Some climate activists have taken to defacing cultural icons. Many of these stunts have been symbolic, since, for instance, the glass over Mona Lisa protected it from tomato-soup-throwing Riposte Alimentaire protestors. But this seems so unproductive as environmental action so as to question the bona fides of the rebels. What exactly does great art made hundreds of years ago have to do with environmental degradation? If you want to send a more on topic message that will still get headlines, how about stopping traffic? The message could be that we soon can’t afford cars due to resource costs and climate impact, and users need to come to grips with a future where our now-routine commute-type trips are rare and expensive. I am no expert, but one would think it would be useful to tie the happening (as they were called in the 60s) to the message, and call attention to what bad future outcomes will be and what they mean for ordinary folk.
Instead some of these protestors are engaging in exploit escalation. IM Doc sent this tweet today:
How to lose friends and fail to influence anyone. Stonehenge. Why? https://t.co/BsKtGFs67Z
— Mark Seddon (@MarkSeddon1962) June 19, 2024
More detail from the Sydney Morning Herald, courtesy Rev Kev:
Two climate protesters who sprayed orange paint on the ancient Stonehenge monument in southern England were arrested on Wednesday after two bystanders appeared to intervene and stop them…
The incident came just a day before thousands are expected to gather at the roughly 4500-year-old stone circle to celebrate the summer solstice – the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere.
English Heritage, which manages the site, said it was “extremely upsetting” and said curators were investigating the damage. Just Stop Oil said the paint was made of corn starch and would dissolve in the rain.
Video released by the group showed a man it identified as Rajan Naidu, 73, unleash a fog of orange from a fire extinguisher-style paint sprayer at one of the vertical stones.
As voices can be heard yelling “stop,” a person wearing a cap and raincoat ran up and grabbed Naidu’s arm and tried to pull him away from the monument. A man in a blue shirt joined in and wrestled the paint sprayer away.
The second protester, identified as Niamh Lynch, 21, managed to spray three stones before the first bystander in the hat stopped her…
Just Stop Oil is one of many environmental groups around Europe that have received attention – and blowback – for disrupting sporting events, splashing paint and food on famous works of art and interrupting traffic to draw attention to global warming.
The group said it acted in response to the Labour Party’s recent election manifesto. Labour has said that if it wins the election on July 4, it will not issue further licences for oil and gas exploration. Just Stop Oil backs the moratorium but says it is not enough.
Now this sort of action is not as obviously backwards as (almost certainly paid for) protestors in Georgia opposing a pre-transparency law that would require US levels of disclosure for foreign donations to NGOs….trying to depict themselves as pro-democracy. What they are instead defending is US and EU meddling.
But alienating the public from your cause (and not demonstrating countervailing muscle, as labor does in general strikes) is so obviously bone-headed as to raise questions as to what is really afoot. From GM via e-mail:
You have to wonder if these are not organized on purpose in order to completely discredit any concerns about climate change. Just make it as ridiculous and abhorrent as possible so that people are maximally antagonized by the idea that there is a real problem.
It has always seemed to me that in the West “the left” was destroyed exactly following such a deliberate plan, by associating it with the various gender and race studies lunacies, which had two very “beneficial” effects — first, it moved attention away from the real issues that concerned people in the past, and second, it totally discredited “the left” in the eyes of the general population.
It has been a remarkably successful and well executed plan, if it was indeed a deliberate plan. But why would it not be?
One has to always remember that during the Cold War the two sides were largely mirrors of each other in their tactics, which is because practical necessities and analogous situational factors tend to result in convergent evolution. The CIA trafficked cocaine from Latin America while the KGB trafficked heroin from the Middle East, that sort of thing. And we do know that most intellectuals were fully controlled by the agencies in the Eastern Bloc, but that is because the archives were opened there. They were never similarly opened in the West. So one has to wonder whether the same programs weren’t in place there too.
It wouldn’t be the same, of course, because communists didn’t really have to do all that much ideological manipulation (the ideology was official and immutable, and there wasn’t real public debate anyway, so you didn’t need public consciousness shaping through public intellectuals and universities) but the main point — that the intellectuals were directly controlled — is quite possibly true on both sides. And it doesn’t at all have to be all of them being puppets on strings all the time, it would be much more subtle than that, of course.
So why not run the same playbook with respect to climate change.
Just as the crisis really starts to hit.
BTW, it is really, really noticeable now. I’ve been working from home for the last year, so I have been tending to the garden in my old grandparents’ house, and what is happening there is a very objective criterion for how things have changed:
1) Last year it didn’t rain at all from early August to early November. Not unusual for August, but extremely unusual for September and October. And we actually started running out of water in October, with restrictions imposed.
2) September was just another August in terms of temperatures, i.e. 30C every day, and then October was 25C every day.
3) Normally, fresh vegetables would end in mid- to late September, because the first frosts would come then and kill the plants. It’s how it has been all through the 20th century (I have direct memories since the early 1990s). Last year the last fresh tomatoes were picked around November 10. Only then did the frosts hit, but it was still 20-25C weather just days prior. Completely absurd for our region.
4) There was barely a winter. Which has been the norm for a while now — it started noticeably shortening around the year 2000, but now it is hard to even speak of winter. Two cold spells for a week each in December and January, otherwise it was 20-25C around New Year, and colder weather (but “cold” as in 10C, not -10C as it should be) basically ended in late January. This for a place that used to be buried in half a meter of snow for months a few decades ago.
5) Then it has been even more noticeable this year — normally trees will be green and blossoming after April 15th here. This year it happened around March 15. Strawberry season runs roughly May 20 to June 10, this year they were ready in early May. Cherries were ripe on May 10-15. Usually that’s an early June thing. Apricots are ready around July 1st, this year they already all fell of trees a few days ago and were ready around June 10. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, etc. you start picking July 1st the earliest, but it was June 15. Basically everything shifted by 15-20 days earlier.
6) Which may all sound great — who doesn’t want fresh vegetables in November? — but again, last year it didn’t rain for two months during the second main rainy season. The primary rainy season is May-June, and we did have regular rain in May, but June has been completely dry. Combine that with snow packs disappearing from the mountains, and you see where it goes in the long run.
Now it’s true that there has always been year-yo-year variation with respect to temperatures and rainfall, but growing seasons have largely been constant regardless of it. When they change like that, that’s an unmistakable sign of serious shifts.
So it’s a real problem — just when the effects of climate change become impossible to miss, how do you trick the population into sincerely believing nothing is happening?
Lambert concurred: “They must be cops. Who else would be so stupid?”