Folks, there are better ways to do this. Idiots.
And on the eve of the summer solstice, no less.
I’ll repost my reply I made in the other thread to this:
There are many legitimate environmental concerns but assholes like this make all environmentalism look like lunacy and really hurt the effort to protect the environment.
I honestly, truly think these people don’t actually give a shit about the environment. They are just attention-seeking misanthropes.
Just Stop Oil has never made any sense in their “activism”. They’re trolls.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if these idiots are funded (wittingly or not) by the oil industry to discredit environmentalists.
I don’t know how such an action could be expected to change anyone’s mind about oil. And I would guess that people who give a fuck about stonehenge would be inclined to support alternative energy sources in the first place. So, piss them off, I guess?
On the bright side, birds have been shitting on stonehenge for a long while now, and stonehenge has gotten over it.
They are - Aileen Getty, no less. She sounds like a total village idiot (and folks, nobody was diagnosed with HIV ca. 1981, because we didn’t know the virus existed yet).
They were also responsible for the “tomato soup” protest a couple years ago, where that was thrown on a Van Gogh painting.
Huh, I wouldn’t have thought it’d be that simple and obvious.
OK, change the headlines: Oil-industry activists pretending (poorly) to be environmentalists vandalized Stonehenge and a bunch of other things.
That’s really shitty. Assholes. 
This made my day. Thank you.
The petroleum and gas industry has pretty much given up on any effort to ‘discredit’ environmentalists largely because it just isn’t necessary. They have instead turned their PR machine to co-opting environmental efforts, and in particular by funding pilot projects for carbon capture and sequestration (CC&S) and direct air capture (DAC) to ‘prove’ that they are doing ‘something’ about atmospheric carbon emissions even though even if practicable these technologies could not conceivably be scaled up to the necessary extent to mitigate future emissions.
Even that effort is really unnecessary; governments have (correctly) concluded that sustaining the petrofuel extraction infrastructure is critical to maintaining global trade and industrialization as it currently exists, and even with transition to more sustainable energy production from renewables has significant limits in terms of how fast it can be adopted and what it can be used for, notwithstanding how much gas and oil hydrocarbons are precursors to a large amount of material resources used today. We will continue on that path as long as fossil fuels can be economically extracted regardless of the ultimate consequence to the environment and global temperature. Petroleum companies have co-oped all transnational efforts at researching and publicizing the effects to the extent that it might as well have been labeled “Sponsored by Aramco”. At least the cryosphere presentations about how serious and multifaceted the impacts to impending collapse of Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves gets unimpeded coverage, although I suspect the typical member of the public won’t listen to two minutes of technojabber by ‘ice nerds’ before they blip over to whatever sportsball drama is currently on ESPN.
The “Just Stop Oil” protestors are pretty much the definition of ‘trolls’, but then, this is essentially the only way the issue gets above-the-fold press by the media establishment. The street blockages that prevent ordinary schlubs from just living their lives, soup throwing antics, and vandalizing monuments at least gets them attention, although I think for the general public the message is lost in the medium rather than being an intrinsic part of it, and they’re just waved away as a bunch of nutballs instead of people trying desperately to bring attention to an actual existential threat, albeit one that nobody is going to make any real effort to avert beyond making hollow commitments to emissions reductions that they have no intention of fulfilling and throwing a few bucks to the developing nations that are facing evident near term catastrophe.
Stranger
Because they are.
The United Nations Environment Programme disagrees with you:
Humanity is breaking all the wrong records when it comes to climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions reached a new high in 2022. In September 2023, global average temperatures were 1.8°C above pre-industrial levels. When this year is over, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, it is almost certain to be the warmest year on record.
The 2023 edition of the Emissions Gap Report tells us that the world must change track, or we will be saying the same thing next year – and the year after, and the year after, like a broken record. The report finds that fully implementing and continuing mitigation efforts of unconditional nationally determined contributions (NDCs) made under the Paris Agreement for 2030 would put the world on course for limiting temperature rise to 2.9°C this century. Fully implementing conditional NDCs would lower this to 2.5°C. Given the intense climate impacts we are already seeing, neither outcome is desirable.
Progress since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015 has shown that the world is capable of change. Greenhouse gas emissions in 2030, based on policies in place, were projected to increase by 16 per cent at the time of the agreement’s adoption. Today, the projected increase is 3 per cent. However, predicted 2030 greenhouse gas emissions must fall by 28 per cent for the Paris Agreement 2°C pathway and 42 per cent for the 1.5°C pathway.
Change must come faster in the form of economy-wide, low-carbon development transformations, with a focus on the energy transition. Countries with greater capacity and responsibility for emissions will need to take more ambitious action and provide financial and technical support to developing nations. Low- and middle-income countries, which already account for more than two thirds of global emissions, should meet their development needs with low-emissions growth, which would provide universal access to energy, lift millions out of poverty, and expand strategic industries.
