Just Stop Oil have been up to their usual tricks. They dug a tunnel under a road in Grays, but after 13 days they tried to sneak out for a Big Mac and got arrested. [Not really. I don’t know why they gave up.]
“This is the reality of climate collapse and it is happening right here in the UK, it is happening all around the world and it is happening now,” [One of the troglodytes] said in a statement published by Just Stop Oil.
BBC
After the tunnel, they decided to block the road at Kingsbury Oil Terminal, but an injunction against them doing that was still in place from earlier in the year. 51 were arrested and remanded in custody, charged with the breach.
As the nation mourns Queen Elizabeth II, climate change protesters said their actions on Wednesday were “not disrespectful”, claiming King Charles III had spoken at the COP26 summit of being on a “warlike footing” in the battle to save the planet.
BBC
Among the dimbulbs staffing this protest were a number of grannies. One lives in Yorkshire, so her “story” was picked up by the Yorkshire Post. She also once lived in Exeter, so her “story” was also picked up by Devon Live.
So, what were her reasons for allegedly defying the injunction? Quoth Yorkshire Post:
Retired occupational therapist Julia Mercer, from Todmorden, took part in the demonstration at Kingsbury oil terminal near Tamworth on Wednesday because she is worried for the future of her baby grandchild.
Mrs Mercer said: “I’ve had an amazing life with so many privileges. Now it’s payback time.”
Yes folks, having had an amazing and privileged life, Granny Mercer has decided that her latest grandchild must not be allowed to enjoy hers.
She added: “I look at my nine-month-old granddaughter and try to imagine the world as it could very well be when she is my age. I find I cannot do this; it’s simply too painful a future to contemplate for her. I will do anything within my power to change this: it’s the inertia and unholy power of business as usual that creates this future and it’s this that we challenge in the courts and on the streets.”
To me this seems like a mind constantly resetting itself in order to turn nonsense into sense. If Mercer has her way, her grandchild’s life will be far worse than it will if she just stays at home and knits her a bobble hat for winter.
Quoth Devon Live:
Now living in Todmorden, Yorkshire, with her husband, Julia has eight grandchildren between ages 23 and 9 months. She loves gardening and was a member of Exeter Community Agriculture. She helps make videos of dramatized Bible Stories to spark discussion in schools. Part of her motivation is the ‘sheer injustice of climate breakdown’.
The sheer injustice of climate breakdown! Define climate breakdown, please. Quoting Mercer,
“I can no longer ignore what’s happening to the people of our world who did the least to create it and yet are suffering the most. There are too many hideous examples. One that breaks my heart is that in Bangladesh as the seawater rises it salinates fresh drinking water and pregnant women are miscarrying their babies. I absolutely owe it to these women to be on the streets shouting for justice.”
None of us wants Bangladesh to sink beneath the waves, but “Just Stopping Oil” won’t help. Helping Bangladesh’s people to become wealthy will help. Seawater is probably infiltrating because fresh water is being extracted. Building dams upstream means that the supply of sediment to the delta is reduced, and compaction as the land dries leads to the ground level dropping. Not a good situation for a dense and extremely poor population, especially one in the firing line of tropical cyclones.
Another JSO granny comes from Kendal, so her “story” was picked up by the Westmorland Gazette. Quote:
Ms Rennie-Nash, a retired teacher and grandmother of two, said: “I’m getting more and more desperate and angry with the Government as it drives us closer and closer to the precipice of irreversible climate catastrophe.
“It’s using taxpayers’ money to subsidise the fossil fuel industry to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds each week while people are dying in their homes because they can’t afford to heat them.
“I will not stand by and watch obscene corporate and political greed rob my grandchildren of a liveable planet.”
Light on facts and high on passion, Rennie-Nash’s plan is to ban cheap energy, and so rob her grandchildren of the life she thinks the “irreversible climate catastrophe” is going to rob from them. And in the real world, a series of entirely avoidable energy decisions by previous governments have left us up **** creek. First because we did not continue building nuclear. Then because we got rid of coal. Then because we decided to plumb in large quantities of “whenever they feel like it” generators, enforcing a high dependence on gas, while running down our own extraction and storage. Dumb and dumberer.
