Liberals think everything is an awareness campaign. The only thing holding us back from action on climate change is a lack of awareness. The only reason people engage in climate change denial is because they simply haven't been presented the facts. Despite the periodic wetbulb heatwaves, megastorms, and continental smoke clouds. If only they could raise enough awareness, we would vote in a solution.
Despite the periodic wetbulb heatwaves, megastorms, and continental smoke clouds.
Um, aktuly, those have always happened or maybe things are actually better than they used to be or also possibly this is God's Wrath for being gay.
it honestly has the same energy as evangelical christians in a parking lot asking me if I've heard of Jesus. No. I've gone 32 years having never heard of him. Thanks for introducing me to the concept.
I honestly cannot tell if they're a psyop or just really really pretentious radlibs being cringe for a hobby. The line is so blurry.
Ah guess that adds up then. But who are these people they find to do the cringe stuff? Actual unironic radlibs?
Guess it shows how important it is for actual leftist organisation to exist in order to direct their energy productively. If only there was any of that.
I've made this point in a previous discussion so will just copy and paste it here, but yeah it does get blurry.
I don't really buy the narrative about Aileen Getty being some sort of oil industry puppet master using JSO and similar to do it's bidding. She hasn't actually given that much money in the grand scheme of things and her history of environmentalism seems to come more from a place of liberal guilt about her oil money inheritance than anything. She's just your standard fail daughter who goes into art and 'radical' politics (for her family maybe).
Don't get me wrong though, I'm sure her ingrained class interests and sensibilities are why she gives to awareness raising and government lobbying groups rather than say the legal defence funds of more militant eco activists.
I'm still far more deeply suspect of a lot of the other XR leadership/funders and the spooks, technocrats, and money managers that orbit it.
Yeah, @Awoo@hexbear.net made the point about WasteFuel Ltd below and I stand corrected on that. Her post of JSO's hedge fund model is really good.
Even then, never assign malice to something easily explainable by incompetence. It's pretty easy to imagine how a 3rd generation Getty heir could out of touch enough to think they're doing good with this stuff.
Effectively these kinds of protests acts like a pressure release valve or lightning rod that directs popular anger and activism towards harmless targets instead of organising against the capitalist system.
Is it an intentional psyop or is it just the regrettable consequence of the eradication of the anti-capitalist left in the west and the proliferation of liberal propaganda? I don't know but effectively the results are similar.
Idk. Can't really make things worse, though. I don't know what to do about populations as politically demoralized and disempowered as they are in the us and uk.
As far as I understand, Stop Oil (and maybe those sitdowns) are there just to polarize us. So many people getting angry an old piece of art being destroyed, when most of it is protected by a glass pane. It seems to take away energy people have to care about this kind of stuff, when we could be blowing up pipelines or factories in Minecraft together.
Apparently they used to target them and then a bunch of their leadership got arrested
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
That's really interesting. I didn't know Aileen Getty was involved in WasteFuels Ltd. She always just struck me as the typical liberal guilt fail daughter who got into the arts.
The hedge fund stuff is definitely more clear cut and the same issue (plus some spookier stuff) around some of XR.
On Extinction Rebellion we think Gail Bradbrook is a name that needs further investigation, she is a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and worked as a government lobbyist for 14 years.
But yes, the model JSO seems to follow is that CEF publishes articles about how their funding of the activism produces a better ROI than traditional lobbying, of course it's swathed in 'emancipatory' fight the power language but ultimately it's capitalist profit seeking. Some of it might be legitimately motivated by capitalists that believe in capitalism seeking ways to turn capitalism into a solution to the climate crisis, to create a profit method of fighting it. But I am extremely cynical of whether their motives are sincere.
Not altogether dissimilar from the way Chris Hohn funds XR while making a killing through his 'activist' hedge fund TCI then.
Are you working on an article or something similar then?
I've considered writing this up a few times but can't connect all the dots the way I want to. There are interesting examples of this model appearing elsewhere. For example Peter Buffett funds 'radical' groups in the US.
This "Why Activism" page for CEF explains several things about the model pretty explicitly: https://www.climateemergencyfund.org/why-activism
There's also Berkshire Hathaway who has been heavily investing into Occidental Petroleum company, which itself is also focusing heavily on 'net zero oil' and carbon capture and storage technology
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ianpalmer/2022/07/25/warren-buffets-big-money-bet-on-occidental-petroleum-company/?sh=373ec86743ab
The US and the world have immense storage capacity for CCS that could last thousands of years. But CCS costs are high and will require a carbon-pricing mechanism to promote their application.
If fossil energy companies continue to over-produce oil, gas, and coal (vis-à-vis the production gap), an enormous new industry for CCS will have to be created — at least as large as the present oil and gas industry and, by some estimates, twice as large.
Fossil fuel production and a new CCS industry together will be too cumbersome and expensive for fossil energy firms to manage when compared to renewable energies.
...
the US Department of Energy have recently been tasked with setting up joint initiatives with oil and gas industry to reduce GHG emissions, and this may make companies like Occidental more profitable by lowering their direct expenses or indirectly providing tax breaks.
I think understanding the philanthrocapitalism model is essential to understanding what the new activist groups are and what they're actually doing. Understanding how Bill Gates gave so much of his money away years ago and somehow made significantly more of it back in dividends. This Peter Buffett video talks about a similar dynamic, where Peter Buffets foundation is funding radical groups in America, but at the same time using these groups as a trojan horse for gentrification.
