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Just Stop Oil activists jailed for throwing soup over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers
(www.theguardian.com)
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
I said this before when JSO used "washable" paint on Stonehenge: they are punching in the wrong direction. Billionaires don't care about human life, so why would they care about a painting?
These works belong to humanity, and by defacing them, you aren't winning converts—you're just pissing people off. Go vandalize something that belongs to the billionaires making things worse for the rest of us; unless you can win people to your cause, you're going to remain small-time vandals that get outsized prison sentences and unflattering media coverage.
Unless you can demonstrate an actual harm that these people are doing to the cause, I am going to give them my support for doing SOMETHING. If it moves the needle a millionth of a percent in the right direction, tear down all the art galleries. We only have one planet.
Many of these cases have had jury nullification, which means a jury of twelve people who have been vetted to remove bias, all unanimously agreed to say "fuck you" to the legal system rather than lock up JSO activists.
That tells me that there is considerable public support for them, whatever you say to the contrary.
Edit: Here's a study about the actual problems facing the climate movement. Support isn't the issue:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-01925-3
Abstract:
The abstract of that paper says that the real problem is people's lack of awareness of how incredibly high the support for climate action is, because that informs how likely they are to act.
In which case, all this hand-wringing about which actions increase or decrease support is a red herring, because the support is not actually in danger.
I would suggest that the real problem is people who handwring about the support creating the perception that the cause is less popular than it is.
But it’s not moving the needle, not at all ! It’s only fuelling antipathy towards environmental activism, and you can bet your favourite thing rightwingers are using that to pull centrists into their side.
I've given some pretty compelling evidence that public support for these activists is extremely high, and in response you have... some flatulence.
Here, I'll respond in the way you did:
But it is moving the needle, it totally is!
See? I can say things too.