Where do these incredible JSO misapprehensions come from? We all know that unchallenged apocalyptic hogwash floods the media, including the outlets that are supposed to be authoritative and even have what they call, without a smirk, “reality checks.” I rarely hear the scientists pushing back on the ludicrous terms like “climate breakdown” that are used. All I really hear is scientists reinforcing the message by saying this or that disaster was in effect caused by modern civilisation’s addiction to fossil fuels. The JSO people actually believe this stuff – I don’t doubt that. But none of it is true. It’s squit.
Quoth another JSO activist [not a granny this time]:
“…we have just a few years to avoid the locking-in of human extinction.”
For someone who believes such an absurdity, blocking an oil terminal is a perfectly rational response, as is defying court injunctions and mooning at the judge (I don’t think they have tried this measure of defiance yet; they could have STOP on one cheek and OIL on the other; I guess they’ll need a good friend with a Sharpie to help them with that).
Fortunately for us, and them, humanity is not doomed. Even if an impossible apocalyptic climate scenario were to be realised, we would not go extinct. Gaia would have her work cut out to wipe out this particular rat. My own understanding of the situation is that the planet will be no less liveable in 2100 than it is now. And I sincerely believe that, and yes, I have searched for reasons that we might be doomed. I have found none. Just Stop Oil has to tell us what we will die of. If it be famine, war, and disease, I have news for them: their project is more likely to lead to those things than continuing the use of fossil fuels.
The JSO 51, including the grannies, appeared in court a couple of days ago. This from the Guardian, as highlighted in Open Mic by Mark:
But when they appeared at the Queen Elizabeth court in Birmingham and the Royal Courts of Justice in London on Thursday, they refused to comply, standing on chairs, turning their backs to the judge and reading out prepared statements about the scale of the crisis.
One of the defendants took off his shirt to reveal the words “Sham justice kills kids” written on his body, while another held up a copy of David Wallace-Wells’s book The Uninhabitable Earth and recommended it to the court.
Many of the protesters made it clear they would continue to take action at the Kingsbury terminal if they were released on bail, despite an injunction prohibiting protests at the site still being in force.
The question arises: should we be jailing these JSO grannies and their accomplices if they are found to have breached the injunction? I say no. There is no room in jail for all the scallies we need to lock up to protect the public, so locking up ill-informed but obviously honourable demonstrators makes absolutely no sense. On the other hand, they will just go out and do the same thing again if set free, imposing their will on the rest of us. A conundrum, no doubt. If only there was an option to teach the grannies how their lives of privilege and their long and – ahem – active retirements would be impossible without oil. I wonder if any of them know how their food is produced and transported, for instance? Any oil products in that coat you wear? Perhaps a history lesson, too. You know what the life of average Briton was like in George III’s time? That’s what you want for your grandchildren. (Aha! Is this why they glued themselves to The Hay Wain?) Ever heard of the Bhola cyclone, which struck what is now Bangladesh in 1970 and killed upwards of 300,000 of its people? What if those people had good housing, there were good roads leading to safe places, and every family had a petrol car?
Now, all of us would be prepared to break the law of the land under certain circumstances. Probably extreme circumstances in most cases. My recommendation when asked to appear in front of a judge after such an event occurs is as follows: attend at the appointed time. Stand for the judge. Remain quiet unless required to speak. Admit your guilt. Undertake to obey the court (and mean it). Take your punishment in good heart, because you believe your actions were worth it. Don’t wave an unbelievable work of eschatological science fiction in your hand and recommend it to the court. Don’t reveal inane writing on your chest. Don’t turn your back.
And most importantly, don’t moon the judge.
This does not constitute legal advice, which I am not qualified to give.
Featured Image
Some JSO types at Kingsbury. (I think? This might be from a previous protest.) Not all of them are grannies. I’ve tried to turn it into their signature orange, but haven’t quite got that right. Hoo well.
Climate Scepticism 
What I find most amazing is that virtually everything these people use and enjoy in their current lives is a product of and dependent on OIL. And yet they see it as uniquely evil.
Read Alex Epstein’s book “Fossil Future” to understand that the IPCC only looks at problems from fossil fuels and totally ignores all the benefits of their use – which means just about everything that makes our lives so comfortable and enjoyable.
And yet they want to deny all of that to their grandchildren (as well as making them all live in fear!) because of some phantom menace from a changing climate. Totally unhinged…
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This inability to understand our individual reliance or even dependence upon petroleum for our lifestyles, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the desire of many of the same people to prevent others, including our descendants, from benefiting in the same manner because of fears about the future is a great puzzlement.