Most of this was all done for the sake of trying to figure out what the fuck these people are doing and then try to push more awareness of it out through Greenandpleasant, but because we can't connect the dots up in a way that makes this a neat package it's sort of sitting around half-finished work. I do not mind if someone else picks up any of this information and uses it elsewhere, everything that educates people on what this actually is will probably be a good thing. Right now most people are in a "so do we support this orrrrrr?????" mindset of indecision on the topic and I think that mostly stems from really not understanding what these groups are doing. The issue is communicating it in a neat way while not looking like kooks.
I honestly think JT / Second Thought probably has the best presentation and style to handle this, a video can probably handle it better than a written article.
One of the major things you absolutely have to explain to people within this topic is also why this is not a good method, liberals will say "oh that's a clever way to get people to do good", and they already think bill gates is doing good. That needs to resolved within this otherwise they will go away with the idea that it's good. I have been hung up on how to do this for a long time, it needs someone much more eloquent than me to go at it.
That's really interesting. I'll give the links a proper read a bit later when I'm not on the go, but I definitely think it's worth being explained and more widely understood. Especially given that ESG and activist investing isn't just so prominent but increasingly contentious at the moment, not just with investors but the right seems to have picked up ESG as their recent 'globalist plot' buzzword.
Maybe I'm being naive, but I think that a lot of the responses are being a little too cynical about this question. Honestly, I think that the main answer is that a lot of people feel pretty desperate about what is going to happen to us because of climate change, but also have no idea what to do about it. The kinds of actions that Stop Oil undertake require very little organisation and are very visible. I don't know if they are actually 'doing something', but it definitely has the appeal of looking like 'doing something'. And, it probably does make the people involved feel better just because they are doing something, which is ultimately I think what underpins a lot of people's activism - I know it does mine. I think we have to bare in mind that the populations of many western societies have essentially been politically demobilised for several decades (this was a key part of neoliberalism's programme and was very successful). They/we have almost no experience or knowledge of how to build political power, and (in the UK and US, at least) have basically no institutions through which to try to do so. I think this is the result of that.
TLDR: People are desperate and feel like they have to do something, but don't know what to do. Gluing yourself to the road or spraying paint on a bank has the appearance of doing something, so people latch on to doing that.
a lot of people feel pretty desperate about what is going to happen to us because of climate change, but also have no idea what to do about it
Just Stop Oil and other philanthropy funded climate protest groups are just a clever outlet to give the most distressed people a harmless way to feel like they are doing something. The organizers get to make money off donations and the members get to feel like they are actually doing something. The most die hard members will get themselves arrested and locked up for taking illegal but ultimately low impact actions, which is also useful to those who fear things actually escalating.
I'm honestly expecting within the next decade an iconic moment of "mr president a second plane has hit the offshore oil rig". It is only a matter of time before this starts happening, we already have people setting themselves on fire in protest (in the US of all places) and the logical next step is one of those people wanting to die making a statement decides to truly escalate. Once it happens a couple times and the perpetrators manifestos somehow don't get suppressed, it will start happening regularly because that is how it always works with this kind of thing. There will also be the US and European government response that will be as brutal and escalatory as the war on drugs, war on terror, and every other counter insurgency that only ever causes even more of what they're fighting by hurting millions of uninvolved people.
edit: yes, I know that this is a borderline fed post and maybe I'm just too cynical
Theres really nothing fed at all about this post, its just solid analysis that I have also pretty much reached. Its really weird how we in america at least keep having these huge moments of distilled crystalized political crises like George Floyd and Uvalde, and they are constantly foundered and writhe in powerlessness before dissipating back into the ether before the masses can act politically to abolish the conditions that cause these crises.
If anything the perceived nature of the state being an unstoppable and omnipotent controller of violence will be its downfall. It really is much more fragile than any of us really know, and that will make the time after it collapses to be insanely important for the rest of the future of humanity.
Stop Oil is financed in large part by Aileen Getty, of the billionaire Getty oil family. I have no proof but to me that smacks of bored rich people. There are probably more rich folk financing it.
And that's really the whole answer. Organizations like Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion are pet vanity projects of bored rich people who only know about performative action, or they're not committed enough to want monumental change.
The funders of Just Stop Oil and Aileen Getty in particular definitely strike me as bored rich liberals. XR has some altogether spookier elements in its orbit although I've met some good ground-level activists.
direct people who might have actually done eco terrorism into doing performative bs
what is "eco terrorism" and why is it good? is the idea to blow up an oil pipeline or something? Won't that create a huge oil spill? Won't they just rebuild it anyway? There needs to be a systemic solution, not adventurism. But yes, I get your broader point that a lot of these movements are suspiciously astroturfed.
It will not create an oil spill any larger than what they already create, and that localized damage can be much easier to repair or mitigate than the widespread pollution of entire river systems, oceans, atmosphere, etc.
Theres a reason why in Ghost in the Shell, the solution to climate crisis and pollution was nanobots doing everything everywhere. Because thats the wonder technology it would take to do what a bomb and some empty barrels that can scoop up contaminants can prevent.
the deflating tires one is good because it inconveniences massive knobheads
i like it when massive knobheads are inconvenienced
if they downsize from a giant range rover they do not need to something that actually fits on non-american car infrastructure and isn't extremely dangerous to other road users and pedestrians, then that's just a bonus
the main thing is knobeads having a miserable time of itOut of all the imperial denizens, I think the British are the most supportive of climate change measures so maybe it is working.
