This organization clearly wants to have it both ways. They are hiding behind the guise of advocating for "democracy" and claiming to be repressed by the state, but they are actually advocating for a very, very unpopular and undemocratic position and resorting to undemocratic methods to achieve it.
Championing people like Ghandi or Mandela is a false equivalency as they actually fought to increase suffrage and representation. Just Stop Oil is advocating for non-democratic means to their specific policy positions. Maybe they are right in the long run, but they are not being intellectually honest about their justification.
Their key demand was the policy of the recent democratically elected government and has now been enacted: "No new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea"
What undemocratic policy? Or do you just mean unpopular?
Such as they even have a policy position, Just Stop Oil is advocating that governments ban all oil and gas contracts without a referendum or popular vote or even any elected officials.
Ostensibly the organization is about political mobilization. But they haven't actually endorsed a candidate or secured a referendum or achieved anything vaguely democratic. Which I am not saying they have to do. But claiming they are on democracy's side seems a bit premature.
they're clearly organized and acting to influence public opinion and provide policy suggestions to elected representatives. public advocacy and communication to elected representatives are part of the democratic process.
they have already achieved their first policy goal: the UK no longer issues new oil and gas drilling permits.
https://juststopoil.org/2024/07/10/paint-the-town-orange-jus...
they have set another policy goal, and i expect they won't change a winning formula.
> acting to influence public opinion
They are influencing me the other way. Every time I see one of their stunts I turn down my AC 5 degrees and run my car in my driveway for an hour. Doing my part to carbon offset their shenanigans.
Solving climate change might be incompatible with democracy, due to the desire in the aggregate for business as usual and unwillingness to pay for true costs of emissions from activities.
Not a lot of folks with the fortitude to vote against the free ride of not paying for carbon emissions (transport, air travel, agriculture, shipping, etc), based on the evidence.
I don’t think we’re going to solve climate change, we’re just not moving in that direction, like you said there’s unwillingness. Going anti-climate is not going to foster democracy though, the people who are working to end democracy are also advocating for ignoring climate change.
My opinion is that we need more democracy. The people who are most impacted by climate change, the poor and the youth, have the least influence on the issue. If they had a bigger voice, we’d be making different decisions.
> My opinion is that we need more democracy. The people who are most impacted by climate change, the poor and the youth, have the least influence on the issue. If they had a bigger voice, we’d be making different decisions.
But that isn't democracy then, right? Equal votes is the problem, when younger and future stakeholders should have a greater vote and say vs those who will not be around much longer or the wealthy (who generate outsized emissions [1] and a component of their wealth are fossil fuels based [2]). Unaccounted carbon emissions from consumption are our time's bread and circus, racking up the credit card and dumping the liability on future humans.
Imagine telling anyone over 60-70 or anyone near the top of the wealth spectrum they shouldn't get a vote in climate related matters. So instead, you have to just wait for them to age out, while you make whatever progress you can day by day. Or a version of a representative democracy where the longer you'll be here, the greater the vote you get. "No taxation without representation." if you will. The future having to pay for the past's lack of will to reduce carbon emissions is taxation, and the cost is going to be enormous [3] [4] [5].
[1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-emit-much-...
[2] https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/06/23/only-the-super-wea...
[3] https://apnews.com/5949adfa46b84ee9aa28369f9c050e18
[4] https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-damage-economy-inc...
[5] https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2024...
Oh, pish posh. Oil policy has never been set by democratic methods. It's been decided through backroom deals and corruption at the highest levels around the world. Unlike most conspiracy theories, this is extremely well-documented and public opinion has been significantly swayed by fraudulent misinformation, spin campaigns, and cynical policy written with the express intent to entrench the oil industry. Tricking voters through lies and corruption is not democracy.
I mean, if you want conspiracy theories, Exxon and Arco actually launched the solar panel industry and invested tons of money into them. It wasn't until OPEC (government controlled oil suppliers) undercut the oil market in the 70s that they divested them. (Arco's solar business ended up getting sold off to Siemens).
I think it's a bit misguided to believe that oil companies are solely using corruption to drive their influence, but then that they would also care about what in particular they are selling. If their profits came only from backroom deals, you'd think they would choose a cheaper and easier product to trick consumers into buying!
>found guilty of causing criminal damage exceeding £5,000 [...] although the painting was protected by glass and was unharmed
incredible
why incredible? Somebody disrupting the normal activity from a museum is not different than somebody going to Google and unplugging a server.
Even if the server is not damaged, the owner can be losing millions each hour that the server is out of service.
After each attack, the museum must close for a while and check if everything is correct in the other rooms also. The picture must be removed, cleaned by paid specialists, somebody must verify that its integrity has not being compromised and that nothing is slowly leaking under the glass. Insurance staff must come and write a report. Policemen must lose hours of work and write reports also.
There is a clear, measurable, and verifiable lose on ticket revenue for the museum. And the museum is not even responsible for the fact that people use cars!.
