The London Marathon went ahead without incident and people packed the streets to watch it, despite climate protesters threatening to disrupt it. Apart from a few banners – mostly obscured by the copious LGBTQIA+ flags along the route – there was no evidence of climate protesters. Perhaps Extinction Rebellion’s offer to ‘police’ the marathon kept the protesters at bay; the optics of two groups of climate protesters scrapping like rival groups of football hooligans would not have been their best publicity.
Just Stop Oil – one of the climate protesting groups – is a coalition of groups working together to ensure the government commits to halting new fossil fuel licensing and production. The group was founded in February 2022, and began protesting at an English oil terminal in April of that year.
It first made a name for itself when a protester tied himself to a goalpost during a premier league match at Goodison Park in September. Louis McKechnie was, thankfully, found guilty of this bizarre act and later stated that he was hoping to save lives through his actions. But how is tying yourself to a goal with a metal-enforced zip around your neck going to achieve this? If others, for example children, emulate this it could be downright dangerous. Also, it just makes you look like an idiot. He could have just run around the pitch like a normal pitch invader. He achieved nothing, except six-weeks in prison. Undoubtedly, he thought that was worth it.
The group went quiet for a while, but in April 2023 it stated that it would ramp up its actions and was plotting a summer of sporting chaos. It started with the Grand National, an event watched and loved by millions. Then, when watching the Snooker World Championships, as I do every year, a man with a ‘Just Stop Oil’ t-shirt broke past the security, jumped on the table and covered it in orange powder. Snooker has nothing to do with oil. The cues are made from wood, the table is made from quarried slate that is covered with cloth and rubber cushions and it is a long time since elephants were shot to make the balls. He made himself look like a fool and he ruined the night for everyone who paid to watch the event. The reason the protestors do this is to get their message over. However, the reactions from the crowd showed that nobody cared; people were shouting ‘get him off’ and they were swearing at him.
The protester who made it on to a table (the other female protester was stopped by a quick acting referee) is Edred Whittingham who comes from a privileged background. As with so many of these protesters (statue demolishers, animal rights protesters and other climate change activists), these are posh people spoiling working class people’s fun. Thankfully, Barry Hearn, the owner of World Snooker, is ready to fund legal action on behalf of the 400 fans who were affected by the protester. However, with top lawyers saying that they will not participate in prosecuting climate protesters and judges being notoriously reluctant to throw the book at them, a prosecution seems unlikely.
These groups are ridiculous and their aim to ‘stop oil’ is not going to be achieved. While trying to do this, one has to ask how they got into the events? Perhaps a magic carpet? Footage on Telegram from a protest on Saturday showed rows of coaches that had been used to bus in protesters from Extinction Rebellion and the LPG generators they were using to power their platforms and inflatable protest banners. Hypocritical or what?
We cannot live without oil; we need it for transportation, heating buildings, producing electricity and to create hundreds of intermediate and end-user goods. The protestors refuse to acknowledge the efforts and achievements over the decades to make fossil fuels cleaner, reduce our dependence on them and to improve the environment. The Government seems to pay them too much attention but, fortunately, the general public largely ignores them. If they want to stop something, they should stop trying to ruin things that millions of people enjoy.
Jack Watson is a pupil at Sirius North Academy, Kingston upon Hull. He blogs about being a Hull City fan at Ten Foot Tigers.
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Ok, this young man is gaining a name for himself and I do not wish to discourage him but this article reads for what it is – a report of an incident written by a fourteen year old schoolboy.
It is heartening to see that this young lad has a fine level of common sense and if he can gather a similar generational readership it bodes well for us all.
I wish him well but could we get back to adult writers?
Hux, what has age got to do with it? What does “adult” mean? As we know, most “adults” have the critical thinking abilities of a slug on opiates.
Case in point, all my “adult” colleagues are whinging,
“What was this emergency alert? Why didn’t I get it? I need to know if there’s a problem! The government are useless, why didn’t I get it? It’s not fair!”
When I ask them why they even care about emergency alerts, let alone ones from the bl**dy government, all I get is blank looks.
I elaborate,
“If it’s that urgent, it’s the apocalypse, we’re certainly all doomed and the phones won’t work anyway, so what’s the point? And if it isn’t that urgent, what’s the point?”
Again, more blank looks.
Bring on Young Jack and his Cracking Articles, I say!
“Jack Watson is a pupil at Sirius North Academy, Kingston upon Hull.”
I do not have a problem with age as such but this article reads as if written by a schoolboy, which it was. Would my comment have attracted so many downticks if it had been levelled at a more mature writer? I don’t think so. There is no criticism of this young man but his work is being promoted to an extent because of his youth and that is virtue signalling.
Thank you for responding Marcus. Forty seven others couldn’t be bothered.
I agree with you, HP.
Many thanks Aethelred.
Hear hear more power to Jack’s elbow
Ok, this young man is gaining a name for himself and I do not wish to discourage him but this article reads for what it is – a report of an incident written by a fourteen year old schoolboy.
Ehh … well … yes. And what’s the problem with that? I mean $article reads as if it had been written by $author is hardly unexpected and nobody’s forcing anyone to read it. I read it because I’m generally interested in the author’s opinion about the topics he’s writing about. No one will confuse him with a professor of philosophy, but it doesn’t hurt to listen to people who aren’t. His perspective is also a valid perspective.
Here come the downticks!!!!
I’m not sure this boy even exists!, If so, why can I find no mention of him anywhere on the Internet?. If this lad is real he’s a savant, and there’s been plenty that don’t hide their light under a bushel, so give some credance to his existence or he’s just a ghost writer!
