irredeemably tarnished their message.
Unherd’s billionaire owner (and also co-owner of GBNews) has $2.2bn in fossil fuel investments. I.e. he certainly doesn’t want to stop oil any time soon. Always worth bearing in mind whenever you’re reading this publication or watching gb news. As with politicians in the pockets of banks – follow the money and you’ll know their ‘principles’ before they’re proclaimed.
Thanks for the biography, but that doesn’t make Harris’s article less convincing or make me develop any sympathy for JSO.
A lot of ordinary folk don’t want to stop oil any time soon either – not because we’re pawns being manipulated by billionaires, as might be the predictable reply, but because we can smell the austerity this would entail by a mile away.
Yes I don’t think pro-environment policies should be implemented regressively either – they should focus on projects that enrichen rather than impoverish ordinary people e.g. don’t tax petrol, but do develop green industries that create skilled jobs.
Am heartened as well that you are critical of austerity which impacts the worst off. I trust then, that being consistent in this view, you didn’t vote for any of the Conservative governments that have unnecessarily inflicted it upon us these last 13 years while reaping in the benefits for themselves and their cronies?
Thanks for telling us that an oil investor also invests in media which promote broadly centre-right policies including free speech. Sounds like a great bloke.
So GB News, presented by, among others, Farage, Rees-Mogg and now Johnson (the last two members of a party which has clamped down on multiple freedoms, such as the right to protest and withdraw labour), which doesn’t meet Ofcom’s requirements to qualify as ‘news’ and which has advocated the illegal Rwanda deportation policy, is an example of media which promotes ‘centre-right’ policies that enhance freedom?
Unherd I’ll admit at least makes some effort at accomodating a broad church of commentators but GB News is a government mouthpiece not worthy of its name.
Whether a successful investor takes a stake in a fossil fuel business is a separate issue entirely from whether they support decarbonisation or not.
Someone should start a group called Just Stop Just Stop Oil.
They have no perspective or nuanced thinking. You need to balance the possible consequences of climate change in the future against the known immediate consequences of stopping oil today (billions of deaths and societal collapse).
Fertiliser comes from oil. It sprayed by tractors using diesel. Transported on lorries using diesel and planes using aviation fuel. Without oil there would be blackouts, lack of refrigeration. They wouldn’t get their organic hemp seeds, flown in fresh from Peru; it would be a diet of turnips and carrots, a medieval diet of UK-only food (a time when people were significantly shorter due to malnutrition).
I would love to know what their master plan is for the day after we all stop oil, and how many people it could sustain. Do they expect people to meekly agree to starve to death, quietly at home, or will it be Darwinian carnage, a global bloodbath where only the strongest survive? Why does the BBC never ask these questions?
The only solution is technology. A rapid scale up of Small Modular Reactors (super safe super advanced fission nuclear power) to tide us over until we develop fusion power.
If global warming was really a problem, the government wouldn’t be playing politics like they are. All of their plans are wedge issues to get votes from vote heavy jurisdictions.
It’s weird they can’t connect the dots. I struggle to wrap my head around that.
How about Just Sod Off?
Perhaps I’m out of touch with more recent scientific consensus, but I was under the impression that even professional groups whose role it is to monitor climate change, like the UN IPCC, do not believe human extinction due to climate change is a likely risk.
So this is where groups like Just Stop Oil stop being climate protestors and become a millennial cult. Throwing paint around in art galleries a direct action version of those “The End is Nigh!” sandwich boards you once saw.
The thing with millennial cults is that when the apocalypse fails to turn up to schedule, the public soon loses interest.
You do get to reschedule the date of the apocalypse a few times though.
They must be going for the record.
“Just Stop Oil is the latest phase of evolution: its nimblest, most creative and worthiest form yet.”
I’m planning to start Just Oil to spread the word that fossil fuels are the best thing to ever happen to mankind.
Fossil fuels are the best thing to happen to mankind. We’d still be using oxen for power and burning trees for heat otherwise.
