JULIE BURCHILL: These posh eco-loons need to check their privilege.
[Cressida] Gethin is a 22-year-old music student who, among other things, clambered on to a gantry over the M25 in 2022. In doing so, she ruined the trips of 4,000 airline passengers. Whether swinging from gantries or attempting to destroy great art, these young people have the air of never having heard the word ‘No’.
Why are the climate fanatics all so posh? The Just Stop Oil activists are always called Cressida or Amy Rugg-Easey or Indigo Rumbelow. (Rumbelow has inspired an amusing Twitter game called Find Your Silly Posh Girl Name ‘by combining a colour with a defunct shop’.) In this, JSO is simply carrying on the glorious tradition of Extinction Rebellion, the leading lights of which had such names as Robin Ellis-Cockcroft and Robin Boardman-Pattinson.
Infamously, Boardman-Pattinson opined in 2019 that ‘air travel should only be used in emergencies’, despite having been on a number of skiing trips that very year, which he had foolishly posted on social media. It’s no wonder Cressida Gethin picked on desperate sun-seekers to make her point. Like the dowager countess in Downton Abbey who once asked, ‘What is a weekend?’, posh people who do nothing find it hard to understand what a holiday means to ordinary folk.
Like aristocrats down the ages, these posh clowns get together and breed new generations of clowns. Trans activist Riz Possnett, who glued her hands to the floor of the Oxford Union to protest against feminist Kathleen Stock last year, is the daughter of Extinction Rebellion activist Robert Possnett. He has been arrested several times for making a nuisance of himself. He once glued himself to a Brexit Party bus. The bananas don’t fall far from the tree in this family’s case.
And then there’s poshest eco-loon of them all: This May Be the Dumbest Thing John Kerry Has Ever Said.
“I believe that Russia has the ability to be able to make enormous changes if it really wanted to,” Kerry continued. “I mean, if Russia has the ability to wage a war illegally and invade another country, they ought to be able to find the effort to be responsible on the climate issue.” Indeed, he went on to note that Russia’s “unprovoked, illegal war” has “sadly” halted progress on climate-related issues. “I say ‘sadly’ because it’s a loss for the world not to be able to have Russia acting constructively on this issue,” Joe Biden’s SPEC concluded.
I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that precisely no one, save perhaps, John Kerry, would be willing to reevaluate Russia’s war if Moscow committed to reducing its aggregate carbon emissions over the course of a decade by a couple of percentage points. Precisely zero observers of the war in Europe would compartmentalize summary execution, rape as a weapon of war, ethnic cleansing on a mass scale, and the subsummation of a sovereign people into Russian captivity because Russia put illusory caps on carbon dioxide and methane discharges. Indeed, in even indulging this fanciful notion, Kerry has only revealed how monomaniacal climate-change alarmists have become.
Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor in their high carbon footprint Messerschmidts? Forget it, he’s rolling — in his Prius.