A couple of weeks ago, I sprayed bright orange paint all over the windows of an Aston Martin storefront in London, then gave a speech about the climate emergency we're living in. I quoted the UN's Secretary-General, who has called our government "dangerous radicals" for pushing through genocidal oil and gas expansion policies that will, in no uncertain terms, kill millions of people, predominantly in the Global South. I reminded people of the context of my action: floodwaters from monsoons and glacial melt ripped 33 million people from their homes, permanently obliterating schools, hospitals, and crops across Pakistan, just last month. 16 million of those scattered from safety were children. Our moral situation right now is this: we act on the climate crisis and save billions from the horror of forced migration over the coming decades, or we get distracted by division, and allow billionaires to profit on the largest genocide the world has ever seen.
Most of the comments from the general public were about my clothes.
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No other organisation I've ever been a part of has had as high a proportion of LGBTQ+ people as Just Stop Oil. There are reasons for this:
Simple self-preservation.
The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report says: “Vulnerability [to climate destruction] is exacerbated by inequity and marginalization linked to gender, ethnicity, low income or combinations thereof, especially for many Indigenous Peoples and local communities”.
Basically, wherever you are in the world, if you’re marginalised, you’ll suffer the worst impacts of the climate crisis. The majority of UK deaths from air pollution occur in predominantly Black neighbourhoods. As increasing migration and societal collapse drive up demand for authoritarian regimes, scapegoating of queer people and minorities will escalate into lethal hatred, something already evident in the rising murder statistics of trans people in the UK.
Marginalised lives are, in Judith Butler’s terms, less “grievable”. The societies that generate us don’t know, or don’t care, about how to respond when we die. So we are ignored.
Everyone in climate activism, however altruistic, is acting from a survival instinct; this crisis threatens all of our lives. But for those already endangered by the current status quo, already familiar with the precarity of simply existing, the threat is emotionally concrete. We know what “life-or-death” really means.
Our existence is disruptive already; activism isn't much of a leap.
To be queer is to disrupt. Wearing a dress on a busy street gives me the same feeling I had when I helped to shut down an oil refinery for a day. It’s non-violent civil disobedience. Direct fashion.
When we throw soup at a painting, we are debated. “Is that right? Are they going too far?”
When we block roads, we are called murderers. “What if that ambulance couldn’t get through?”
When I paint my nails, they are discussed like I’m not there. “I’m not sure I get the whole transgender thing, really. I think it’s gone a bit far.”
When we try to use the toilet, we are called sexual predators. “I just wouldn’t feel safe…”
We are trying to say something when we spray paint on property, but the message gets overlooked, in favour of a condemnation of the means. We are trying to say something when we wear lipstick or breast binders, and tell you our pronouns, but the message gets overlooked, in favour of “I have a right to say what I want.”
What we are trying to say is this:
let us live.
What you are replying is this:
not right now.
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One of the key Just Stop Oil demands is a ‘just transition’ for workers currently in the oil industry. If a consequence of the Just Stop Oil campaign is that thousands of oil refinery workers, tanker drivers and petrol station workers suddenly find themselves unemployed, we’ve failed. Even if there’s no more oil and gas.
There is no climate justice without workers’ justice. We’re demanding that those who would be fired from the collapsing oil and gas industry be financially supported and given training to work in a green sector. Ideally, this work would be in building or maintaining our renewable energy infrastructure, or in a massive country-wide home insulation project. There’s a lot of work to be done. Nobody should be unemployed.
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The key word in all of this: transition.
Everything around us is in transition. Our climate is transitioning from the Holocene, a geological epoch characterised by predictable seasonal weather, mild temperatures and an abundance of diverse life, to the Anthropocene: the age of the humans; fire, instability, extinction.
Our politics are in transition: bad to worse.
Our collective narratives are in transition: from doubtful to certain, from ignorant to terrified, from nonchalant to furious.
We are in transition: young to old (though more and more of us are missing out on this).
Transition is inevitable and continuous. It’s the second law of thermodynamics. It’s what we call “growth”, though that word has been appropriated by the colonisers of high finance. It’s life.
What isn’t inevitable is what we transition to.
It doesn’t have to go from bad to worse. Thousands of workers are on strike in this country, demanding better. Thousands have joined a coalition with Just Stop Oil, helping us fight a non-violent war of attrition against the government; in a few days, we’ll have disrupted the flow of the UK’s capital city every day for an entire month, a monumental achievement that will go down in UK protest history. Countless groups with different approaches, like Green New Deal Rising, are building support for alternative political projects. Don’t Pay UK toppled a chancellor and plans to keep sabotaging fossil fuel profits. Greenpeace has occupied Parliament. The momentum behind a positive transition has never been more powerful. Even the RSPB isn’t ruling out direct action.
In order to transition from instability to tranquillity, from hate to joy, from oppression to love, from extinction to diversity, we must all make one, powerful, beautiful, terrifying transition:
From complacency to action.
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