This is the name of the ‘UK’ protest organisation, ended in 2025 by court action with lots of them now in prison, and a lot of disruption to society caused by actions of blocking roads, etc.
The Just Stop Oil protest group does not want any more licences granted for fossil fuels extraction, which are the coal and gas and oil, formed over millions of years and lying peacefully in the Earth until a few hundred years ago. Humans have of course been mining for millennia, hence the Chalcolithic era away from Neolithic farming where only stone, wood, antler, or anything else to hand was used, and into the Bronze Age and the Iron Age….and on and on the scale of development away from the true facts of existence it went.
Looking from the top of the wobbling ladder of 2026, with pretty much everything in the industrial-dependent world made out of something which requires fossil fuels or at least something in the machinery which made the goods, and add in plastic which is pretty much everything these days, and liquid paraffin which is in a lot of cosmetics, even apart from the obvious of transport and heating of domestic and office life, it is a relevant question to ask of what exactly is the relationship of the western world to oil?
Just Stop Oil sounds a sensible slogan, if the extraction of fossil fuels is doing damage, which everyone knows it is, or anyone remotely observant of the natural world knows it is. To just stop extracting oil would mean that soon-ish, given the rate of consumption by the industrialised and consuming humans, all the existing goods and transport options will run out and everything will Just Stop because there is no Oil.
Do the Just Stop Oil protesters mean that nothing is based on fossil fuels, and that will inevitably mean we slide back to somewhere about 1750 CE before coal came into industrial production, or just that an equivalent lifestyle of modern times is available from not using fossil fuels? If there were no oil used the protesters would have no transport to arrive at the disruption sites, no glue to stick themselves to fences, no clothes to wear and no food or drink while out on protests, but of course if there were no oil in western society there would be no need to protest in the first place.
With Trump’s catastrophe in the Middle East, where clearly no cartographer ancient or modern was consulted, the reverse situation of oil is high in the news, panic in case the supply becomes unavailable, and the sudden rise in price because paradoxically it becomes a valuable commodity, liquid gold indeed it is. Everyone actively wants it now.
It’s a really strange relationship the western humans have with their goods and society and view of Helion, Earth and gravity. The failing soil in even the fertile latitudes of mid Britain and the dried up and polluted chalk streams and water courses still have an inkling of life in them, and walking on the earth are thousands of venisons and rabbits, grey squirrels and pigeons, and vegetables still grow and fruit trees produce apples, and there are a few fish around the one teeming waters.
Confusing it is that President Trump began his rule by speaking of America consumes what America produces, and the relief to many around Earth (the spinning mass of rock with a tiny atmosphere enabling a fragile life) that someone was talking about limitations onto society instead of endless promises, it is very hard that the same person now apparently sheds all reason and puts the equivalent of the nuclear under the very ancient lands of what the west calls the Middle East.
The ‘UK’ Labour Party are disintegrating in the polls (the whole network of political paraphenalia connected to democracy, which itself is collapsing in rationale and in practice) but if an edict was sent out of a National Self-Sufficiency Week, somewhere into May or June when the tilt of Earth’s axis in the spinning System of the Sun, itself in the vast galaxy called the Milky Way, brings Light and warmth to the northern hemisphere, to live with no fossil fuels at all for a quarter lunar cycle, preferably the half cycle around the Full Moon to add some cheer to what would be a miserable week for all those who do not remember 1750, and a hard week for all of us because much physical work would be required and much organisation at a very local level. But at least the night would be for sleep, and there would be no news coverage of the real apocalypse of cultural and political and consumption expectation going on and going who knows where.