Broken Record: Temperatures hit new highs, yet world fails to cut emissions (again) [pdf]
Of course, publishing a 80 page report summarizing extensive research on the hazard and necessary action doesn’t get you as much airplay as throwing tomato soup on a da Vinci painting, and almost nobody is actually going to bother reading past the summary (if that). So, you can understand why some might resort to trolling, even as counterproductive as it is.
Stranger
Does “dry orange paint” mean powdered orange chalk?
If these are the same folks who did other art defacings, they did things that sound horrible in the first rush of reporting and then it turns out that they defaced the glass around the painting, rather than the painting itself, for instance.
I’m waiting for the second round of reporting to see if the powder is likely to stick.
They clearly don’t, what the fuck are you talking about. Nothing in that is promoting Just Stop Oil in any way.
If I take a shit on a table in McDonald’s while yelling that I want world peace, a report by the UN with concerns about civilian casualties in Gaza and Ukraine doesn’t make me any less of a wackjob. For fucks’ sake. 
I can do without your performative hostility.
No, the UNEP is not throwing soup or yelling a pithy three word motto. Instead, they publish an extensively referenced summary report containing statements such as “Change must come faster in the form of economy-wide, low-carbon development transformations, with a focus on the energy transition.” You can virtually feel the eyeballs rolling back in legislators’ heads (or at least, the few who actually bother to even read the forward). And, again, while I think the “Just Stop Oil” protestors’ tactics are counterproductive, they are getting far more attention than yet another report full of technical jargon which no matter how dumbed down the authors have tried to make it, is still too complicated and full of bad news for most people to even read a portion of it or for news outlets to bother to even summarize it for their readers.
Stranger
@Stranger_On_A_Train , are you even reading any of the other posts in this thread? This is a thread about an oil-industry-funded group claiming to be environmentalists, and you say that the oil industry is making no effort to discredit environmentalists. A poster says that this group is a bunch of nutballs, and you disagree by posting something that has no connection whatsoever to the group. Heck, are you even reading your own posts? You call climate change an existential threat in the same post that you say that governments are correct to conclude that maintaining the fossil fuel industry is essential.
Nothing wrong with human altruism. But when it’s just an expression of narcissism, it makes for a dangerous paradox
“Just Stop Oil” is not “oil-industry-funded group”; it is primarily funded by the Climate Emergency Fund of whom one of the major donors is Aileen Getty, a granddaughter of J. Paul Getty and trust fund heiress who has no association with or has ever worked for Getty Petroleum Marketing or any of its subsidiaries or inheritors. There is no indication that the petroleum industry is playing any kind of dirty-tricksterism in this case (although they have certainly engaged in a lot of gaslighting and coverup about the dangers of climate change), and frankly, they don’t need to fund a group of pranksters to sway public opinion when there are so many well-funded PR ‘think tanks’ like the American Enterprise Institute and Navigators Global LLC who have effectively sowed fear, uncertainty, and doubt about energy alternatives for decades and have done so with such effectiveness that it has essentially become a polarizing political issue.
Despite your patronizing comments, I have read every post in this thread and responded by referencing the report by the United Nations Environment Programme which is making essentially the same statement, to wit the urgent need for developed nations to transition away from oil and gas as rapidly as possible (and the failure to make any real efforts to do so) which has received virtually no media attention. Clearly, practically nobody is reading reports, or watching presentations on ocean thermal gradient transformations, advances in cryosphere modeling portending far more imminent melting than glaciologists believed possible, or signals of AMOC slowdown, but when you glue yourself to a roadway or splash paint on the plastic cover over a famous artwork, it makes headline news. In terms of raising some kind of public awareness there is an obvious value proposition even if it is generating more ill will than enthusiasm.
I did note the climate change has grave potential as an existential threat, but that governments which want to continue to proceed with business as normal “have (correctly) concluded that sustaining the petrofuel extraction infrastructure is critical to maintaining global trade and industrialization as it currently exists”, and by extension are not motivated to take serious actions for either a transition to sustainable, lower carbon emitting energy supplies which would include dramatic restrictions in travel and shipping, industrial manufacturing, production of most modern materials, et cetera. Perhaps next time you’ll try reading the entire post instead of castigating me for what you imagine I wrote.
Stranger
Thank you, I was just coming in to ask how come the conclusion was reached so quickly that because Ms. Getty is a donor this has got to be a operation on behalf of the Getty Oil interests.
On the other hand, yes, JSO gets a lot of attention… that is waved off as trolls and cranks and still does not lead anyone to read and heed the reports addressing the threat. Wish I had an answer to propose.