Last week, five Just Stop Oil activists were convicted of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance and sentenced to up to five years in jail for planning to block the M25 in November 2022. The judge, Christopher Hehir, ruled that evidence relating to climate breakdown was ‘irrelevant and inadmissible’ and could not be used in their defence. The activists, representing themselves, ignored the judge’s instructions.
They described the devastating impacts of global heating, cited the government’s legal climate commitments and told the jury they were being afghanistan phone data denied key evidence. Eleven protesters outside the court were arrested for holding signs that said: ‘Jurors deserve to hear the whole truth.’ The defendants were found in contempt and removed from the court. It took the jury only a day of deliberation to return a unanimous guilty verdict.
This can be interpreted as a kind of climate denial. Not outright denial of the facts, which in the UK at least is an extreme fringe position, but a refusal of the implications. During the trial, the prosecution read out ‘facts not in dispute’: the climate crisis is ‘an existential threat to humanity’ and global heating of more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels would be catastrophic. But those facts weren’t as salient as the traffic jams, disruption to business and cost of police time.