Some people have argued that the stunt discredited the wider climate movement. I won’t buy that for a second. Instead, I suspect it is much more likely to produce a useful radical flank effect, making more moderate forces in the climate movement, such as the British Green Party, more attractive to the mainstream. A recent study even found that unpopular radical tactics by climate activism groups can indeed increase support for more moderate factions.
I emailed sociologist Brent Simpson, the study’s lead author, to the University of South Carolina, asking if he thought it applicable to the sunflowers protest. He saw a connection. “We didn’t exactly study these actions in our research, of course,” he wrote. “But yes, our findings certainly suggest that these more radical protest tactics could increase support for groups using more moderate tactics to pursue the same overall climate action goals.”
And if protesters continue to demonstrate in striking ways, they will continue to push the issue into the national conversation and widen the Overton window. We’ve already seen this happen in the US with the recent passing of the Inflation Reduction Act, which contained climate provisions that were until recently considered the radical left, but passed with a moderate Democrat in the White House. This change did not happen despite climate activism, but because of it.
Most people now believe in climate change and support for policies aimed at combating climate disruption has increased significantly in the 2010s. And even if most people also think eating to pretty paintings is a stupid way to fight the climate crisis, it still raises an obvious follow-up question: Well, what’s the best way to fight climate change? Throwing canned goods probably isn’t at the top of the list, but it’s not doing nothing.
In the week after the sunflowers stunt, Just Stop Oil has been busy. Activists blocked a busy bridge in the eastern English county of Essex for days. “Protests are coming, this is a fast growing movement and the next two weeks will be what I hope will be the most intense period of climate action yet, so brace yourself,” said Margaret Klein Salamon, executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund (the organization largely finances Just Stop Oil) said: the guard. Good! It’s soup season, honey.
time travel
Now seems like a good time to revisit a 2018 WIRED feature called “Pipeline Vandals Are Reinventing Climate Activism”. It’s a fascinating dive into a different kind of stunt-driven climate action. The story follows environmentalists who sabotaged an oil pipeline in Minnesota, and how they were able to use a “necessary” defense in court, alleging that the government had taken so little action to mitigate fossil fuel damage that it left citizens no choice but to intervene:
It was a cold morning, aspens shaking their dull gold under a heavy sky. A fellow activist, Ben Joldersma, was livestreaming to Facebook as the two women cut chains around large shut-off fences for two oil pipelines belonging to Canadian multinational Enbridge. The pipes carry crude oil from deposits of tar sands (also called oil sands) in Alberta and transport it to Lake Superior. Because making petroleum products from this goo — called bitumen — causes more global warming emissions than most other oil wells, the activists would do what they could to keep it in the ground.
Enbridge was well aware that they were there: About 15 minutes before they entered, an activist named Jay O’Hara of the Climate Disobedience Center in Seattle had spoken to Enbridge staff by phone and warned them that protesters would be closing the valves. on Line 67 and Line 4, each buzzing at 33,000 gallons of crude oil per hour.
What only a handful of people knew, however, was that Johnston and Klapstein were part of a nationwide action called #ShutItDown that would also choke pipelines that day at three other locations in North Dakota, Montana and Washington State, running east to west. . Calling themselves the Valve Turners, Reuters called their effort “the largest coordinated move on U.S. energy infrastructure ever taken by environmental protesters.” On that day, five key activists — Michael Foster, 54, Ken Ward, 61, and Leonard Higgins, 66, in addition to Johnston and Klapstein — cut off 70 percent of the oil from tar sands flowing into the US from Canada.
