Recent Just Stop Oil protests have sparked controversy once again. This time, over their newest protest, as viral videos rolled out showing two activists throwing tinned soup over Van Gough’s infamous Sunflower painting held in London’s National Gallery.
credit: juststopoil.org
The recent disobedience in Westminster has sparked intrigue online about the potential skeletons in the group's closet. The issue arises with the newly circulating formation about the key founder of the CEF Aileen Getty. Aileen is the granddaughter of oil tycoon Jean Paul Getty and an heiress to the company’s $5.4b fortune. A recently deleted TikTok video also set out to expose Just Stop Oil as a campaign run by Big Oil in a ploy to evoke public dissent against climate activism. While the Getty family company is not around today, having defunct in 2012, their money is still circulated through what would be its heirs and heiresses. Taking this into account, is it only natural to question the ethics of a company with a unifying passion to abolish fossil fuels?
Just Stop Oil describe their community as a coalition of groups working together to ensure the government commits to ending all new licences and consents for the exploration, development and production of fossil fuels in the UK’. Their agenda is clear: they are an anti-oil movement committed to stopping the UK government from extending its relationship with fossil fuels. Their work is often controversial and public activists were heard asking in this protest, “is art worth more than life?”. The question itself does not receive many critiques, but the act of soup-throwing on a precious painting has been interpreted by many as vandalism or, in other cases, super nationalist from those who stand for a cluster of liberties, including art, public welfare and the climate.
The group appear to be transparent with their work, by publishing the latest press releases, commentaries on the meaning behind their protests and Court and Prison updates from protestors facing persecution. Their website states that the organisation collects funding from the Climate Emergency Fund; an organisation providing ‘safe and legal means for donors to support disruptive protests that wake up the public and put pressure on lawmakers. Aileen Getty is the founding donor and advisory board member for the company. In 2022, CEF claimed to have funded 39 organisations with an accumulated amount of $4 million distributed.
So, let’s take a closer look at Aileen Getty.
Aileen’s fortune hasn’t just been diverted into climate-related charities. She has stood on many charitable boards and so her agenda doesn’t point towards one specific movement. Getty serves on several non-profit boards including the Climate Emergency Fund and The Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). As well as this, she established a charitable foundation in her name in 2012 and oversaw the creation of the non-profit Gettlove which advocated for sustained housing of homeless individuals in Los Angeles. Aileen’s philanthropy seems to be the most public outlet for her fortune, and in the case of CEF, Getty appears to be using her fortune to combat the same resources that built it.
The heiress has a long history of charitable investment. This is a move we often see from financial elites; examples include the Bill & Melinda Gates fund and Soros Fund Management. There has long been contention over charitable and philanthropic donations being no substitute for the wealthy paying their fair share of tax. The motivation behind Aileen, as with most corporate charities, is something that will remain ethically unclear.
It appears that Just Stop Oil is not planning on slowing down its civic disruption as they continue to headline the UK's major news outlets this following week. Throughout this, controversy and suspicion have not disrupted the identifiable characteristics of a Just Stop Oil protest and their agenda continues to catch the public eye. The protestors have since released video footage explaining the point behind the soup throwing, within which Hannah speaks of the “minimal damage done to the frame” and that they “would never have considered doing it if they didn’t know that it was behind glass”. She goes on to say, “what we’re doing is getting the conversation going so that we can ask the questions that matter”. Questions that include “is it okay that fossil fuels are subsidised 30x more than renewable when the offshore wind is currently 9x cheaper?”.
Fundamentally, current evidence cannot decipher if Big Oil is puppeteering the Just Stop Oil activists. How the general public chose to react to disruption is down to personal ethics and cannot always be generalised. Whilst Just Stop Oil has dominated the headlines with this controversial performance, their anti-oil agenda continues despite the Big Oil background from one of their major investors.
It is also worthwhile to note that Just Stop Oil represents a strand of climate activism and not the whole picture. Other environmental groups take legislative and community-based approaches to encourage the conversation of our environment as a collective issue. Some separate organisations include:
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