An edited version was printed in the Plymouth Herald on 11.7.23. The unexpurgated version is below:

Just Stop Oil stopped tennis match by scattering golden confetti on court during a break in play. The incident lasted less than 5 minutes. A runner dropping orange dust was carried-off a cricket pitch by a sportsman, the cricketer applauded to the rafters from a crowd seeming to bay for blood. 

The climate-denying ex-Chancellor George Osborne had two handfuls of orange confetti pawed towards his head after his wedding, although not a JSO action. The idea is taking hold. No-one was harmed, the spaces were not harmed, the protesters expressed no anger, intimidation or destruction. Indeed, only by disruption do the issues receive any airtime.

It’s bonkers that fans were encouraged to be upset by 4 minutes of disturbance in a game of tennis when the world is rapidly descending into catastrophe. By comparison, Wimbledon lost a quarter of a weeks’ playtime from rain. We have to gather some perspective here. Individual protesters are available to be attacked, whereas the real culprits, politicians and oil executives remain untouchable. 

Workers queue for hours in traffic jams on their way to-and-from work every day. In most regions, scheduled commuter buses don’t turn-up, trains are cancelled minutes before they’re due, roadworks snarl-up highways for weeks. But get stopped for a few minutes by a peaceful protester calling for government action to protect our children’s future, and suddenly its OK to kick, punch and drag the unresisting body away from a slow-walk protest, screened on prime-time news by sneering media and watched by laughing policemen. 

The government’s recent response to extreme weather conditions is to cancel their climate emergency plans, underwrite new high-emissions projects and enact draconian laws to incarcerate the compassionate climate activists for jail periods longer than those for manslaughter. 

Prime Minister Sunak spends over half-a-million pounds of tax-payers money by travelling on private jets in a period of a fortnight, leading Britain into the record books as having more private jet take-offs than any other country across Europe. Indeed, all the actions of his Government suggest a policy of climate-change-denial fuelling the far-right conspiracy theorists who say it’s all a Big Lie.

Only last week, the United Nations General Secretary declared “climate change is out of control”. The UK government’s own Climate Change Committee has condemned the Conservative Cabinet decision to authorise over 100 oil and gas licences, the government having already given permission for a new coal mine. These decisions will produce millions of tonnes of global heating emissions. Opposition leader Starmer has promised they will not be rescinded under a Labour Government, and expressed his personal hatred of “tree-huggers”. The Climate Change Committee Chairperson, Lord Debeen, a Tory and previous environment minister, has resigned in disgust at Sunak’s policy-turn but has received no support from anyone in the Establishment.

Government policy encourages denial of basic and obvious facts, and indeed is encouraging anger against anyone who speaks-up or acts-out. The climate emergency is real. It’s not that the Government is saying the emergency is a hoax, just that they don’t really care. But that affords chancers and hoaxers the opportunity to swamp social media with elaborate arguments to say the world is as it ever was. 

Tell that to the sweltering ex-pat British residents in Tarragonna, Spain, swept away in their cars in flash floods; citizens of the southern states of the USA dying inside the continuing “heat dome”; the wildlife of the Antarctic experiencing the temperatures of an average day in England’s Spring; or the Canadians losing their homes to the seemingly endless forest fires. 

They’re all unprecedented, way outside anything recorded or even predicted to happen at this stage in the crisis.

June 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded, globally and locally. Last week’s July temperatures exceeded that, with projections that this month will reach the hottest global temperatures in some 120,000 years. Even those idiots (I use the term according to its original definition of “politically ignorant”) – those who care not a jot for the peoples of North Africa or India or Bangladesh or China suffering extremes of heat and drought  – may wish to consider the impact of the temperature changes here killing their own aging relatives and asthmatic children, with worse to come. 

This summer’s anomalies suggest widespread crop failures and the development of a global food crisis in the immediate future, possibly by the end of this year. Sensible people will thank their heavens should this not happen, whilst the ignorant will condemn the science as false. 

This catastrophe is coming our way, within years, exacerbated by the sixth great extinction of life on earth, a wholesale destruction of the Ecology. More than 70% of our insect population has gone extinct since 1970, risking lack of pollination and thereby destroying the potential of harvests even where crops can be protected from drought.

Most working class people – the silent majority – express concern about climate change whilst at the same time getting on with life, as the issue appears wholly outside our control. The climate challenge can only be managed on a societal level. It will require a transformation of social production and infrastructure. We know that real freedom requires mutual support and social organisation to ensure we are all cared for. 

We’re not about to be taken-in by claims of climate conspiracy – the science is real and born-out by real events from glacier melts to off-the-scale hurricanes. The climate deniers are either paid by the fossil fuel corporations to create doubt, or individual chancers deeply alienated from human society. We mustn’t be conned.

85% of the UK adult population queued up for vaccination during the COVID pandemic despite claims by “anti-Vaxers” of a worldwide conspiracy. Their current claims of climate conspiracy is no less absurd than their claims that the Earth is flat! The comparison is useful in helping to recognise what’s really going on. Through the Pandemic, billions of pounds was made in profit by pharmaceutical agencies, not through any conspiracy but because that’s how the system of capitalism works – someone always  looks to make a fortune out of a crisis. And that’s how the rich view climate change – not caring about the real threat to life and livelihood of billions of people, but as a chance to rake-in billions of dollars in private profit. 

So, rather than admit we have to end the extraction of fossil fuels without delay, the Capitalist class protects those profits whilst pretending that yet-to-be-proven technologies will solve the problem. Pie-in-the-sky techno-fixes and superficial tokenism is sucking-up billions of tax-payers money in hopeless greenwash projects such as carbon-capture-and-storage and biofuels. 

When they say they want growth, they mean continuous growth in their profit margins and private wealth, not growth in our standards of living or wellbeing.

We want growth, but in green jobs. The jobs to insulate 11 million homes to protect from the damp in winter and the heat in summer. The engineering jobs adapting our infrastructure to ensure transfer away from the 25 million gas boilers delivering our central heating. The jobs producing the low-emissions energy generation and the new transmission grids needed to supply us. And the jobs in health and welfare – services that will grow in demand as the climate makes us ever-more sick. 

The only problem is that all these jobs, all the essential industries required to adapt to climate change in time, all the.zero-emissions systems already fully tested and available, make only a fraction of the profits of petrol, diesel, oil and gas. So the big fossil corporations won’t allow the changes needed within the time we have left.

The net-Zero plan is too little too late to avoid global catastrophe, but is daily fought against by the right-wing dailies like the Mail and the Sun. Workers are being hoodwinked and brainwashed by a denial that is far more palatable than the facts. Let’s pretend everything’s fine. Just keep calm and carry on.

The actions of JSO offer a voice in an unhearing world. We need to transition away from fossil fuels. Stop all oil and gas exploration and exploitation. This is a climate crisis, with many parts of the world already experiencing catastrophe. Just Stop Oil is drawing attention to the most critical issue that humans have ever faced.

But they’re too few in number and suffering a heavy price for their sacrifices. They are likely to be remembered decades from now very favourably compared with the insults, assaults and incarceration they suffer now, just as with the women’s suffrage movement, the anti-fascists, the anti-slavery abolitionists of the past. 

But their small actions won’t be enough to successfully shackle the big corporations. There will be many more protests from here-on in. We need mass public action, focussed upon the politicians and the wealthy and powerful Executives, stopping all business-as-usual in order to create the adaptation required. That will require workers to challenge their bosses, in every industry, to Just Stop Oil.