Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion are a public relations disaster for the environmental movement. The oil companies would actually be helping their cause by funding them secretly.
Firstly; their choice of targets was deeply flawed. Blocking roads and mass public transport systems just made the public hate them and gave the government the excuse it needed to crack down hard on environmental protesting.
Secondly; the messenger is as important as the message and the people these groups put front-and-centre tended to be the most unrelatable privileged trustafarians imaginable. Remember Edred Whittingham? The optics of people like that stopping working class people getting to work were terrible. If the message is "consume less" then the messenger is as important as the message. If the messenger is heir to a country estate and visited over a dozen countries on their gap year then it's easy to level accusations of hypocrisy at them. The optics of idiots like Roger Hallam defending blocking ambulances with critically ill patients in them from getting to hospital (on national TV no less) was even worse.
The tactics used need to be rethought quickly. Nothing will be achieved if the public hate environmental protestors like poison. Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, sickeningly, were able to persuade the working class they're on their side, whereas JSO appear to be against the working class.
A scientifc breakthrough in a renewable abundent & cheap energy source that is signficantly cheaper than what we currently use is what will stop oil. So if you are concerned, goto unversity and research/study that. Or invest in enterprises that do.
Part of the problem we have is that for decades the big oil companies bought up patents for alternative energy generation technologies and put them on ice indefinitely. They also removed the urgency for technological innovation and societal change by actively covering up the link between fossil fuel derived CO2 pollution and damaging climate change. The fossil fuel industry was aware of this problem since the 1950s and chose to use PR tactics to "create doubt" about the science to avoid losing market share.
For example, ExxonMobil got its own researchers to undertake a study of
anthropogenic climate change in the late 1970s and their report produced a forecast of average CO2 concentration/global temperature increases right through to the end of the 21st century. Their forecast for the mid 2020s was remarkably accurate.
We are where we are because of corporate greed and dishonesty, because quarterly profits are more important than having a stable climate.
www.bbc.co.uk
