Just Stop Oil is doing more harm for the cause than good

Mitigating climate change requires more than poems and protest

It’s never fun to tell someone well-intentioned that they’re doing it wrong. But occasionally, it is better if you do so.

If a friend were baking a cake to donate to the local orphanage, even if they had the best intentions in the world, it would still be wise to step in if you see them pouring lead and arsenic into the mixing bowl to add flavour.

And we should do the same when we see bad political activism. When you care about a cause, it can be tempting to assume that anyone ostensibly acting on its behalf is helping. But this isn’t always the case.

For example, imagine if I were to go to Boston in Lincolnshire to knock on doors on behalf of a hypothetical “Rejoin” campaign. Europe is an issue I care a lot about. But would it help the cause if I were to say “Hello” in Esperanto, and pull out a graph showing the positive economic impact of immigration? Of course not.

What made me think about this was a piece written by the comedian Robin Ince, defending the activist group Just Stop Oil (JSO), which is of course, best known for throwing orange paint over famous things, on behalf of climate change.

Reflecting after spending the day speaking at a JSO rally outside the Royal Courts of Justice, Robin wrote the following:

Whenever I put anything up about climate change protests, I will usually get a smattering of people, some bots, some possibly flesh, saying, “actually, I think these protests are doing more harm for the cause than good”. Generally, I think the people saying that aren’t really particularly bothered, addicted instead to a pasty, grumbling inaction that is made of little more than whining. If you have the energy to whine about protesters, then have another spoon of sugar and trying and get the energy to whine about the industries that are hastening extinctions.

The piece was a longer version of this Bluesky post, which echoes the same sentiment:

Now, to be clear – I’m about to be mean about Robin’s posts. But I also feel a bit bad about it.¹ He was a hugely formative figure to me when I was in my early 20s – his comedy, the shows he organised, and his advocacy of critical thinking were huge influences on me.²

But it’s using these same intellectual tools that he incubated that makes me think the core arguments made above don’t quite stack up. But instead of simply whining about it, I thought it would be more constructive to explain why I think so – and why I disagree with him on this.

So at severe risk of sounding like I’m addicted to grumbling inaction, here’s why Just Stop Oil is actually doing more damage to the climate cause than any good.

The missing context

Let’s start with the big picture. It’s here I think that much like Extinction Rebellion, JSO’s starting point is just plain wrong. With the rabble-rousing and disruption, it feels like they’re fighting a war that has already been won – because contrary to Robin’s sarcastic point above, we have actually seen renewable energy move ahead – quite hastily, too.

For example, did you know that according to Carbon Brief, Britain’s emissions in 2023 were at their lowest level since… 1879?

I’m guessing the story of the graph is roughly: Industrial revolution, WWI, Suez Crisis, further industrialisation, oil crisis, transition away from coal to gas and the transition to a services economy, then the renewables build-out.

There are numerous reasons for the dramatic fall. Some of it is a function of deindustrialisation and off-shoring to countries that still manufacture things – which means those emissions haven’t been eliminated entirely. But it’s also the result of a series of policy choices to transition the grid first away from coal to natural gas in the 90s, and then more recently to incentivise the build-out of renewables through programmes like Contracts for Difference, as well as the start of the electric vehicle transition.

So it turns out our “ersatz democracy”, as Robin calls it, has actually done a pretty good job of decarbonising so far – even under Tory governments. And as the gradient of the line illustrates, though there is more to do, and no doubt the hardest decarbonising is yet to come, we’re very much heading in the right direction.

That’s why I’m ultimately left wondering… who are Just Stop Oil trying to persuade with their stunts? What’s the theory of change? Because here in Britain at least, they’ve already won.

Since Theresa May was in power, we’ve been legally committed to achieving Net Zero by 2050, and her numerous successors have stuck to the commitment.³

And then there’s the actions of the current Labour government, which famously committed to an extremely aggressive (and critics would say unworkable) mission, promising to make the electric grid Net Zero by 2030. And since taking power last July, the government has already announced plans to establish GB Energy – a vehicle to co-finance renewables – and it has announced plans to reduce the regulatory barriers to building clean power.

It has also written an actual technical plan for how to get the grid to that Net Zero goal – I’m sure there is plenty to argue about in the details, but you can’t deny that it is a serious piece of work.⁴

In other words, I’m just not sure the climate problem still requires protest and direct action – because when it comes to decarbonising, we’re beyond the argument over principles, and are already deep into the boring-people-holding-boring-meetings-about-it phase of making it happen.

And this reality even applies to the cases where Keir Starmer appears not to be making the most climate-friendly choices, such as when he suggested that he’ll approve the Rosebank oil and gas project. This is because, again, the problem isn’t that he needs persuading about the underlying facts of climate change, or reminding of the urgency – it’s because of the trade-offs involved.

The importance of being interested (in trade-offs)

In his essay, Robin writes:

If only we had a few more politicians with the energy I see at demonstrations, but so many will patronisingly explain that “the real world is a lot more complicated than you crazy dreamers imagine”, failing to realise that they have hands in shaping that real world.

What use is there in power if when you get it you hand in your ambitions in return for keeping power and keeping the powerful happy?

It’s an echo of something that Just Stop Oil says itself. Here’s how the organisation describes its key demand:

“Its simple. We need to end fossil fuels, before they end us. No more “phasing down”, no more false solutions, no more lies and misinformation.”

