I’mfinding it pretty interesting that everyone here seems to be saying that the group doesn’t have a goal- in the UK- where the group is based all the info has been very clear; they’re trying to get what currently passes for a government to reverse the recent decision taken in the last few weeks to allow fracking and the expansion of oil extraction.
I’m at a loss to see how that’s not a clear goal.
The point about the price of oil and gas is in reference to the fact that the recent attempt at a government effectively claimed that the expansion of gas and oil extraction is needed as the cheapest way to lower electricity and gas prices after the huge recent rise, which is nonsense, especially as a short-term fix, as it’d take years to build the extra infrastructure.
If you’re not aware of the local issues, it maybe does look like a mixed message, but it makes perfect sense to anyone here following what’s been going on IMO. It’s not ‘gas should be cheaper’ it’s that ‘gas won’t even be cheaper’.
Goal= what they would like to achieve. Pretty clearly stated.
Method= what you are questioning.
It may interest you to know that the group have previously attempted to protest outside oil company headquarters etc. It barely made the local news. Also, on any given day there a whole range of protests going on in and around parliament and London in general, on a whole range of issues. At this point, unless there are more than tens of thousands of people all at once for a single cause- hard to organise, especially at short notice- it gets zero attention, and even huge marches get reported as a single 5 second mention then dismissed most of the time.
Oddball protests are pretty much the only way left to get any attention or interest. If people want to stop them from happening, start listening to the people who protest in the way they’re ‘supposed to’.
It’s possible they just couldn’t fit their entire mission statement on a t-shirt. But my point remains, regardless of their antics, their shirts say ‘just stop oil’ and I still think that’s pretty self explanatory. For more information you can literally type ‘just stop oil’ into google and find their website. Plus, as we’ve seen, people more local to them seem to have a decent understanding of what they’re after. Maybe it’s not that they’re doing a bad job of conveying their goals, but rather the media.
If all you saw was a picture of two people with their hands glued to something or dumping soup on a painting and wearing a shirt that says ‘just stop oil’, surely you’d be able to figure out what’s going on. I think most people would see that and think ‘climate activists creating a scene to get some attention’.
That kinda reminds me of when there’s a big protest or riot and when asked why they didn’t do this or that instead of resorting to a protest how often the answer is ‘we did, but we were ignored’. That seemed to be a common thread during the BLM protests. Admittedly it was a bit eye opening for me when BLM organizers would almost have to spell out that ‘this isn’t the first time we’ve asked to be treated fairly, we were ignored when we asked nicely’.
And they’re right, more often than not, things escalate to a protest, they don’t start there.
I’m in the UK, I’ve followed the news about their antics but I didn’t know this was a protest against fracking. I thought “Stop Oil” was fairly clear though.
It’s both really- overall message to move away from oil, but they’ve really stepped it up lately due to the overturn of the fracking ban and expansion of drilling licences recently announced.
More to the point, I’d think (and did think) “Climate activists vandalizing shit with no relation to climate just to get attention because they’re largely clueless and don’t have anything more productive or actually climate-helping to do”.
Right. You had people who were protesting by coming out, holding signs and making a presence. You had a select minority who took it as license to smash windows, set things on fire and steal shit despite none of that actually being related to BLM. The people in the majority had their messaging tarnished by the minority where people could say “Pfftt… that’s what it’s really about”
You can support the greater message and still think some of the messengers are dumbshits. These guys are a bunch of dumbshits hurting the overall message.
As @Filbert and @Joey_P point out, I was in no way at all unclear on their goals and how their goals relate to their means and their verbal statements. If this is unclear then I think the media must be doing a very bad job muddling things up because it is not difficult to understand and their own statements tend to be clear and eloquent.
Additionally, they have stated that it was carefully plannend and they were very sure that the soup couldn’t harm the painting. They grabbed attention but caused barely any harm. Literally any other form of protest will likely cause much more disruption and much less international interest.
Had it been my museum, I would have gladly supported their protest by leaving them a little longer and doing what was in my power to get extra attention, while making it about performance art and protest art—it could very well work for both!
Just Stop Oil protest in many different ways and they often risk arrest. I do find it convincing because it shows me that there are other people who care about this issue who are willing to take great personal risks for what they believe in. This makes me want to support them even more. I believe that there will be no change without discomfort. Why would we change anything if we’re all comfortable? Universal suffrage or bicycling laws in the Netherlands are good examples of how many people opposed the protesters because the means caused discomfort, but ultimately the discomfort led to change we all agree was for the best.
Just Stop Oil protests are ongoing and constantly reaching me through the papers and their own social media. Here is an 80-year-old reverend being arrested:
⛪️ 80-YEAR-OLD REVEREND SUE PARFITT ARRESTED AT HOLBORN ROADBLOCK ⛪️
She’s not all that easy to hear over the noise, unfortunately. But they post this stuff all the time and the action that got the international attention was the soup at van Gogh’s Sunflowers. They hurt nobody at all, least of all their message. I hope they keep at it!
You mean the media they’re relying on to get their story out?
You’ll have to excuse me for being unconvinced that the couple of idiots throwing soup at paintings to protest the cost of heating food by saying we need less energy production to make heating food cheaper weren’t really as careful in planning “Make sure no soup hurts anything” as they now claim they were.
