• Awoo [she/her]
    ·
    10 days ago

    Just Stop Oil is an advertisement for investors.

    Their process is attention grabbing high exposure protest that is then used as a form of advertising and "this is our impact" to philanthropy investors. It's essentially a business. Some notes I took in a chat when doing research with a friend:

    Trevor Neilson, alongside Rory Kennedy and Aileen Getty are founders of the CEF (Climate Emergency Fund)

    Trevor Neilson is a director of Wastefuels limited with Aileen Getty and Nck hurd mp

    Trevor Neilson is a co-founder of I (x) Net zero, Nick Hurd is a chairman of the board

    It's basically a net zero hedge fund.

    Trevor Neilson has also worked for the Bill & Melinda gates foundation and Princes Charitable trust, so he's got real experience in the Philanthrocapitalism industry

    Wastefuels ltd is a Berkshire Hathaway startup that's partnered with Maersk shipping to develop waste to fuel energy


    In short. They fund the protest action as a form of investment that generates interest in their zero carbon companies. Advertisement. They then get investment in their zero carbon companies and have a financial incentive to generate the most buzzy hypey protest stuff possible, not because it's effective but because it has the highest advertising impact for them - providing something that attracts and sells to investors about how effective they are at generating attention.

    tl;dr - they're profiting off of climate activism

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
      ·
      10 days ago

      Just compare these controlled opposition to Palestine Action. They couldn't be more different.

    • IzyaKatzmann [he/him]
      ·
      10 days ago

      hey cde where's the source? i didnt see the text in the posted article... wanna share it with someone if you don't mind providing it

      • Awoo [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        10 days ago

        Independent researching I did a while back. You'll have to specifically look up CEF and individuals involved and connect it all together as I have not seen anyone write about it. We dug around back when some sus people were trying to contact the /r/greenandpleasant modteam about doing AMAs and possible further "partnerships". We also needed to know what the subreddit's party line on the topic of JSO should be and all of this ended up being how we came to the final decision to kill topics about them.

    • dead [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      10 days ago

      When I search what you wrote, it says that even though CEF gave money to JSO in the past, Trevor Neilson left CEF in 2021 and condemned JSO as only disruptive in June 2023.

      What you wrote doesn't seem up to date. It would seem that JSO went in a different direction.

      https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/just-stop-oil-extinction-rebellion-donor-climate-activists-counterproductive-b1090030.html

      Also this article from from November 2023 says that JSO only received 2% of it's funding from CEF. That doesn't seem as significant as your post claims.

      https://time.com/6334072/just-stop-oil-climate-change-activist-group/

      • Awoo [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        10 days ago

        It was up to date as of 11 months ago when I originally wrote it. Whether Neilson has fallen out with his collaborators and since "condemned" them in the media doesn't matter much though. The setup of JSO itself continues to be that of a grift for investments in funds. Might need some research doing to update it along the exact lines of whatever orgs are now involved and called, possibly names have changed or whatever, but I'm confident the overall grift going on is this.