It reminds me of the white queen who could believe in six impossible things before breakfast. I’m sure the protesting grannies all have such queenly traits.
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Got their privileged lives thx to Ol ‘King Coal and democratic Rule of Law.
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Having recently been exposed to the theory of the evolutionary purpose of memes, I see a huge flaw in memes: biological evolution depends on biologocal success. It is as a result slow, and must pass reality tests to propogate widely. Memes, on the other hand, are socioogical. They spread at the speed of communication. Therefore in the age of social media, foolish, bad, and even nihilistic memes can spread amazingly fast. We have seen this demonstrated with gender, covid and climate policies.
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Jit: ‘Among the dimbulbs staffing this protest were a number of grannies.’
And three vicars, two of them retired, all of them serial offenders and yet still at large.
Here’s ex-dentist/vicar The Revd Tim ‘No Chews’ Hewes justifying his latest protest:
https://christianclimateaction.org/2022/09/14/three-vicars-block-kingsbury-oil-terminal/
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Hunterson, these are what you might call “luxury beliefs.” Life is so easy that you can believe what you want, go and glue yourself to a road, whatever you like, and you will be fine and carry on life as before. Many people around the world do not have that luxury.
Vinny: H’mm, perhaps I could have written about the vicars instead. No doubt they can be mined for plenty of mad quotes. I was particularly bewildered by the grannies because of the way their fears about their grandchildren had led to demands for policies that would make those very feared outcomes occur. (That is not terribly clearly put.)
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This exposes the slant that the “doctors’ wives” set have in their view of the world’s ills. And that, unfortunately, is a mix of ethnocentrism and classism. I’ll take it for argument’s sake that ultimately fossils fuels are bad for a number of reasons (look at Russia’s current ploy, for one, i.e. geostrategic dependency). But you still have to evaluate who your policy will help, and who it might harm. The doctors’ wives are concerned about white oppressors privileging themselves at the expense of the oppressed. They’re in a bit of a pickle there. But driving up prices by restricting supply will a) impact on lower social classes in their own society (including bipocs), and b) reverse all-important transport connectivity across the developing world. They can say oh, but we’re all going to fry and they’re the vanguard, but why should the oppressed carry more of the burden before Armageddon than they?
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It’s nicely done. There are a few obvious takeaway points:
1. The first-world “problem” of worrying about the imaginary climate crisis and having the time and money to do stupid things to protest about it all.
2. Demanding policies from your government that will make your grandchildren’s lives an awful lot worse than they would be if we carried on with business as usual.
3. Demanding policies from your government that – unless replicated by the Chinese, Indians, Russians et al (which isn’t going to happen), and possibly even then – won’t make any difference at all to the “problem” that leaves you sleepless at night.
4. And yet these people, by and large, are reasonably well-educated and presumably moderately intelligent people. How and why does the emotional mind overrule the rational one?
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Jit: ‘…they could have STOP on one cheek and OIL on the other’
I don’t know about JSO but XR likes to have ‘TELL THE TRUTH NOW’ on naked buttocks, with ‘NOW’ crossing the crack.
https://show.pics.io/xr-global-media-breaking-news/preview/62e0343d55fb040019bbd8bc
That could be interpreted as telling people to talk out of their arses – and it’s not impossible that Donald Bell, the owner of those particular buttocks, meant that when he presented his message to the world. Bell, an ex-junkie (and dealer), has been prominent in a lot of XR protests and I’ve sometimes wondered whether he’s just having a laugh.
(Incidentally, XR now has a Twitter for grannies:
Very busy but not very interesting.
A bit like some grannies, then.)LikeLike
“Fortunately for us, and them, humanity is not doomed.”
Not according to 74-year old “sheila 54” in comments at the Hereford Times:
“I first learned about climate change in 1985 when the organisation I worked for ran computer models to predict the future of wildlife habitats. I’ve known, since then, that the point of no return was 1995 and had to live with the knowledge that all humanity, plant and animal life was facing inevitable extinction. However, in the last five years things have moved faster than predicted and I now review my estimate from 90 years for extinction to around 70. Everything fades into insignificance in comparison.”
https://www.herefordtimes.com/news/business/20598684.buildings-craned-place-new-housing-estate-hereford/
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“Just Stop Oil apologises over protest site rubbish”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crgj8y434n3o
“The farmer is right to be angry,” a spokesperson for the group said. “Just Stop Oil is sorry that the site was not cleaned up, this is now being organised. The area should have been cleaned, so that the land, people and wildlife are protected.”
