Just Stop Oil are their own worst enemies. I support their aims and I do my best to minimise my carbon footprint. I haven’t flown since 1993, I don’t own a car and I have eleven solar panels on my roof, but I’m losing patience with the movement. Meeting the JSO activists who disrupted a West End play only confirmed my suspicions that the movement has gone off the rails.
Weir and Walsh evidently care about the planet, yet they seem to lack ordinary human sympathy
Most people think the protestors who sabotaged Sigourney Weaver’s performance as Prospero at London’s Drury Lane theatre in January are a nuisance. Not JSO. Earlier this month, they scheduled a Zoom meeting in which the pair – referred to as ‘the stars of The Tempest’ – offered to explain their decision to halt a West End show.
‘Hayley [Walsh] and Richard [Weir] will be sharing what motivated them to take action, what it felt like to step into the spotlight and what happened afterwards,’ we were told before the encounter.
Walsh, a mother of three, is a professional theatre-maker who believes in ‘the theatre of protest.’ As she entered the stage at Drury Lane, she feared that her orange banner might be invisible because the lighting was so gloomy.
‘Was it The Tempest in space?’ she wondered. ‘Or The Tempest on the moon?’ She felt anxious that her confetti cannon might not work, but the firing mechanism launched a cloud of orange sprinkles into the air as she unfurled her banner.
‘Over 1.5 degrees is a global shipwreck,’ it said. This refers to the Paris Agreement, 2015, when politicians vowed not to let the earth’s temperature rise 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. That promise has now been broken.
Walsh noticed that Weaver was ‘very calm,’ as the show was interrupted. ‘She sat down and she didn’t seem distressed.’ Weaver is known as a ‘climate ally’ and Walsh was ready to deliver a speech if Weaver let her address the crowd.
Instead, the actor playing Caliban, Forbes Masson, ‘crawled out of a trap-door and led the cast off the stage.’ Alone with Weir and her banner, Walsh chose to remain silent ‘so that we wouldn’t be filmed shouting angrily into the crowd.’
After 11 seconds, according to her estimate, she and Weir were ushered into the wings by security staff. She expected to ‘be locked in a room’ while the police were summoned, but they were ‘turfed out’ onto the street.
Weir said they were caught in a downpour of cold rain. ‘One degree above freezing,’ he noted. He was a gas-fitter by trade so he knows about water temperatures. It was Weir who devised the slogan that linked the Tempest’s subject-matter, shipwrecked mariners, to the climate crisis. And yet, as he noted, London in January seems to have avoided the effects of global warming.
Weir explained why he sabotaged The Tempest. He feels outraged that Britain’s householders are failing to insulate their homes and to replace their gas boilers with heat pumps. The take-up rate, he said, is far lower than in some Scandinavian countries.
‘If we don’t insulate our homes, global warming is going to continue,’ he added, although this sounds like a contradiction. If global warming continues, we might not need artificial heating because rising temperatures could make chilly winters a thing of the past.
Weir and Walsh evidently care about the planet, yet they seem to lack ordinary human sympathy. Neither expressed any remorse for ruining the audience’s night at the theatre, or for upstaging Weaver and using her fame to grab the limelight for themselves. Weir has devised a joke at her expense. ‘Being on stage with Sigourney Weaver felt a bit alien,’ he said.
Apart from wasting the authorities’ time, they’ve achieved virtually nothing. Even JSO members aren’t that interested. The Zoom meeting attracted 60 visitors, which is a little higher than the usual tally of a few dozen.
The decision to call themselves ‘stars’ reveals the truth about the movement. JSO behaves like a drama school or a talent agency for under-occupied attention-seekers. Protestors are often pictured engaging in pranks or appearing outside court in connection with criminal charges. The members seem more interested in publicity than in curbing CO2 use. They love getting arrested and thrown in jail because these punishments extend the shelf-life of each stunt and provide extra material for their show-reels. The JSO website has little or no useful information about minimising pollution or preparing for a world without oil.
Their demand is for an international treaty obliging the world to ‘stop extracting and burning oil by 2030.’ That deadline is just 60 months away, so JSO ought to be leading the search for alternatives to petrochemicals.
Without oil, as everyone knows, civilisation will collapse. Transport relies on road surfaces and tyres made from oil products. Sanitation is impossible without synthetic pipes to carry clean water. Removing plastics from healthcare means getting rid of syringes, tubes, blood-bags, masks, and so on. A hospital without plastics will turn into a mortuary overnight.
JSO is well placed to tackle the crisis by forming alliances around the globe. Saudi Arabia, along with every other petrol-based economy, is preparing for the exhaustion of the earth’s supply of oil. If JSO had serious intentions and political vision it would team up with the petrochemical industry and work on breakthroughs in technology. Wearing garish costumes and taking selfies in gridlocked traffic makes them appear childish and irrelevant. Modern science deserves better than these loons.
Comments