Just Stop Oil are my heroes!

[incognit]

I have changed my name for this, but there is so much negativity and hate towards JSO, Insulate Britain, and ER on these boards, that I really want to risk putting my head above the parapet and saying "WOOOHOO! I AM RIGHT BEHIND YOU!!"

These are wonderful people sacrificing their own liberty and careers to bring attention to their cause - and it really works! There have been huge benefits, so many companies are aware of them, and taking steps to avoid being in the firing line by upping their investments in environmental mitigations.

And the huge amount of attention that insulation got- it is now high up on so many agendas! Why did it take protesters gluing themselves to the road to do it? It should have happened anyway, but it didn't. People had to make that sacrifice, but themselves in danger, lose jobs, careers, liberty, etc, to get results.

People moan about having their days disrupted, etc by JSO, without caring how much their days are going to be disrupted by the climate crisis running out of control.

I have cancer. I couldn't get to a chemo appointment once because of JSO. I 100% support their actions. I think their cause is so much bigger than one person. They are acting to protect millions.

No doubt people will come here and bitch and moan and I don't care really, at least anyone from JSO who is on MN will see my thread title.

Good points, but I really think the social and political climate is hardening with regard to interest in and tolerance of peaceful protest. More recently, protesters opposing HS2 have employed very similar tactics to those seen during the Newbury bypass protests in '96 (tunnelling, locking on, occupying, tree-dwelling), and they were not exactly lauded by the public. People are quick to write dissenters off as time-wasting weirdos and miss the point about wider environmental benefit. Social media amplifies these voices to the detriment of reasoned argument.

To the posters suggesting JSO take their beef to China, saying that the UK's contribution to global CO² emissions is negligible: come on!

We are actively out-sourcing our production to places like China, letting them do our manufacturing for us, hence China's enormous emissions. If we as a nation produced all the stuff we feel entitled to consume, there would be NO low-emissions moral high-ground to claim.

I generally can't stand the 'gotcha'-style of finger-pointing which says such-and-such a person is a hypocrite for using a mobile phone or wearing jeans, but claiming that the UK is somehow squeaky clean with its 2% of global emissions is either naïve beyond belief or green-washed hypocrisy of the highest order.

If we are concerned about China's high emissions and feel they ought to strive to be more like the UK, we should consider cutting down on Chinese imports.

It's the driving a car to get somewhere that needs to be reduced

Exactly. We have been outsourcing everything to China for decades. Some of us were writing to our MPs about this in the 80s. Brexit has made things even worse. It isn't just about fossil fuels it is about who we allow to control the world.

I remember Greenham Common. We don't talk about those women and celebrate them enough.

I think there actions do nothing to promote there cause if anything it has the opposite effect
I think there efforts lose support for the cause rather than gain it

@Allfur and none of JSO use a car to get somewhere? The problem isn't people using cars to get somewhere, the problem is the lack of alternatives. I am not a car driver, and it restricts where I can live, my work availability, even my ability, should I wish to, to get to a protest site.
JSO are strangely quiet when another bus service is cut. Oddly quiet about ever-increasing train prices. I have never seen a protest at a train station after yet another fare increase is announced. Why aren't they breaking the windows of the office of the Transpennine Express and demanding cheaper fares? Why are they targeting the victims of the privatisation of public transport instead of the profit hungry perpetrators of a broken transport system that used to be the envy of the world?
It's the equivalent of objecting to water companies by turning off the water supply to everyone's homes.

If I hadn't been a child at the time, I would have joined them. Every time I saw them on TV I wanted to join them. Nuclear war scared the shit out of me.

But JSO have never purported to be a group campaigning for local transport. We can all do that in our local authorities and local constituencies. Lots of local groups do with great success, thankfully. Our MPs are often very keen to mediate in issues concerning local and regional transport.

JSO are a single issue campaigning group who campaign for the British government to commit to ending new fossil fuel licensing and production. That's all. They're not campaigning on anything else, just focusing on getting the government to commit to this one issue. Not the general public; just the government.

I was responding to someone who said driving in cars to get somewhere is the problem, in response to my point about targeted action.
You've just rather made that point. If the target is the government, not the general public, target the government, not the general public. If your argument is not with Joe Bloggs driving to work, what good is stopping Joe Bloggs driving to work doing, apart from pissing Joe Bloggs off?

@rwalker, the sad thing is that it's not 'their' cause, though. The heating climate is all of our cause, and whether we support JSO or not, the impact is already devastating parts of the planet.

We're so privileged to be able to think that our individual support for an organisation matters at all. The issue is separate from this particular organisation's cause: the climate is changing irrespective of what we individually think of JSO.

