Just Stop Oil’s latest stunt must be its most stupid yet

Jamie Blackett
·2-min read
Stonehenge being attacked
Stonehenge being attacked - HANDOUT/AFP

Eco-warriors are often described as the Stone Age Appreciation Society owing to their desire to drag us all back there. So it was bizarre that the tiresome anti-social radicals, Just Stop Oil, should have chosen pre-solstice Stonehenge to stage a cheap stunt, which, ironically will have caused fossil fuel usage to rise today.

Unless they walked there like Tess of the d’Urbervilles, two “activists” pushed carbon into the atmosphere by travelling to Wiltshire. The Unesco World Heritage site was sprayed with orange cornflower paint, very likely grown, manufactured and transported using fossil fuels. Then the police stopped chasing proper criminals and nee-nawed up to arrest them, increasing Wiltshire’s carbon footprint a bit more.

They were particularly insensitive to pick Wiltshire in which to burden ratepayers with the consequences of their antics. It is set to be a sacrificial lamb on the altar of net zero and become a large solar complex centred on Melksham, if Labour wins the election and agrees to all the solar “farms” in the planning pipeline.

They also missed a trick. Stonehenge is an astonishing example of the miraculous feats of stone excavation and traction by our ancestors several millennia before we discovered fossil fuels. A more effective PR stunt would have had a citizen army of those wanting to stop fossil fuels – and don’t we all, as soon as it is practical to do so, actually? – rolling stones 150 miles all the way from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire to Salisbury, to demonstrate what can be done without burning oil.

Instead we all thought, “Look at those stupid plonkers.”

Just Stop Oil should just stop. We are all working towards an oil-less future. We want solutions not problems. Seen from a rural perspective, the net zero riddle can be solved quickly and easily by innovative power generation from animal manures, rooftop solar and hydro. And by increasing the carbon content in our soils. Childish stunts by anti-capitalists are a distraction and likely to be counter-productive.

Jamie Blackett is a farmer and the author of ‘Red Rag to a Bull’ and ‘Land of Milk and Honey’ (Quiller)

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