I don't know how much the Louvre earns each day, but those £5,000 for weeks or months of not having the Monalissa available for display seems a value too low to me.
> After each attack, the museum must close for a while
This was the National Gallery in London, which I believe doesn't charge for admission because it's a public institution. But ... did the National Gallery actually close after these incidents, when just one painting was attacked and not actually damaged? That would seem to be an overreaction. In any case, I think a lost revenue justification for the damages along these lines seems kinda silly.
Rather the judge seems to have believed that the damage is to society overall:
> our culpability is at level A. You did reconnaissance and planning and talked to a journalist. Your harm is at category 1, which means extreme harm to society.
> There is nothing peaceful or nonviolent about throwing soup. Throwing soup in someone’s face is violent.
I think the problem with a legal system that treats throwing soup as violence and not damaging a painting as causing damage is that this flattening perspective only incentivizes activists to go big or go home. If you're going to be sentenced as if you did damage even when you did not ... then you may as well try to destroy the painting next time. If you're going to be treated by the legal system as if you committed a violent crime when you threw soup at an enclosed painting ... then maybe next time you should actually commit real violence. Note, it sounds like being convicted of battery in the UK only gets you up to a maximum of 6 months. So you could physically accost people and get a much shorter sentence than these soup-throwers.
https://criminalinjurieshelpline.co.uk/blog/punishment-sente...
> maybe next time you should actually commit real violence. you could physically accost people
This just reinforces the idea that the 2 years are fully justified. Better stop it now.
> being convicted of battery in the UK only gets you up to a maximum of 6 months
If you keep committing batteries each weekend, I bet that the next time the situation will change.
All civilized societies agreed that recidivists should receive harsher sentences than one-time offenders. Here we have a criminal group --organized-- to deploy a chain of senseless attacks on a campaign of harassment of --innocent-- museums targeting artifacts of huge cultural value for western culture. Without showing any sign to stop or symptoms of regret. Legally there is no point into treating each case as an isolated act because it isn't. They are steps on a bigger crime scene.
> did the National Gallery actually close after these incidents, when just one painting was attacked
Don't know. Wasn't there.
The museums work like a computer memory pile. There is an endless stream of people walking in. To keep the system running the same amount must walk out. To keep the system efficient, the flux must have a direction and only one. The tourists must walk the pile until finding the other extreme and walk out. The same door shouldn't be used to enter and exit.
If a museum is famous for a particular painting, it is assured that the stream of visitors will be directed towards that room, so nobody miss it. It will be placed most probably on a noble room with a door for entering and another in the opposite side to continue the visit.
If this area is blocked, suddenly the incoming flux of people can't go out. The museum needs to find an alternative route ASAP to release that flux pressure before the people start being crushed.
Most modern places will have planned that possibility, but architectures don't allow a secondary route everywhere.
What I mean is that, as long as the visit is arranged in the traditional way, to close a big museum just by the attack to a single painting is not impossible at all.
i can say that observationally, this just-do-the-crime reasoning is real.
over the past couple decades, many american activists have realized that demonstrating certain political positions is dangerous, even if the demonstration itself and each individual participant is lawful.
so now there's a broad activist culture that encourages independent militant action against productive capital, general infrastructure, administrative facilities, retail outlets, and personal homes!
Though, I guess to ground this a little:
I can say that observationally, this just-do-the-emissions reasoning is real. Over the past several decades, many industrialized individuals and groups have realized that pushing certain harmful chemicals into the environment is lawful almost regardless of the amount. So now there's a broad emitter culture that encourages independent destructive action against productive ecosystems and planetary systems, threatening the long term viability of public infrastructure, administrative facilities, retail outlets, and personal homes!
The scale of destruction from climate activists is many orders of magnitude less than the destruction of what they're railing against. These soup-throwers are being charged, but Exxon/BP/Chevron are never charged with manslaughter or even reckless endangerment when a heatwave or hurricane which would not have happened but for climate change claims its many victims.
> The scale of destruction from climate activists is many orders of magnitude less than the destruction of what they're railing against.
two wrongs don't make a right. "Bob shoot at me, therefore I can rape Lisa?". Sorry, but I'm not buying that BS.
No one is claiming two wrongs don't make a right.
I'm certainly not saying these activists should have no punishment (and they know that they're risking prosecution when they undertake their actions).
But we should also be keenly aware that the emitters that causing a giant and growing crisis which has already killed a bunch of people and will kill many more in the future are not facing any punishment, and this should be at least as significant a story as 2 people getting 2 years for throwing soup.
> There is a clear, measurable, and verifiable lose on ticket revenue for the museum
No. It's the National Gallery:
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/visiting/plan-your-visit
> And the museum is not even responsible for the fact that people use cars!.
That same page I cited has driving/parking directions to the museum.
That actually sounds pretty low for the amount of labor and trouble they caused.
The painting was thankfully unharmed but there was significant damage to the frame.
I believe they are doing this mostly to get attention, with the hope that some of the people who hear about the action will also take a little time to learn about the issue.