Somebody needs to explain to JSO the difference between an act and an omission. They just didn’t fail to clean up after themselves, they actively went about dumping their rubbish in the hope that the misdemeanour would not be traced back to them. Now that it has, they are sorry. As for the BBC, their headline should have been:
“Just Stop Oil fly tips in an act of stark hypocrisy”.
The apology is not the newsworthy part of this story.
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Disgusting creatures. This climate denier has never dropped any litter anywhere, ever. In fact, because I’m such a climate denier, I pick up other people’s ****. Not nappies. But food packaging and beer cans.
John, what was that story filed under?
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Jit,
Good question. It was buried under Local News: Regions: Coventry & Warwickshire.
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If anyone ever doubts the bias at the BBC and its agenda, one only has to notice where it buried that story about the people at JSO. Good spot, John – needless to say, I’d missed it, since I tend not to burrow down to the Coventry & Warwickshire section of the BBC website.
And JIT, that’s you and me both. True environmentalists are people like us, not the JSO and XR brigades, who are quite happy to dump rubbish and litter remote and precious countryside with wind turbines.
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To be fair, Mark, the item was covered by a number of newspapers and I actually picked up on it at the Daily Telegraph (everyone but the BBC went with the hypocrisy and not how polite, understanding and apologetic JSO was). After finding the Telegraph article, I then googled their headline to see who else had covered it and saw the BBC link. After following that link it was not clear where the story had been filed, and so to answer Jit’s question I had to do some detective work. Lo and behold, there it was, fly tipped where it wasn’t meant to be found.
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John, in many ways that just makes the BBC’s behaviour and bias all the more egregious!
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Eschatonanist quote of the week?
(My bolds.)
That’s from Emma Brown, a Just Stop Oil artist who blocked a road outside Buckingham Palace today.
That quote appeared on a lot of news websites. Some also had this quote from a police officer who talked to the road-blockers: “Let me know if I can I do anything for you.”
Great stuff, Mr Plod! I do hope that you’ll be that welcoming the next time I have something stolen. (Found my Hilux yet? No, of course not. You didn’t even turn up.)
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“I look at my nine-month-old granddaughter and try to imagine the world as it could very well be when she is my age. I find I cannot do this; it’s simply too painful a future to contemplate for her. »“
Retired therapist Julia Mercer probably thinks this was an original thought. But climate scientist James Hansen has already written “Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity. » (Climate Catastrophe? Surely some mistake there) and climate scientist Chris Rapley named his one man show at the Royal Court Theatre “2071,” that being the date at which his granddaughter would reach the same age as he was at the time of his thespian début.
There is something very odd about imagining your young granddaughter being old & wrinkly. It will happen of course (one hopes) but only long after you have succumbed to the great catastrophe that awaits us all. A therapist (or a vicar) should be able to explain this to confused climate scientists.
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“Just Stop Oil: M25 protests to be halted”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-63594641
Translation: Winter’s coming, and it’s no fun protesting when it’s cold and wet, but we’ll be back in the spring.
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Some reactions to Just Stop Oil’s stunt at the Snooker World Championship two days ago. Here’s a guy who’s been a rabid alarmist in the past but may just be changing his tune:
Linehan’s initial beef is with one self-styled communist’s comparison with the Suffragettes. But he can’t help also noticing the posh name of the bloke with the orange powder. And that leads to another really interesting blog post about the incident:
Also picking up the point about narcissism was our own Ben Pile. His video is an extremely thorough debunking of the whole idea of the climate crisis. Published two months ago but I hadn’t seen it till now. Thanks, Just Stop Oil, for that, and for the negative reactions generated all round.
Ian Woolley is struck by the fact that snooker is mainly a working-class sport. He is really hoping that JSO repeats this kind of stunt in working men’s clubs in the north. He suggests Edred might come a cropper pretty fast!
Lastly Tom Slater is very good on the subject in The Spectator: Why is Just Stop Oil targeting the snooker?
I have a hunch the alienation generated in this case is going to reach places earlier stunts would not have done. Bad, bad move JSO.
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