Just Stop Oil
Just Stop Oil
Don’t mean to cause an argument war in the comments so please stay civil. But it’s an interesting read.
Whenever I hear of that group, I think "oh, those nutcases", and not "heroic deeds for nature".
I am convinced they are actually run by big oil to make real environmentalist look bad, and create a path for harsher punishment and criminalisation of climate protests everywhere. So far, they have been quite successful in that regard.
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.
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.
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.
A YouTuber I quite like, Tom Nicholas, recently made a video going undercover with Just Stop Oil. Warning, it's an hour long video, but he has interesting analysis of JSO's actions and he includes the perspective of their members as to why they do what they do.
Definitely worth a watch, as are his other videos.
jeez, their protests are terrible. and they kept getting worse as I kept reading.