To say that Just Stop Oil – the latest offshoot of the Extinction Rebellion cult – is ‘out of touch’ is more than an understatement.
Even to say that these activists live in a ‘parallel universe’ doesn’t capture the vast chasm between their eco-extremist view of the world and the reality that ordinary people have to live in. [bold, links added]
I don’t just mean they are ‘out of touch’ in class terms – though there is that. I’d wager that young ‘Louis, Maddie and Kai’, as profiled glowingly in the Guardian, have never had to worry about struggling to pay a heating bill.
And, certainly, it takes a steely indifference to ordinary folk to set out to make their lives more difficult today of all days.
Today, as most people will have acutely felt, is the day that the hike in the energy price cap comes into effect – with bills shooting up on average by a record 54 percent.
This arrives amid the worst squeeze in living standards since the days of rationing, thanks in part to recent disruptions in global oil and gas supplies.
That Just Stop Oil would choose today to add to that misery, by blockading several oil refineries and deliberately curtailing the supply of vital fuels, beggars belief.
Worse, the campaigners acknowledge that ‘Ordinary people can no longer afford oil and gas’. But their solution is for ordinary people to just stop using them – ‘It’s time to Just Stop Oil’. If the plebs can’t afford petrol, let them eat electric cars, say these green Marie Antoinettes. Or maybe just go without.
But it is not just the Extinction Rebellion (XR) splinter groups’ distance from the lives of ordinary people that should disturb us. The truth is that the XR worldview is based on a fantasy – and a pretty twisted fantasy at that.
Sure, fossil-fuel use contributes to global CO2 levels, and therefore to anthropogenic climate change. But XR and its offshoots warn of something much graver, more apocalyptic, and yes, utterly fantastical.
So Just Stop Oil tells us that the use of oil is not just bad for the environment, but that it is also ‘genocidal.’ This echoes the infamous claim from XR that climate change is going to kill literally ‘billions’ of people.
Heavily involved in Just Stop Oil is XR and Insulate Britain cofounder Roger Hallam, who claims that even the Holocaust is trivial compared to the mass murder soon to be visited by climate change.
The Holocaust was ‘just another fuckery in human history,’ while climate change will turn ‘whole regions of the world into death zones.’
And if that were not vivid enough an illustration, according to Hallam if we don’t stop emitting our CO2, then your mother, your sister, and your girlfriend will be gang-raped – on your kitchen table while you are forced to watch. ‘This is the reality of climate change’, Hallam argues.
Of course, this is not reality. It is deranged. And it is on the basis of this derangement that eco-extremists argue that we must be deprived of the fuels that sustain modern life.
It is possible to ‘Just Stop Oil’, to live without oil and gas, as the campaign demands. There are plenty of people in the world who really do live oil-free lifestyles, producing very little CO2 as they go about their business.
Billions of people, in fact. But this carbon-free lifestyle is perhaps better described as ‘absolute poverty.’
A life without fossil fuels is nasty, brutish, and short. It is not something sane people would wish on their worst enemy, let alone put forward as an aspiration for their country.
Read more at Spiked-Online
“according to Hallam if we don’t stop emitting our CO2, then your mother, your sister, and your girlfriend will be gang-raped”
You too probably. Just what is happening in Ukraine, plus killing, after Merkel’s attempts to stop climate change by stopping Germany’s coal and nuclear fired energy system, so increasing financing to Putin. Whose diminishing fuel resources are further stressed by Chinese demand. When these resources end, if there is no alternative but discontinuous sun and wind but no industry to maintain and replace them when obsolete, but far greater electic power demand due to electric transport and heating, where will that power come from? Only a better alternative can replace fuels. But right now we have none.
You just can’t fix STUPID. Based on the photo that accompanies the article, It would appear the activists sign & vest are most likely made from petroleum. You just can’t make this stuff up…
They have reverted back to a backwards way of thinking they wont be happy until were all living in cave and making the seasonal sacrifice of a Virgin or child to the pagan deities they worship just the same was the Aztecs did