Ignore Soup Throwing Climate Activists

Some climate activists have taken to throwing soup at famous paintings as a way to get attention for their concerns about climate change and societal inaction. Protesters have long used a variety of ways to get media attention, like the giant rat that union members trot out during strikes, a person in a chicken suit who mocked peak oilers as ‘chicken littles,’ and many varieties of topless protesters. Throwing soup like this makes great sense as a tactic, since it gets attention without harming anyone or anything, as opposed to blocking subways, as Extinction Rebellion has done in London.

Unfortunately, that’s the only positive aspect of these protests, as shown by a recent NPR interview with Stop Oil’s Phoebe Plummer, a 21-year old university student who threw tomato soup at one of Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers paintings. (Why tomato soup? Perhaps an homage to Andy Warhol or maybe its resemblance to blood. Or it’s cheaper than lobster bisque.)

“Don’t trust anyone over thirty” was a favorite slogan of student protesters in the 1960s, who by an amazing coincidence were under 30 (shocking I know). Granted, the point that older people are more invested than youth in the socioeconomic system and are therefore more conservative is valid, whereas youth can be more accepting of change (and risk) since they have less at stake.

But additionally, and importantly, youth are often both more ignorant about history and policy. Most of Plummer’s arguments seem to be based on cliches and factoids gleaned from the internet, and although they assert the need to listen to the scientists, they don’t seem to practice what they preach, except selectively. (Note: Plummer identifies as they/them and I have followed that convention here.)

Thus, Plummer blithely talked of both stopping oil and at the same time helping low-income people with their energy bills. They justified this by claiming that “…renewables are nine times cheaper….” Which is absurd. The most prominent cost estimate promoting the superiority of renewables comes from Lazard Frere, which argues that wind and utility-scale solar produce electricity at $26-50/Mwh and $30-41/Mwh respectively, compared to gas turbines at $45-74/Mwh. Even if these costs were considered precisely comparable, renewables are, in the best circumstances, half the cost of conventional electricity, not one-ninth, and certainly cloudy England’s solar costs are not near the bottom end of the range. The added problems of intermittency explains why renewables, despite being cheaper, require massive subsidies be competitive in most places.

And Plummer inappropriately compares lead times for oil and solar by saying, “The largest solar farm in the U.K. was built in just six weeks, whereas these new oil licenses that the government are proposing — it takes 15 to 25 years for any oil to even come out of the ground from these.” Ignoring the various pre-construction steps necessary to develop the solar farm is like saying it takes one day to get an apple from a tree, but six years for a peach tree to bear fruit from the point at which the farmland is made available for purchase.

And their apocalyptic alarmism is completely in line with the younger activists especially, who are unfamiliar with the many similar alarms that have been raised over the years, from overpopulation to resource scarcity and peak oil. All of those included advocates insisting that the problems were dire and required extreme policy measures in response. The supposed overpopulation did not yield the predicted mass starvation but has instead seen a rise in obesity; yet the alarmists like Paul Ehrlich are still praised by many of those also warning of climate catastrophe. And resource scarcity, promoted by so many prominent scientists (both real and self-defined), has not enriched resource-producing nations but caused vast economic damage when commodity prices, despite supposedly being condemned to the ashbins of history, reverted to the mean. Governments that spent their expected ever-rising commodity incomes found themselves saddled with debt, reducing economic growth and increasing poverty.

Plummer also says “When are we going to start listening to the scientists?” citing David King as saying that what we do in the next three to four years will “determine the future of humanity.” David King, a prominent British physicist, had earlier weighed in on the peak oil question in the journal Nature, saying that oil had entered a ‘phase change’ from cheap to expensive oil. He and his co-author essentially regurgitated arguments made by peak oil advocates without any comprehension of their validity, suggesting he is better at alarmism than comprehension. The next three to four years might determine the future of humanity, but only in the same way that the last three to four years did.

Finally, a growing chorus of skeptics has increasingly targeted the extreme claims of groups like Extinction Rebellion and the soup-throwers, noting that while the IPCC argues that anthropomorphic climate change will mean increased deaths and economic losses, this is far from the catastrophic language used by those like Plummer. Unfortunately, while many in the press are (rightly) dismissive of right-wing claims that climate change is a Chinese hoax, they are much more accepting of apocalyptic warnings that go far beyond what the scientific community accepts. This was also true of instances of voodoo science such as the warnings of overpopulation in the Population Bomb and resource scarcity in The Limits to Growth, to say nothing of the many peak oil warnings which were rarely challenged in the media.

Presumably, Plummer and their allies are focused on stopping oil even while the world gets more than one-quarter of its energy from much dirtier coal because the oil industry is politically unpopular with their political cohort. And while there are many climate-friendly policies that could be adopted which would be economically and environmentally sensible, we would be well advised not to take advice from young soup-throwers.

NPR.orgThe activist who threw soup on a van Gogh says it’s the planet that’s being destroyed