JSO are not exclusively empowered to act in the interest of everyone concerned about the climate. They are just one group of people, campaigning on one single issue: to get our government to stop issuing new fossil fuel licences and stop producing new fossil fuels.

Anyone who is worried about the changing climate can still seek to influence decision-makers individually through letter-writing and petition signing, for instance, or by joining a organisation who carry out their campaigning in a way you feel more at ease with: Greenpeace, WWF, Friends of the Earth, RSPB, National Trust, the Woodland Trust all do work on the climate.

Good response.

“I really want to risk putting my head above the parapet and saying "WOOOHOO! I AM RIGHT BEHIND YOU!!"

The only thing you are behind is your keyboard.

Quite. Especially when one of you should have been boycotting your brothers destination wedding for a start, flying loads if guests to God knows where unnecessarily.

@DramaLlamaBangBang "God knows where" ‐exactly! Is there definitely a 'destination wedding'? I've listened to the mum's statement and searched online for some scrap of information that would back this up but can't find anything. Given that lots of posters seem to think it would be a great idea to disrupt the poor brother's wedding in order to give hypocritical Cressida 'a taste of her own medicine', you'd think someone might have been able to track it down?
Or maybe there isn't one.

Plenty of protests in cities where there are alternatives

Only just discovered this thread. Thank you for starting it OP.
I don't like many of JSO tactics. But, I do think they're brave and well-meaning; and the vicious vengeful posts on the other threads in recent days have been totally uncalled for and actually quite upsetting.
I'm glad someone was brave enough to start a more positive thread. I don't think I can bear to read all the posts here, as so many will be predictably unpleasant. But, I'm glad the thread exists.
I totally oppose the prison sentences they've received too.

Pretty much this

Has anyone seen them at Gatwick this morning. Honestly it is so embarrassing . Sitting there with their T-shirts and little orange home made boxes.

if they want to achieve something, someone needs to tell them how to organise, how to educate, how to publicise what they wish to achieve, how to target and work with companies who can make a difference, how to petition governments,

sitting on the floor at Gatwick airport is not the way to do this.

Agreed.

They're cunts and thankfully that pink haired prick Phoebe is being jailed

I’m amazed there hasn’t been a vigilante group turning up at there protest and dragging them off the rd

Someone will ram them over one day (if it hasn't happened already) if I was at Gatwick I would happily push through them. What entitled little twits. How did they get to the airport i wander? Unless they walked, they are hypocrites.

My main concern is, really, that there is bugger all we can actually do to stop it without the US/China/India’s buy in. We can lobby the govt to keep pressurising them, but unless they put embargos/punitive taxes on imports coming from these countries and parts being made there for our products, unless those nations step up, we really are tinkering around the edges - which is one of my main issues with JSO and others. There are being so parochial and naive.

We need to continue to encourage/fund our scientists to find solutions and alternatives largely so that we can sell those ideas to those nations, as well as adopt them ourselves. And a lot of research/innovation is being done in UK universities, science institutes and, yes, amongst the fossil fuel companies - after all, they want to still be in business in 10, 20 or 100 years. They’re invested in being part of the change if only to keep shareholders happy (though I know it is because those that work for them really do care as much about the planet as everyone else).

Just got back fom a holiday in Europe - the wells are dry, summer level weather began at the end of Feb, not April/May. Locals cannot afford the cost of water (shipped in) or to run air con; crops are struggling with low yields; livestock struggling even with their water needs prioritised. Food prices (for olive oil, fruit/veg etc) even when locally sourced are more than doubling.

Nothing JSO does standing on the M25 can bring home the reality of climate change more to these people - they already know. But, like us, there is eff all they can do about it when the biggest carbon producing nations will not stop, and governments globally will not act to make trading impossible unless they do.

We need to start working on technologies that will help us manage the impacts of climate change - eg., contain the floods that we are increasingly seeing, both coastal and in land, preserving that water for our heat wave periods so that we can save our agricultural industries and be as self sufficient in terms of food production and energy as possible. Wind farms, solar farms, on and off shore, a move back to maintaining existing motor vehicles and white goods instead of the limited lifespan and easy disposal and replacement with imported replacement goods.

JSO putting lives at risk by causing havoc on the motorway in protests over drilling rights licences in the North Sea are so far removed from workable solutions or creating the pressure needed to get China et al to change. They are toddlers having a tantrum in the paddling pool of climate change politics.

edited for bloody typos

They're paid actors, their job is to convince you to believe a pack of lies. If you're so easily led, good for you. You don't sound particularly smart.