Insight: Europe cracks down after rise in 'direct action' climate protests
Insight: Europe cracks down after rise in 'direct action' climate protests
Simon Lachner had plans to glue himself to a German city thoroughfare in June to call public attention to climate change. Instead, he ended up in police custody before he'd even left his home.
You're viewing a single thread.
Protests at oil installations make sense, and people protesting in a way that inconveniences politicians is something I love to see.
But I don’t know what Just Stop Oil is hoping to achieve with a lot of their protests in Britain. They seem to do more harm than good, and actually turn a lot of people who are on the fence against their cause.
They don’t seem to bring attention to the issues, only attention to themselves. And they’ve managed to turn a lot of people from “not interested” to actively against them and their cause.
If anyone is "actively against them" then the media is failing to properly inform. We are talking about the end of civilisation as we know it, this is not "their cause", this affects every single person on earth.
It's not true that "everybody talks about it anyway". They don't. It's rarely spoken about with the candor required. When was the last time you saw a climate scientist on the news?
As long as awareness of the crisis goes up (which it does), then Just Stop Oil popularity doesn't matter.
From this point on awareness inevitably goes up as we start to see the effects of climate change first hand.
I don’t know what news you’ve been watching, but I see climate change discussed near daily. ULEZ has been in the news recently and people are talking about the politics surrounding how we actually take action when it’s being impeded by NIMBY people, which is a productive discussion to have.
Meanwhile, all the talk about Just Stop Oil is around the disruption they cause and people saying they hate them. Nobody brings up Just Stop Oil and talks about their cause.
Morally they’re in the right, but in reality they’re harming their cause more than helping it. 10+ years ago these tactics would’ve brought more attention than climate change was getting, now they’re a distraction.
You're right that exposure in the news has gone up due to the extreme weather events, I have still seen reports highlighting the fires and floods and failing to mention the climate crisis in them. But they still don't bring on climate scientists and they still don't make people aware we are on track for mass crop failures, a billion climate refugees, millions of climate deaths that put together means collapse of our society as we know it.
Even if people don't talk about JSOs demand (which is entirely reasonable and backed by the science, btw), they know why these people out there. They also know they feel strongly enough about it to get shouted abuse, risk getting assaulted and get arrested. That does get through to people.
Please stop calling it "their cause", it's yours too.
It's publicity. Bad publicity yes, but the message is being seen even if it's not being recieved well
They're basically the PETA of climate change. Where they often harm their own cause because they operate by the creed that more people would be on their side "if they only knew", so most of what they do is designed mainly to get attention from the public.
A great example being the video of a medical professional yelling a bunch of them. Because they glued themselves to the main road ambulances used to get to the ER.
Of course more people would be on their side if they knew the collapse of society was at stake! And more people are on their side, where do you think all these people slow marching keep coming from?
The message is known by everyone, it’s constantly being talked about regardless of Just Stop Oil.
If anything it detracts from the conversation because when people talk about climate change, some people’s go to response is saying “those Just Stop Oil protesters are a nuisance”.
Their actions seem to frequently cross the line of just getting people to pay attention, as they don’t just try and use events to be seen, they actively try to ruin those events entirely.