How Many Cans of Soup Does It Take to Stop the Climate Crisis?
We’re asking the wrong questions about this month’s viral protest action.
Welcome back to Life Inside the Bubble, a newsletter about class, wealth, and privilege. If you haven’t already, please subscribe below. Above photo of soup by F Devanthal.
Imagine that you can see the apocalypse coming. With horrifying certainty, you know when and how the world is going to end. The good news is that if humanity takes drastic action on a worldwide scale, we can prevent our demise. The bad news is that no one seems to believe you. It’s worse than that, actually, because they say they believe you; the planet’s most famous thought leaders, executives, and politicians have big fancy conferences at which the approaching apocalypse is discussed seriously and at length. But when it comes to the necessary drastic action that would save humanity, they pause. Surely we don’t need to go that far, the global elite seem to think. No you absolutely need to go that far, right now! Yesterday! you yell, but you aren’t invited to the fancy conferences. Meanwhile, day by day, the apocalypse draws ever closer.
If that was happening, how far would you go to get people to listen to you?
That’s the position many climate activists find themselves in today. All too aware of the devastation that global warming will cause, frustrated by the half measures (at best) adopted by the world’s governments and corporations, some of these activists have stopped being polite and started getting real. Which is a rough explanation for why a pair of protesters with a group called Just Stop Oil threw a can of soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting at London’s National Gallery last week. In a video that was shared widely on social media, the two women follow the soup toss by spreading glue on their hands and slapping their palms against the wall. “What is worth more, art or life?” one of them says, her voice quivering just a little. “Is it worth more than food, more than justice? Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?”
This kind of dramatic anti-climate change protest, part political statement and part performance art, is relatively common in Europe and Australia, and increasingly visible in the US. Gluing yourself to things, throwing paint on things, disrupting the fabric of everyday life, is supposed to force people to pay attention to the climate crisis. These tactics were popularized by the group Extinction Rebellion (XR) but have proliferated as XR has spawned offshoot groups and gotten media attention. In the mere days since the soup stunt another action went semi-viral, when members of an XR offshoot called Scientist Rebellion glued themselves to the floor of a German Porsche showroom to demand Germany adopt highway speed limits, then asked the car company employees for “a bowl to urinate and defecate in a decent manner while we are glued.”
Some of these individual actions wind up looking silly, and the soup-throwing in particular was roundly derided and criticized online. What did Van Gogh have to do with climate change? Was a museum an appropriate venue for this sort of protest? Was making such a scene going to actually change anyone’s mind?
XR and its affiliates don’t deserve to be casually dismissed. They are well-funded, have clear objectives, and organize their protests thoughtfully and carefully. (For instance, they knew that the Van Gogh painting was behind glass and so would be unharmed by the drive-by souping.) The protesters who put themselves in positions to get arrested, like the Just Stop Oil soup-throwers did, volunteer for those assignments because they can afford to get a criminal charge; if you have a criminal record or would lose your job if you spent the night in jail or fear racism or violence from police you are given other tasks. So though there was some snickering online about one of the Just Stop Oil protesters having a posh accent, you can see her soup-throwing as a constructive way to use her privilege – she knows she isn’t the sort of person who gets brutalized by the cops, so she put herself at risk to further her cause.
The overarching goal of XR, Just Stop Oil, and similar groups isn’t just to cause chaos but to get 3.5 percent of the population to mobilize on their side, at which point governments will have no choice but to give into the protesters’ demands. That specific number comes from the work of political scientist Erica Chenoweth, who formulated the “3.5 percent rule” after studying hundreds of mass protest movements. “No government has withstood a challenge of 3.5 percent of their population mobilized against it during a peak event,” is how Chenoweth defined the rule in a 2020 paper.
Here, “mobilization” means more than joining in a casual, peaceful march. Roger Hallam, a British activist who founded XR and Just Stop Oil, believes that it means breaking the law and forcing people to take notice. “You need lots of people causing a reasonable amount of disruption,” he told Vox in 2019. Simply writing letters to the editor and holding up a sign at a rally isn’t going to get you noticed or have any tangible effect.
Hallam’s long-term goal, he said in that Vox interview, is “basically… bringing down the government and replacing it with a new form of democracy that isn’t corrupted by the elites.” But in the short term, activists just want to force people to think more about climate change. Increased public awareness can lead to more pressure on politicians to pass climate legislation. According to one analysis, if you assume that XR’s actions helped spur the UK to reduce emissions (which it has done), XR is actually the most cost-effective climate nonprofit in the world in terms of dollars donated versus tons of carbon dioxide emissions prevented. This theory has motivated oil fortune heirs to give millions to the Climate Emergency Fund, which provides money to XR, Just Stop Oil, and similar groups.
So we aren’t really talking about a random person who sees the apocalypse coming and tries to warn the world. The real question is, what would you do if you were a millionaire who saw the apocalypse coming? How would you leverage your fortune to influence public policy and persuade governments to do the right thing?
First, you should kick the tires on some of the claims made by XR, particularly those about the “3.5 percent rule.” Chenoweth has said that their research looked at “maximalist campaigns” that were about “overthrowing a government or achieving territorial independence.” No one knows if her research even applies to climate-based campaigns. Also, this rule of thumb assumes that if 3.5 percent of a country’s population is out in the streets, a lot more people are silently supporting those protests. From a 2020 paper by Chenoweth:
In most cases, large-scale peak participation was achieved through this popular support and legitimacy. This is why neglecting a broader public constituency and just bringing large numbers of people to the streets might not be an effective strategy. And organizing only to achieve mass participation benchmarks may create a loud but wildly unpopular minority, with little chance of achieving a sustainable victory.
A “loud but wildly unpopular minority” is unfortunately a good way to describe XR, which is widely disliked in the UK. Maybe XR’s actions have helped people to realize the seriousness of the climate crisis, or maybe it’s mostly all the abnormal extreme weather. If you want to assign these groups some credit for affecting public opinion, and therefore shaping policy and reducing emissions, you can make that argument.
But it’s not as if the public on either side of the Atlantic is unaware of climate change today. In the UK, 81 percent of the public thinks climate change is an emergency. In the US, broad majorities favor governmental action on climate change. Even if you think these flashy protests aimed at raising awareness have a role to play in solving the climate crisis, surely there comes a point where these protests have diminishing returns because awareness has already been raised pretty high.
Taking XR-style groups seriously means admitting they might be more effective than their detractors admit. But it also means interrogating their theory of change more than most of the sympathetic profiles in left-leaning publications have done. What’s the plan after you grab people’s attention with your soup? Hallam wants to change the fundamental structures of government – but if we’re in an emergency, can we afford to wait for a revolution?
Or a simpler question: Does the rhetoric underlying these stunt protests even make sense? One of the complaints of the Just Stop Oil soup-throwers was the rising cost of living in the UK. “Fuel is unaffordable to millions of cold, hungry families. They can’t even afford to heat a tin of soup,” the activist said in the viral video. But would banning new oil and gas projects in the UK bring the cost of fuel down? Couldn’t you plausibly argue that if fuel is expensive, we need to drill more?
Maybe that’s an unfair question to ask – Just Stop Oil and XR aren’t think tanks that craft policies or lobby governments, they’re pressure groups that want to start conversations about climate change. But once that conversation is started, do these groups have anything helpful to say? Or is the plan to just keep shouting?
I said last week I’d write about the Democrats, and I will—next week!