On Friday Phoebe Plummer, a 21-year-old graduate student and activist, threw a tin of soup over a Van Gogh painting in the National Gallery, before proceeding to glue herself to the wall. “What is worth more, art or life?” she shouted in a manner reminiscent of an especially tiresome student at the Oxford Union. Whilst Phoebe didn’t exactly make it to Oxford, she was the beneficiary of a £15,000 a year boarding school education. Having rich parents probably helps if your lifestyle involves dying your hair pink, covering yourself in glitter and getting glued to a succession of defaced public monuments. The legal fees alone must be a headache.

Apart from infrastructure shutting down, food production would grind to a halt

That said, perhaps the organisation she cheerfully acts in the name of — Just Stop Oil — can foot the bills. After all, it’s a registered charity funded by the US-based organisation The Climate Emergency Fund. The Fund boasts on its website that “We provide a safe and legal means for donors to support disruptive protest that wakes up the public and puts intense pressure on lawmakers”, not to mention “Our robust legal team”. The charity comes with endorsements by high profile organisations such as fashion magazine Marie Claire and the backing of donors like the group’s co-founder, oil heiress Aileen Getty who is quoted as saying, “Don’t we have responsibility to take every means to protect the Earth”. 

I can think of other organisations that provide “A safe harbour for donors” and put “intense pressure on lawmakers”, not to mention having “robust legal teams” — though they generally feature rather more Italian accents and bodies dumped in the river, and rather fewer celebrity endorsements (Frank Sinatra could not be reached for comment). 

The Just Stop Oil organisation itself is even more explicit about its willingness to countenance potentially illegal means. In its FAQ section it calls for people to “use tactics such as strikes, boycotts, mass protests and disruption to withdraw their cooperation from the state”, and announces that they “are willing to take part in “Nonviolent direct action targeting the UK’s oil and gas infrastructure should the Government fail to meet our demand by 14 March 2022”. Well the date has past. “Will there be arrests?” the next section asks. The answer? “Probably”. 

Quite why organisations that openly fund illegal — sorry “disruptive” — protest, and hire teams of lawyers to avoid the legal consequences, are allowed to enjoy charitable status, let alone avoid investigation by the authorities, is beyond me. Nor is it clear to me how attacks on works of art, or stopping traffic in the road, can attract support for environmental causes, or challenge those who profit from ecological destruction. 

The answer lies with the nature of the radical environmental movement, which is often starkly at odds with many of the finest traditions of ecological and anti-industrial thought. Early critics of industrial capitalism like Ruskin and Morris were as concerned with the protection of traditional culture as they were with the destruction of the natural world. Their humanist challenge to industrialism was to call for the return of craft, the embrace of localism, a built environment on a human scale, and an economy that fed the spiritual as well as material needs of mankind. 

Modern environmentalists claim to be taking on poverty as well as pollution, and I don’t doubt the earnestness with which Phoebe (and others like her) proclaimed her wish to challenge the cost of living crisis. The fact that so many activists are from highly privileged socio-economic backgrounds, and take a fanatical and anti-democratic approach to environmental policy speaks to a disturbing void at the heart of the new radical environmentalism, however. 

Consider for a moment Just Stop Oil’s agenda. Details are mysteriously thin on the ground, but their central demand (as seen above) is simple: “That the UK government makes a statement that it will immediately halt all future licensing and consents for the exploration, development and production of fossil fuels in the UK.” 

The problem with oil, unlike the gas and coal used for electricity generation, is that it is far harder to substitute for clean sources of energy. Whilst France regularly manages to generate about 90 per cent of its electricity from clean sources (thanks largely to the nuclear energy that many environmentalists, including the British, German and French Green parties oppose), oil is far more deeply enmeshed with all aspects of the modern global economy. 

According to experts employed by the Norwegian petroleum industry (not neutral sources, but highly informed ones), were the world to cease oil production tomorrow, the results would be catastrophic. As well as major job losses in the industry itself (in 2019, 280,000 people were employed in the oil sector in the UK alone), we are reliant on oil for most forms of transportation, including strategically vital areas like aviation, shipping and road haulage. Apart from our infrastructure shutting down, food production would grind to a halt. Not only for the obvious reason that fishing boats and farm equipment rely on oil, but because modern fertiliser production requires natural gas. This is before we even begin to address the question of how we would heat our homes or produce plastics, a material integral to a vast number of industries. 

Beware ideologies that give you all-or-nothing choices

Evolving away from fossil fuels may be necessary in the long run, but there are countless structural shifts and technological innovations needed before we can deliver a carbon-free economy. Not even the greatest optimist can imagine, mid-energy and economic crisis, that Britain is going to pull this off within years.

Halting or scaling back domestic production would not meaningfully reduce global or domestic oil consumption, but would have the following unavoidable effects: increase fuel bills for ordinary people, add to the national debt, slow economic growth and decrease our energy security. Apart from hurting ordinary people, all of the above will slow and hinder — not help — our progress to a carbon-free economy long term. 

The “save the planet no matter what” position is highly seductive, and superficially its logic seems irrefutable. If we do nothing, the ecological crisis (which is far from just climate change alone) will see much of the world’s species go extinct, flood coastal regions (including some of the most populous cities on Earth), degrade the soil we rely on for crops and increase the number and severity of most forms of natural disaster. Besides that, what’s a few per centage points of GDP, an old picture of some flowers, or some bloke trying to get to work one morning?

Beware ideologies that give you all-or-nothing choices. It’s no coincidence that some of the most ardent activists of this gnostic, anti-humanist agenda are children of the rich. What this approach of “anything goes, nothing else matters” teaches its adherents, is to disconnect from the world, from society and their fellow man and woman. 

This disconnection and anti-humanism directly leads to bad policy goals. Far from being an ideology that truly, fundamentally seeks to get us all out of this crisis, it’s actually a counsel of despair. Demands like the one above are as crazy as they are because they no longer believe in the capacity of society to change its social and economic logic, to employ the might of modern science and industry to protect and steward the Earth, to not only halt but to reverse the harm we have done to Creation. 

Being in touch with the ordinary human experience and everyday challenges is not just a matter of democratic moralism. It’s a basic requirement for good statesmanship and practical policymaking. If you’re deeply concerned with the basic questions of food, shelter and transport, you are on your way to devising environmental policy that might actually work. As mad demands to ditch domestic oil or forsake nuclear power show, when you ignore those questions, you don’t just fail — you make matters actively worse. 

Moving back from policy to psychology, we can see a zealous, nihilistic logic at work in radical Green activism. If we assume society to be irredeemably corrupted, any part of it can be held responsible for climate change. So rather than throwing eggs at oil millionaires (Aileen Getty’s security is probably too good anyway), you instead find yourself getting glued to a busy road, or chucking soup at an Old Master. One target is as good as another. 

If there’s really not any hope, your best bet, like any good millenarian cultist, is to mark yourself out as one of the few truly righteous souls come the rapture. Too much of a stretch? Just ask our friend Phoebe Plummer, who isn’t too worried about her burgeoning criminal record: “When asked why I would risk my future with arrest and a criminal record, I always reply: what future?”

In a postmodern turn, the modern millenarian has merged with the other imminent apocalypse demographic — the partygoers next door living it up whilst they still can, since nothing matters anymore. Not only are they the righteous few, but they’ll also welcome the end of the world in an orgy of individualist self-indulgence. 

Dig beneath the surface, and you discover a movement that is the mirror of the very decadent capitalist culture they claim to attack — lost to nihilistic individualism, and despairing of any project to save the planet from the costs of our consumption.