So, does he exist, or is this a ghost writer?
Putting the words in a young mouth! Like,.. greta thunberg maybe?
huxleypiggles, I’m with you, this is a doubius source! With no proof of fact!
If I’m wrong, don’t downtick! Prove
Marcus! You seem sure that he’s a real person?
Thanks Dinger.
The punishment for Just Stop Oil protesters should be to deny them access to any oil based products or services for a year, that might change their minds.
Can I reccomend a 1 year camping holiday on West Falkland .I hear its quite nice between the gales ……
The government don’t want to punish their own useful idiots. These brainwashed dreamers are doing the dirty work for western governments who were the ones who filled their heads full of climate change junk science in support of public policy in the first place. You can hardly come down like a ton of bricks on people batting for the same team as you. But unless these activists are nipped in the bud very soon a lot of people are going to be seriously hurt or worse. None of the stuff they get in a tizzy about is remotely plausible. Billions are not going to die. There will not be hundreds of millions of climate refugees, we will not be drowned by rising seas. But government policies and the actions of their useful idiots are all based on the fantasy that all these things are likely. Which ofcourse is not based on real world observations but is entirely based on the output from speculative un-validated climate models which have little in the way of predictive value, and have so far, unsurprisingly, been totally wrong.
If British prosecutors are so corrupt that they refuse to go after these scumbags, then we have to start bringing in prosecutors from abroad who will.
I wonder if any of those fine young gentlemen landing on the south coast these days would like to be a King’s Counsel.
The usual excellent and well-written article, there is just one aspect that I would like to challenge:
“The protestors refuse to acknowledge the efforts and achievements over the decades to make fossil fuels cleaner, reduce our dependence on them and to improve the environment.”
I am sure that Jack has had the whole ‘Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change’ theory and agenda rammed down his throat throughout his time at school and might not even be aware that it is massively flawed and open to outright rejection (and therefore there is no need to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, that they are not in and of themselves pollutants etc).
I am afraid I am feeling lazy so will simply reproduce a response I made on YouTube to a fawning Good Morning Britain interview with representatives of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil which covers many of central weaknesses of the Net Zero project and its underlying fear-mongering claims:
Far from being threatened with imminent mass failure crop yields both in the UK and round the world are at near record highs, deaths from climate or weather related problems at record lows;
No evidence of any significant or threatening sea level rises;
Wildfires cannot be started by direct solar or terrestrial heat and are nearly always human caused via arson, dropped cigarettes, shrub clearing, camp fires etc;
Far from being brought about by the continued use of fossil fuels the cost of living crisis / energy and general inflation increases are being hugely exacerbated by the switch to relatively inefficient, unreliable and expensive ‘alternative’ versions such as wind and solar (which require full and constant backup availability from fossil-fuelled or nuclear plants in any case)
No evidence that the unusually prolonged rainfall last year that led to a particularly widespread but relatively non-fatal instance of Pakistan’s endemic flooding (a still appalling c 1,700 deaths versus c 10,000 in 1965) has any connection to human-caused C02 levels in the atmosphere;
At a basic level zero credible evidence that global temperature changes over time are occurring in anything other than a completely normal, natural and non-threatening manner;
Never mind the preposterous claim that humanity’s 5% annual contribution to a trace gas measured in parts per million and which itself only comprises around 3% of overall ‘greenhouse gases’ (the overwhelming majority made up of water vapour / clouds) could possibly be the main driver of the earth’s climate.
Hope that at least gives the author another perspective on the matter.
Speaking of joy-suckers, June piggin’ Raine! Here’s the always excellent Prof Fenton in a 17min vid pulling apart this manipulative, disingenuous, lying windbag’s presentation/speech from Nov ’22.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbFK5KqEdoA&ab_channel=NormanFenton
I’ve just been catching up with Dr Mike Yeadon’s Telegram posts. He has quoted from Steve Kirsch’s newsletter – estimates now are 13 million killed by the ‘safe and effective’ injections worldwide with 670k in the US and 3.7 million in India.
No wonder Billy says they weren’t very successful.
Not a subject I have ever looked into seriously, but according to R.F.Kennedy’s book “The Real Anthony Fauci”, the numbers killed globally by toxic and ineffective jabs in the HIV/AIDS scam are even more impressive!
Of course, thats been going on for much longer. Well worth reading about Fauci’s very long and infamous career.
I agree. I have Kennedy’s book but I haven’t made great inroads yet.
Perhaps the author could share the attached image with his classmates…
The Establishment is quietly encouraging these champagne socialist Eco nutters, most of whom are from wealthy, middle class families.
It keeps the Net Zero Policy in the spotlight and in their world, gives the Government “cover” to justfiy the imposition of the Eco Lunacy policies which are being forced on us.
It’s why a “softly, softly” approach has been taken to their organised disruption from the start; they hope people will get so fed up with the issue that they’ll just accept more and more restrictions on their lives in the hope it will stop them.
Who is primarily funding them? Eileen Getty provides main funding but there are other oligarchs as well. They need to be exposed and held accountable. Too many of the billionaire class have become oligarchs subverting the rule of democratic governments. Look how many are involved in climate change, WEF and Covid.
It is good to see young people question climate change orthodoxy rather than simply blindly accept it as ultimate truth, which ofcourse it is NOT. We should remember that, in matters of science, scepticism is the one true calling and blind faith the one unpardonable sin. I am glad to see a fourteen year not committing that sin.