Just Stop Oil. How much plainer could it be? We are up shit creek. Oil lobbyists, right through into the heart of COP28 and with their tendrils into governments and the media, are fighting like cornered rats. They are banking on the fact that most people seem either ambivalent, in denial as the first stage of grief, or have swallowed their propaganda.

The options are either to believe the air-brushed arguments that we would make life too difficult by drastically phasing down fossil fuel extraction, or face the reality that humanity’s naive consumption of the drugs of fossil fuels for decades means we have to go through the painful withdrawal symptoms to survive. We all know that recovering from an addiction has to be better than feeding it and letting it kill us.

George Monbiot says it like it is. But that would be too uncomfortable by itself so the dance of weasel words has to continue. This suits the fossil fuel industry and their shareholders just fine. They have a set of potentially lethal weapons they are deploying on the movement against them (as set out by Michael Mann in his book ‘The New Climate War: The Fight To Take Back Our Planet’):

Delay – it’s not as urgent as people think, we can take more time to change
Distraction – Carbon Capture and Storage will suck the problem out the air
Deflection – it’s consumers who must change, the industry merely serves their demands
Division – get the environmentalists to argue amongst themselves over the best ways forward

Sunak rowing back on climate change is NOT stopping oil.

Enjoy your weekends folks.

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Video via Twitter: https://twitter.com/i/status/1733110566586036351