Activism is all about the activists, rarely about the actual cause. If oil was ‘stopped’ today, they would find something else to whinge about.
Starvation, for one thing.
Almost entire economy would be shut down.
95 percent unemployment.
So how do you think you acquired most of your civil rights and liberties? Reckon they were just handed down on a plate by powerful people who decided they wanted less power or were they fought for from below? Or do you wish those whob had fought for them never had because those people were just a bunch of self-serving activist busybodies who should have let the powerful be?
For activism to work it needs to spring from a need to uphold universal rights for all people. Much of the activism we see today is boutique activism. It makes participants feel good, even if their particular cause is naively stupid or massively unpopular.
I can’t imagine devoting so much blood, sweet and tears to a cause and know absolutely nothing about it. Do they know climate related deaths have dropped 94% since the 1900s and continue to drop year after year? Or shutting down Britain and the entire west won’t prevent a rise in CO2 emissions? If they really want to make a difference, they should agitate for nuclear energy. That would resonate with more people.
Western liberals are never going to allow the poor people of the world to have the cheap energy they need. We’ve lost thirty years of progress on nuclear power because hysterics like Caroline Lucas, who doesn’t even have an O level in a STEM subject, shrieked so long and loud that we gave up and abandoned it.
They should all go agitate in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, the Gulf of Mexico/ USA, China…that will stop the cult in its tracks! Same with Saint Greta. Stop coming to the UK. Start travelling to the great polluting nations on the planet and see what reception you get there!
Making a nuisance of yourselves through annoying disruptions is not persuasive. It is merely annoying.
They’re just a bunch of narcissistic attention-seeking inadequates.
The cause means nothing to them. It’s part of an “omnicause” which is no more than a background for their deluded self-image.
As humans, they’re failures, propped up by misguided tolerance. In the animal kingdom they wouldn’t have lasted out their first year of life.
Just a waste of skin and bone.
Not ot mention oxygen …
I wish that, just once, an interviewer confronted by a JSO activist making absurd claims, would slap a copy of the latest IPCC report on the table and ask: ‘show me in here where it says that’. I’ve never encountered a climate hysteric who can actually produce solid evidence for their apocalyptic predictions beyond repeating the nonsense that Hallam, a certifiable nutter, spouts during his incoherent rants.
They probably cannot read. Just tell them that their gas, electricity, water, clothes supply and transport will be cut off so they can genuinely claim their righteous living free of oil and its products.
Roger Hallam is usually seen as the brains behind XR and Just Stop Oil. In his more candid moments he has been open that he is more interested in overthrowing the existing system than climate change – not least because he thinks the latter is a lost cause. He spent years studying revolutionary change at King’s and his formula appears to include
1/ the belief that if radicals can get the whole heated commitment of even 3 or 4% of the population then dramatic change is possible
2/ the starting point is to attract attention by being a nuisance
3/ then using the media to stress the moral superiority of the protestors – given their willingness to go to prison – thus attracting more followers i.e. a twenty first century updated version of Gandhi’s tactics.
4/ A number of other subsequent steps
Irrespective of what one thought of their demands, XR was very effective. It made climate a top 3 issue and forced politicians of all stripes to pay attention. Since Hallam was kicked out of XR, however, his successor vehicle has been far less successful. I think he has been overdoing the nuisance bit and singularly failing to get people to see himself and his followers as Gandhiesque saints. Instead they have come over as slightly deranged and selfish. It makes one wonder if some of the other quieter leaders of XR were not as important to its successes as Hallam. I suspect he has had his 15 minutes of fame but perhaps he will get a trial which enables him to play the martyr.
Do you by any chance actually know this fellow? A contemporary perhaps?
Not personally but a friend does and thought he would interest me so I listened to surprisingly candid lecture he gave when he was riding high.
Thanks.
It is unfashionable to suggest that the Met or Home Office get anything right but they seemed to have judged this one well. Allowed the really extreme types enough time to alienate the public then drafted some new laws and carted them off. If one considers how much support XR was getting at one point and the risk of generating martyrs – which was part of the strategy – then maybe they should get some credit for once.