Both statements sound compelling, right? It’s simple! Politicians should just Do The Right Thing!

Except… it’s not simple, is it?

I mean, think about the issue for more than five seconds. Any energy policy we adopt is going to be the result of dozens of messy trade-offs. It’s not as poetic, but the real world is a lot more complicated than the crazy dreamers imagine.

For example, we’ve already seen what a world where we “just stop” oil looks like. We saw it when Russia invaded Ukraine, where in response, Russian fossil fuels were (rightly) cut off from Europe. The immediate consequence was that utility bills soared, the cost of living skyrocketed, and people struggled.

And it was the poorest who suffered the most. During the winter of 2022, when energy prices were at an all-time high, we had the grotesque need for “warm banks” – heated public buildings where people could go when they could not afford to heat their own homes.

So this is all to say that just stopping oil isn’t simple, and it is a serious political challenge to manage, with difficult choices to make.

For example, we could have “simply” reacted to the lack of Russian gas by massively ramping up the rollout of heat-pumps and renewables. I think we should have – but that would have required an enormous government spending commitment, and would have led to a tonne of downstream political decisions around how to facilitate such a programme.

Or maybe we could have just told the public to tough out the cold winter, for the greater good of protecting the climate, but I’m not sure the elderly freezing to death would have been a particularly good outcome either.

This is all to say that whatever we do to get from where we are now to a world without oil won’t be simple. It will require reckoning with countless trade-offs and policy choices. A million decisions where politicians will have to balance climate mitigation against other political priorities like energy bills and economic growth. Not to mention that any programme of decarbonisation will need to maintain political support across multiple Parliaments, and the persistent consent of the electorate.

And maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places – but I don’t think I’ve ever seen JSO, or supporters like Robin reflecting on what is supposed to happen after the protesters and poets pack up, when the orange paint has dried, and the politicians and bureaucrats are left to figure out how to deliver what the crazy dreamers want.

In fact, one telling example of this is that there aren’t any mentions of nuclear on the JSO website – beyond talk of nuclear weapons.⁵ This would be something tangible to advocate for, in terms of pursuing a solution to the climate crisis. Or perhaps JSO is more into “degrowth” ideas, where we force people to live poorer lives, and sacrifice for the greater good of reducing fossil fuel use? I’ve got no idea what they want, as they won’t tell us.

And don’t get me wrong – I don’t think everyone involved needs to write a detailed policy white paper – but it would be nice to get a sense of what they want the future to look like. After we “just stop oil”, what happens next?

More harm than good?

I know what you’re thinking. Sure, I’ve pointed to some woolly thinking and I’ve been mean to a famous comedian – but what’s the harm?

I’d love to pretend that JSO is doing a good thing. The organisation is clearly very good at getting attention. But I just can’t see their actions achieving anything more than my hypothetical rejoin campaign in Boston. At best, their efforts do nothing, and at worst, they are turning people against the cause because the messengers are so damn obnoxious.

And this is important, as if we’re going to mitigate climate change, we need to persuade people who do not share the same underlying values that climate change isn’t just a weird, left-wing issue that posh kids can use as a pretext to act out.

But this isn’t just about respectability on the right. The problem is that JSO also misdiagnose the problem, which weakens the credibility of the arguments being made.

It’s right there in the mission statement: “no more lies and misinformation”.

Sure, oil companies are not known for their good behaviour, but as I describe above, I just don’t think the problem here is corruption or misinformation. The problem is that Just Stopping Oil is genuinely difficult.

If you’re unwilling to recognise the trade-offs decarbonisation entails, then the only possible way to explain the (perceived) lack of climate action is to resort to the intellectually lazy conspiracy-inflected thinking.

And once you do this, it is very easy to quickly lose your critical faculties. Without complexity as an explanation, it can only be that there must be a stitch up between shadowy Big Oil figures and the political establishment to maintain the status quo. It’s not that we need to balance different competing priorities, it’s that we live in an “ersatz democracy”. Which just isn’t taking the issue seriously.

So that’s why I’m whining about Just Stop Oil. I’m doing so not because I don’t care about climate change – but because I really do. I think the consequences if we do nothing to reduce emissions will be terrible, but I also understand that if we actually want to do something about it, we need to understand the problem accurately – and build a broad and durable political coalition that can navigate through the complexity.

And that hard work probably doesn’t start with throwing orange paint around in an art gallery.

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1. But I also can’t deny it is a good hook to frame a piece about climate change in terms of picking a fight with a popular figure.

2. Though it’s fair to say, as this piece will evidence, that in more recent years our politics has clearly diverged as Robin’s views appear to have evolved, and I’ve become a neoliberal, incrementalist centrist dad who shills for the established order of things.

3. Even Liz Truss was committed to the goal while in office, though obviously more recently has further lost her marbles.

4. I suppose if I’m being generous, you could argue that assuming the consensus will hold is breezily optimistic in an era of Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch. But even if they intend to renege on Net Zero, well, they’re not in power yet – and if either do make it to Downing Street, will JSO’s tactics really be what persuades them otherwise?

5. Like all activist groups, JSO shows signs of moving beyond its original brief to just being part of the activist blob, which just campaign about everything from Gaza to nuclear disarmament.