Three individuals targeted National Gallery paintings an hour after Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland were jailed for similar attack in 2022
Climate activists have thrown tomato soup over two Sunflowers paintings by Vincent van Gogh, just an hour after two others were jailed for a similar protest action in 2022.
Three supporters of Just Stop Oil walked into the National Gallery in London, where an exhibition of Van Gogh’s collected works is on display, at 2.30pm on Friday afternoon, and threw Heinz soup over Sunflowers 1889 and Sunflowers 1888.
The latter was the same work targeted by Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland in 2022. That pair are now among 25 supporters of Just Stop Oil in jail for climate protests.
No shit people are for fighting climate change in the abstract. But we’re not living in an abstract world, we are living in an actual one. One, where needs and desires compete. And consistently, other desires take priority over fighting climate change. There obviously isn’t as much support for actually combating climate change in the real world, with real consequences for real humans as you people assume.
Actually people are voting for climate action, enough to potentially have swung results in America:
And we see the same in Europe:
And wider:
But as those same articles highlight voting for climate action is a complex topic. Our economic system often makes the worst option the cheapest and easiest, and green policies, done badly, can sometimes end up penalising those who can least afford it which is why climate change is also an inequalities issue:
These are all things which can only be addressed at a governmental level. People are voting in parties because of their Green credentials but it’s down to the incumbent to act on those promises once elected. Unfortunately organisations such as oil companies have a lot of lobbying power which can dull or redirect green policy. It’s up to the public to ensure that this doesn’t happen by making sure climate change remains in the spotlight, thus making it hard for the government to ignore. Which is what groups like JSO are doing, and why the petrochemical companies are so determine to undermine them.
You are drawing sweeping conclusions from very limited evidence. None of this shows a large part of the population voting for radical climate action, a few more people voting a little bit more centre left doesn’t mean much. It’s particularly telling that you’re trying to use the last EU election as evidence. Are you not aware that there was a right-ward shift in the European Parliament? The Greens in particular lost a lot. The EU continuing its course is far more indicative of technocratic governance over a democratic mandate.
You are deliberately obfuscating, to manufacture the appearance of support where there is too little. The issue is not that there is no climate action, the issue is that there is not enough of it. People, at least broadly, get the climate action that they vote for. Until climate swings elections in the way that the economy or migration does, the message to politicians will continue to be that people have other priorities.