There’s a whole spectrum here. I said in another thread that I could see the reasoning behind the scientists gluing themselves in the VW factory show floor. It made sense. The people actually making the polluting cars are made to feel uncomfortable. I can see the reasoning in BLM protestors spray painting a police station or courthouse. Vandalism but vandalism with a clear line to their goals.
This nonsense was more like people just throwing bricks at storefronts and then saying “How come these people aren’t supporting us?” If you want to believe that doesn’t hurt the message, though, I doubt I’ll convince you otherwise.
I mean the particular medium through which you learned of this story, because the Guardian has not been unclear in getting their story out and neither have their own social media channels.
They very, very frequently have climate scientists glueing themselves to various things. I doubt these women are idiots (but who knows?), but I pretty sure that this wasn’t just their idea. It’s an organisation that plans protests carefully and they are well aware that if they destroyed the painting, that would be bad press.
This seems more like you wilfully decide they must be idiots, therefore they can’t have planned it. I see the evidence pointing the other way: it’s an organisation with scientists and legal help, they plan things thoroughly and the painting was indeed not harmed.
Nothing like that. There was no damage. If you throw a brick at a shop, the damage negatively affects the shopkeeper. Art and protest have a long history together and the museum may well have profited from the attention. Not to mention that climate change affects us all, even the people working at the museum.
Well, they ARE the ones throwing soup with an incoherent message about fuel prices, after all. To watch the video, they just threw the soup directly onto the surface protecting the painting and let it ooze all over. They had no way of knowing if any would seep in at the seams or otherwise affect the art. To say that they did completely know this would require more evidence then “They pinky-swear that they knew”. I mean, I could just as easily reverse it and say you have a naive notion that they MUST have been 100% confident just because you liked their actions. Saying they were “very sure” means nothing – lots of people are “very sure” about things and very, very wrong all the time.
Racial justice affects the shopkeeper with bricks thrown at his store. Small comfort. And the museum was still negatively affected even if the worse case scenario didn’t come to pass. So saying there was “no damage” comes across as false.
In any event, I’ll leave it at that since there isn’t a whole lot more to say.
It’s already created bad press. If this becomes a thing then there’s going to be a backlash of anti-protestors and it’s going to end up in protests that destroy the environment.
Years ago we had a PETA protest of a chain restaurant. All they managed to do was create record sales for the restaurant and a higher demand for more animal product. There was a huge line of cars on the street with people waiting to order food.
And yet, in the much-publicized protests, what they’re counting on to get their message out, the message they’re choosing to get out is “fuel costs need to be lower”. Which is a message that’s not just irrelevant to what you’re saying is their message; it’s a message that is directly opposed to that message. If we take what they’re saying at face value, they’re saying “We’re throwing soup at paintings because oil companies should be extracting more oil”.
Right, it is not really consistent to say that doing whatever it takes to gain publicity is a win because it alerts some people to the urgency of the problem problem that others already acknowledged, while ignoring the fact that their goals were not publicized by the publicity surrounding the event, even if others happen to know what they are.
We’re not, though. Vaguely mentioning something isn’t the same as “talking about it”. As I said before, this thread could have gone the exact same way if they had been upset about abortion or LGBT library books or voting rights or declawing cats – because their issue is pretty much irrelevant to their antics.
That is a good clear goal. Too bad that’s not what’s getting out. The only thing we hear is that their message is “just stop oil,” and the rather weak rationale for why they protested where they did.
They came across to me as wanting people to stop using oil, not anything about reducing extraction. Based on what you said, I would think a better name would be “No More Fracking” or something like that. Because their name is the only thing they can guarantee will get out of their message.
But we’re not. No one in this thread is talking about fracking or how it specifically affects us and what measures we could take to reduce it.
Ridiculous. There was damage to the frame and probably loss of revenue due to closure. Regardless, it’s a ludicrous to suggest this type of thing is a positive to those targeted. Watch the videos I posted above of the gas stations and the car dealership, I’m sure there are tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage from those two incidents alone.
I think we need to take a step back here and look at the bigger picture. The assumption several posters are making here is that the reason the JSO organization’s goals aren’t being met is because enough people aren’t getting the message. I believe they are getting the message but realize that it is a much more complicated issue than “just stopping”.
Their country’s infrastructure is based on oil. The oil and gas industry plays a central role in the economy of the United Kingdom. It also accounts for more than three-quarters of the UK’s total primary energy needs. Additionally oil provides 97 per cent of the fuel for transport, and gas is a key fuel for heating and electricity generation. You can’t just stop.
Further, in democratic nations, you sometimes can’t get what you want if enough other people don’t want it too. You and I might be OK with riding a bicycle everywhere but a lot of people won’t. Stopping oil stops goods transport. It’s way more complicated than ‘just stopping’ and the public will need to be made aware of the intricacies - throwing soup cans won’t cut it. I don’t think protests are the best way to get the message out anyway.
But holding the public hostage through the threat of escalating vandalism because their goals weren’t met the first go around is a form of extortion.
I have completely rethought my inactivity on climate change and adopted a life of monastic asceticism, because people threw mashed potatoes on a Monet.