Agreed, a great improvement.
Climate change is as old as this planet. It is constantly changing which is why we are not buried under glaciers or sweltering in planet wide tropics. Species come and species go often as a result of climate change eg the wolly mammoths. Instead of trying to imitate King Canute and turn back the inevitable they would be better off thinking of coping strategies for what will have to deal with.
King Cnut’s point was the precise opposite of that which it’s portrayed as.
His point was to show his subjects that, in fact, he didn’t possess the power to turn back the tide, and thus make their demands upon him less onerous.
It’s always worth making that correction. It would be interesting to trace exactly why that ancient tale got so completely turned around.
These affluent spoilt brats impose heavy costs on sociiety, and should be held financially liable for that.
Wait until the WHO get their legally binding Global Pandemic Treaty signed off by almost 200 countries next June. They will then get their teeth into declaring a ‘climate change health emergency’. Just Stop Oil disruption will pale into insignificance once their restrictions come into effect.
I don’t understand the logic. If people are going to die in mass because if human made warming, wouldn’t an equilibrium be achieved in time?
The problem is that the left – because “they” are always bedfellows of the left – are deeply enamoured of the monosyllabic and utterly politically and socially moronic idea of the change they want, without debate and whatever it is “NOW”.
The thing about climate change is that CO2 concentration of 400 parts per million (OMG! PER MILLION!) reads a lot bigger than 0.04 percent or one in 2,500.
And you did know, you peaceful protesters, that C3 photosynthesis stops at 150 parts per million in the middle of an ice age. Right?
Or that under 250, all plant life dies.
“400” is a big number though, and “a million” is an even bigger one.
The truth is that the UK is doing a relatively good job in reducing oil consumption. I’m sitting here about to fly (apologies) back from 3 days in UAE. This is where JSO should concentrate their efforts. After three days stuck in traffic jams from hell, I think “we are all doomed” no matter what we do in the UK.
Excellent idea! JSO should protest in Saudi Arabia and UAE!
Nuke ‘em ‘til they glow.
Please make punching JSO activists legal.
Annoying people by interfering with their busy lives is not going to work. Only an unstable person could think otherwise.
Like the endless stream of lefties who oppose bombing civilians in Gaza, they have no practical alternative to offer. It’s easy to see difficult choices in simplistic terms, when one has no skin in the game. As George Carlin observed many years ago, “If you want to see humanity return to the stone age, take away electricity for one month.” It’s difficult to gamble on avoiding long-term chaos, when short-term chaos can be easily envisioned if we are to follow the advice of the JSO types.
What if the uncomfortable truth is that NOBODY has a clear idea of how to transition away from fossil fuels? Supplies are in decline, regardless of the spins JSO or their conservative opponents put on things. Long before oil runs out, the price will begin to rise, as it has been, and various economic activities will become untenable. Nuclear can potentially solve most of the grid-power challenge, but does nothing for the liquid-fuel challenge. Solar and wind are rather dubious.
The most efficient way to transition from fossil fuels is to allow economic pressures to spur innovation, as in every other area of technology. Neither panicking about climate change nor insisting that oil & gas are sustainable indefinitely is addressing this problem. Nor is insisting that we can keep on expanding wind and solar deployments and hope that things will improve at some later date. Every month there is some breathless news story on a revolutionary new type of grid battery, but it’s mostly just vaporware.
It’s clearly politically pointless and meaningless. The purpose of it is to act as a form of self-therapy for dimwitted middle class people
JSO opened a lot of people eyes. Genocidal cult crowled into the open where everyone could see them and ask the question: what JSO would really mean for the poor and the people who consume 1% of energy of the avarafe houshold in Europe or America. Genocide, plain and simple.
Just Stop Oil activists = ‘eco-zealots’? More like eco-fascists.
Same fools camped outside Greenham Common years ago. Did no good.
