The U.K. climate group Just Stop Oil has announced it will no longer pursue its campaign of disruptive and attention-grabbing stunts.
“At the end of April we will be hanging up the hi vis,” a statement from the group said Thursday morning.
The group emerged in 2022 with a series of high-profile protests, including road blockades and attacks on cultural icons such as Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers,” Stonehenge and at snooker matches.
Just Stop Oil originally pushed for the government to end new oil and gas exploration in Britain. The Labour government shared that policy goal and implemented it after they won the election last year. The group on Thursday claimed this made it “one of the most successful civil resistance campaigns in recent history.”
The campaign garnered support from some Brits frustrated and concerned about the lack of global action to address climate change.
But the majority of people thought their actions were disruptive, annoying or poorly targeted.
The group became a bête noire of U.K.’s right-wing media and was criticized as being “zealots” by the Conservative and Labour governments.
A crackdown by police and judges has led to some of the group’s most senior activists being jailed — in the case of one of the founders, Roger Hallam, for five years. The group largely failed in a high-profile appeal against the harshness of the sentences earlier this month.
Hallam and other members of the group were previously involved in Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain, and have often said that campaign groups should only last for a few years before changing guise.
The activists on Thursday vowed to return.
“This is not the end of civil resistance. Governments everywhere are retreating from doing what is needed to protect us from the consequences of unchecked fossil fuel burning,” the statement said.
“As corporations and billionaires corrupt political systems across the world, we need a different approach. We are creating a new strategy, to face this reality and to carry our responsibilities at this time. Nothing short of a revolution is going to protect us from the coming storms.”
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