The tomato soup splashes were still fresh on the glass covering The sunflowers of Van Gogh that the anti-ecological resentment had already found a new target of choice. The images of the two young activists from the Just Stop Oil collective, their hands glued to the wall of the National Gallery in London under the sprayed painting, spread at breakneck speed, prompting a shower of comments, sometimes offended, sometimes condescending.
Why bother with art? Why another bang? Why make so much noise for so little? The method is a diversion, it has been said, you miss the target again. We know the chorus. As direct actions organized by environmental activists multiply, the reactions are increasingly choreographed.
At home, you should have seen, from dawn last Friday, the eagerness with which certain commentators took on the activists of Just Stop Oil. They were immediately presented as scatterbrains indifferent to the value of art with a capital A — ah! the ungrateful and dogmatic youth! — being careful not to say that the painting had not been damaged and that the action had been planned accordingly. As an aside, note the gap between the precautions taken by activists not to ransack a precious asset and the indifference with which the inestimable is constantly sacrificed in environmental matters.
It was also necessary to hear the usual chorus of moderation-in-everything-and-at-all-costs, which was passionate about deconstructing the chosen tactic, roughly borrowing the terms of marketing analysis and dodging the main question raised by the activists of Just Stop Oil: if the rest of the world interests us, why do we continue to exploit fossil fuels?
Fascinating, all that has been said about this action without placing at the heart of the discussion the fact that current commitments to reduce GHGs are moving us towards a global temperature increase of 2.7°C by by the end of the century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Not to mention either that there is now a 50% chance that we will temporarily achieve a 1.5°C increase in global temperature by 2027.
Sadly ironically, a report by the World Resources Institute also indicated this week that the current commitments of States in terms of reducing GHG emissions would lead us to a reduction of barely 7% by 2030. A paltry fraction of the target of 43% compared to the 2019 level, i.e. the target calculated by the IPCC to limit the increase in global temperature to 1.5°C. Enough to set the table for disastrous exchanges at COP27, which begins in less than three weeks.
If the media agitation rarely provokes the desired discussions, it should not be concluded that the flashes which aim to attract attention are useless. On the contrary, they constitute a good diagnostic tool: each time an action leads to sterile debates, it informs us about the tightness of the political deadlock that stands before us in climate matters, stimulating at the same time reflection on the (inevitable?) escalation of pressure tactics.
Take the action organized Wednesday by the Collectif Antigone, affiliated with Extinction Rebellion, on the loading dock of line 9B of the Enbridge pipeline, in the east of Montreal. For nearly 24 hours, activists blocked access to the site by chaining themselves to a container while climbers had perched at the top of the oil loading towers to unroll a banner and prevent the refueling of ships.
It was bitterly cold on Wednesday at dawn when the activists settled on the site, encouraged by about twenty demonstrators. All day, despite the wind, despite the rain, they hung on, hammering the need to close this dilapidated pipeline which threatens several sources of drinking water, at a time when it is urgent to free oneself from hydrocarbons.
This courageous action, which all in all went smoothly, strictly respected the rules of respectability constantly repeated in the public space: to act peacefully, to target the movement of capital and not the everyday life or the property of people, not to damage valuable cultural property, formulate a targeted, clear message. Everything was there. Except that the action did not have the tenth of the echo that had the one organized by the same collective on the Jacques-Cartier bridge in 2019. It did not collect a quarter of the airtime either. which was devoted, last week, to grumbling against the deflators of SUV tires in Quebec or the splashers of works of art in London.
The occupation was not in vain, however. One could say that it feeds an imaginary of resistance essential in this time of crisis. But above all, it unmasks a hypocrisy: what is required of climate activists is not only that they attack the “true leaders” or the “right targets”. They are also asked to do so without disturbing the brave world. But when they do exactly that, they are ignored. This double constraint gives us the exact measure of the danger we face.