The Canadian Green Party lost half their front bench in ‘scandal’ over accidental misgendering. XR take time off to protest ‘TERF’ academics in Bristol. XR activist academic at Jesus College Cambridge (arrested for the cause) has a side hustle in direct action to prevent Helen Joyce doing a talk on sex-based rights another Cambridge college. Saint Greta of the West Bank….Quebec Green candidate disbarred because of pro-life commitments. Climate Action conference starts with a discussion of pronouns. It’s almost like people who say they are convinced that human civilization is in an existential struggle to survive, don’t actually believe it. They certainly don’t seem to think it is essential to build the broadest coalition in support of actions that will hurt and certainly generate high levels of class conflict and polarization. Who the hell needs Catholics, people who live in Alberta (or Middlesbrough, or Dresden), Christians, old-fashioned feminists, conservatives, classical liberals….or just middle of fetch road normies. Climate crusaders must be pure of heart. They’re the chosen ones. I think it is time that strategically minded environmentalists got their house in order, or accept that their best intentions will be consigned to historical irrelevance by the company they keep.
Robert Conquest’s observation that the best way to explain the behaviour of many organisations is to assume they’re secretly controlled by their enemies seem to be relevant here.
XR, JSO etc are so good at alienating the people they claim to want to persuade, that it is difficult not to believe that their real intention is to make everyone love hydrocarbons. In my case that’s pushing an already-open door of course, but there are millions of people who aren’t presently aware of exactly how stone-age their lives would become if we stopped using hydrocarbons at any point in the next hundred years. These activist organisations not only infuriate decent people who are just trying to go about their lives, they are provoking a global debate on the subject in which millions of people are educating themselves on the issue and discovering that there is no prospect of stopping fossil fuel reliance without economic collapse, social breakdown, and eventually the deaths of about 75% of humanity, probably including themselves.
For me and many others, who knew this already, we couldn’t have come up with a more effective way to win an argument than this.
“Just Ligma Bosack”. That’s probably the best, most sane, and most worthy response to the psych-ward-escapees of JSO.
Just stop oil really needs to sort itself out and change its tactics, but we still have the right of peaceful protest in this country and we mustn’t let authoritarianism take that away from us.
There is nothing peacefull about harassment, sabotage and all these sort os middle class harassment tactics.
Walking in the road is not acceptable peaceful protest.
Holding signs on the pavement is totally fine.
If only they had the same kind of PR machines as BP and Exxon then they would make the kind of impact they intended on the debate.
They have billions of government and international organisation spending backing the green message – they are pushing at an open-door politically – look at the billions being spent on renewables and carbon credits.
The problem is that people on the ground – regular folk – are increasingly skeptical because of the name-calling, exaggeration and daily costs they see (blaming Big Oil being another exaggeration). Just Stop Oil then simply adds to the skepticism by associating ‘green’ with ‘unfriendly’, ‘antisocial’ and ‘inconvenient’. The public becomes more ‘anti-green’ because of their actions, not less. It is entirely counterproductive to their cause.
Totally agree, they have gone about it all the wrong way with their partisan approach, which may feel to them like they are doing something tangible but the result is a fail.
What they need is a PR company to come up with something legendary cynical, such as one’s ‘carbon footprint’ – which is of course the creation of BP, and subtly shifts the blame from them to the individual.
I’ve seen lots of Exxon and Shell commercials preening about their commitment to reducing emissions. Can’t quite recall the ad campaign questioning the science.
Read a former, serious environmentalist, Michel Shellenberg, who now takes the view that radical environmentalists are indeed generating widespread antipathy to the cause and thus will fail to convince the public of any threat if indeed one exists. Doomsday approaches, unsupportable as they are, merely generate distrust of the media, public figures and experts. Of course, it doesn’t help that doomsday never happens.
Don’t forget BP! Even their logo is green!
If they are not bright enough to reach that obvious conclusion one has to wonder about their other conclusions, and the quality of thought in reaching them.