Climate activists appear to choose their objectives with all the precision of blindfold darts.
Take the Tyre Extinguishers, a group of British climate activists who have reportedly slashed over 5,000 random tires since March. Since expanding this month to the United States, they’ve deflated 40 tires in Manhattan and targeted around 20 vehicles in Chicago, Scranton, Pennsylvania, and San Francisco.
Flyers left on targeted vehicles tell drivers not to take it personally: “It’s not you, it’s your car … This is a machine that destroys life with terrifying efficiency.” SUVs and 4x4s — “nails in the coffin of our climate,” as the group calls them — are primary targets. The group’s goal is to make these vehicles “impossible to own” in urban areas. Nobody needs an SUV anyway, they say, as it’s a status symbol existing only to gratify the owner’s vanity.
Perhaps the group doesn’t realize that busy mothers with children to chauffeur to school and softball practice make up the majority of SUV drivers.
Equally out of touch is the band of activists known as Just Stop Oil. Members have glued themselves to the frames of the United Kingdom’s most famous paintings, such as Vincent van Gogh’s Peach Trees in Blossom and a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, in protest of continued fossil fuel use. A National Gallery of Art spokesperson said John Constable’s The Hay Wain suffered “minor damage to its frame … [and] disruption to the surface of the varnish on the painting” after two students glued themselves to it in early July.
Hannah Hunt, one of the two responsible for the damage, said, “There is glue on the frame of this famous painting, but there is blood on the hands of our government.” Hunt, the Daily Mail reported, has meanwhile “racked up tens of thousands of carbon-belching air miles traveling the globe” on vacation. Talk about out of touch.
The futile efforts of guerrilla climate fighters are sadly in line with the work of actual energy policymakers who pass laws that are equally thoughtless, impulsive, and reckless.
Last week, Los Angeles became yet another California city to ban gas appliances in new construction. What will it accomplish? Not much — other than reducing the quality of stove-cooked meals and further driving up energy costs for residents, who already pay 66% more in California than they would elsewhere in the U.S. Without sufficient sources of renewable energy, electricity still has to be generated by natural gas, which means banning gas appliances simply reduces efficiency.
Democrats might as well join forces with the Tyre Extinguishers to slash Californians’ tires themselves. Soon, it will be too expensive to drive there anyway.
