this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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Just Stop Oil feels like an astroturf group made by fossil fuel lobbyists to smear the idea of activists while teaching a generation how to fuck up protesting. Their wildly unreliable activities make me not trust them for defacing unrelated things like art. There are other, better ways to protest. And besides, coal is more destructive than oil so this group doesn't look like they know about environmental sciences. Britain was built on coal - fix that first. It's already dying, just do the world a favor and finish it off.
What are the other better ways to protest?
Interfere with the industry that it is trying to upset. Frustrating the customers does little to stop the supply/demand of the market so oil keeps being produced and used.
Disrupt oil production. Upset oil deliveries. Frustrate the oil users.
Those are the end objectives that will change how the world uses oil. Now the organization name makes sense - it's the start and sole cause of the movement. Now it can galvanize people to join by knowing the cause through a name that is a call to action. JSO does so much almost right that it feels like deliberate missteps each time JSO is in the news.
JSO can organize union drives to upset oil production. Rally the people behind it and the organization may see change from the inside. Or at least freak out the people in charge enough to see they need to change.
Dig troughs across oil access roads so maintenance crews can't get to rigs. Make the cost of running the business so high that the people making decisions have to start addressing the activity. Frustrate the business.
Throwing soup at an icon of culture does nothing to highlight the goals, rally support, or stop the offending action. It ONLY gives oil protests a bad name while being completely unhelpful at stopping oil.
That just gets you shot and/or arrested in the middle of nowhere.
You need some media participation.
Edit and/or
It looks like Just Stop Oil does all of those things according to their Wiki entry: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Stop_Oil
And all I ever see on the news is soup on art. So what do you suggest now?
Stop throwing soup on art and keep fighting fossil fuels. Go after coal too. Power plants and refineries are choke points on the process. Just stop making the public mad with pointless soup throwing. Or at least throw it on Nigel Farage. Public figures need soup more than Renaissance painters.
The UK has no more coal fire power stations, so it wouldn't really make sense for a UK organisation to go after coal.
That one worries me a bit because, if there is a problem, it could create a bigger environmental issue if things go really wrong. Then again, I assume they'll just fly helicopters out to it which is probably worse than trucks. I no longer know anyone working in oil and gas to ask them about it, though.
The defacement of treasured art is what ruined it for me. Throwing paint on a centuries-old work of art tells me more about how you see your relative worth in the world than it tells me about some cause I just stopped ever wanting to support.
It's as gauche as scratching your initials into the colosseum, and worse when one drags an organization down too.
Did they actually do that? They threw soup at a pane of glass.
Campaigning against coal in the UK is just a distraction. No one wants to still be using coal. Today the final shutdown of the UK's last coal-fired powerstation happened (and it's not been running most of the time for several years) and the UK's last steel mill that made virgin steel was closed, too. There's nothing major that still uses coal left after today.