There are climate-change protests every day worldwide that get no attention from media at all.
I don't know if it's the good kind of attention. It's pretty arguable that PETA adopting similar tactics has arguably slowed their cause more than helped.
In PETA's case, they suck all of the air out of the room from other animal welfare organizations. These public displays do not change minds so much as they drive donations. So they end up control a bigger share of a shrinking pot.
At least in PETA's case they can show examples of animal cruelty and make people aware about an issue. But I don't think there's a single person out there in the world who needs museums vandalized to learn about climate change.
Meanwhile, there are lots of examples of tactful organizations that do not get headline attention but get decent policy results.
Always reminded of this, and that I always forget about alternative orgs like "Vegan Outreach" : https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
I think this oversimplifies things because one is a younger organization, and there are a ton of similarly named ones. People can't think of very many international charities, but the ones that come to mind aren't known for being notorious and off-putting (e.g. Unicef, Red Cross). Possibly PETA cannibalizes here as without them another more appealing replacement would get similar recognition? I'm not sure.
personally it's rationalist adjacent writing that got me interested in avoiding some conventional factory farmed products
Which is why it's a good thing there's a consequence here. If they got off easy, we'd see a lot more stunts like this. Probably at some point, one of these stunts could cause irreversible damage to a painting.
Climate-change has been salient for decades. Everyone who exposes themselves to the news-cycle is aware of it, and the attention people give to these protests is through said news. It's redundant. People have mostly made up their minds, but through message discipline it's possible to convey interesting data and that could potentially lead to follow-ups, which at best inform voting preferences or consumer choices.
These stunts make the papers mostly because they're rage-bait, and consumers get their 2 min of hate. To biased readers, protests like these or those that target average people reflect negatively, which backfires on the entire ostensible "point" of these stunts (as opposed to the actual purpose) because it can be dismissed out of spite.
The broken record you hear is "protests are supposed to be inconvenient". That is not true. They're supposed to win hearts and minds, engender sympathy, as that is what builds traction. It's possible to use inconvenience for that, but it's on a gradient. Civil rights protests were effective, but no one seriously believes it's because they managed to annoy and inconvenience average people really well.
> I believe they are doing this mostly to get attention
And rage-bait gets more views. Protests designed for social media? Well played!
YouTuber Tom Nicholas made a sort of "behind the scenes" video that explores their methods and motivations.
If I want the public to tune out of climate issues in disgust, I can't think of a more effective way than throwing soup on Van Gogh while crying "Climate!"
The cynic in me wonders if somebody is funding these protestors. If I were an oil baron I would feel deeply indebted to them.
Good.
My problem with Just Stop Oil is all their activism is just targeting people that have nothing to do with oil. They could be much more productive if they petitioned governments or people in power to change energy policy but no all they do is make the lives of people that have nothing to do with it miserable.
Their logic goes something like: "if I splash paint on this painting or block traffic, people will see our message and that will motivate them to join our cause". But in reality those people aren't going to be motivated to join your cause, they will just think you are a giant asshat.
> My problem with Just Stop Oil is all their activism is just targeting people that have nothing to do with oil.
Maybe they don’t like oil paintings.
To be fair, they never go for unprotected paintings, they mostly go for maximum outrage and visibility.
I've talked to a Femen a few years ago (a Russian, exiled in France), asked why they go for visible but ultimately non-actionable acts, and basically her response was something like 'We want to shock the most bigoted, idiotic persons you know, so that they will talk about us to people without strong opinions at their family diners. You can't have real change even with strong words like "women are raped in their own bed" (it was waaaaay before Peniquot) if nobody is opposing you. We create an opposition to make our voice louder'. Or something like that, I mostly remember the last sentence.
We all have to do with oil. We all use it, and more than that, government is responsive to us. The main cause of climate change is people not doing anything about it. Building awareness and stimulating action is fundamental to any change.
People respond to activism like it's some new, obviously stupid idea, rather than a technique with a long history of being effective and essential to democracy and freedom. That is, people respond to left-wing activism that way, for obvious reasons.
> The main cause of climate change is people not doing anything about it.
Ok so other than voting for candidates/laws that assist with it and maybe driving an EV what can an individual do? How does ruined art factor into that?
> Building awareness and stimulating action is fundamental to any change.
If everyone has already heard about it everyday from the media and various internet people, how does a ruined art piece stimulate additional change?
The first step: Stop arguing.
Good. Two years is a proper sentence, even if they are only likely to serve half of it per the article. These kinds of moral outrage stunts do very little to further their cause, make A lot of people angry, and have the real chance of damaging property and harming people. The latter by which I'm thinking of blocking traffic, which includes emergency vehicles.
I wonder what Van Gogh would think. Perhaps painting gas plumes instead of water lilies.
Van Gogh used art to transform his misery, illness, and madness into scenes peace and beauty. If he were to paint gas plumes, then looking at those plumes would fill you with feelings of serenity.