Dale Vince, the green energy magnate, has said he is to stop funding direct action climate groups such as Just Stop Oil and instead funnel money towards getting the vote out for Labour at the next general election.
The Ecotricity founder, who has funded a string of disruptive environmental protest groups, has supported Just Stop Oil since its inception, and has previously said his funding for the group has totalled “some hundreds of thousands”.
This summer, Vince took to the streets with the climate protesters, joining their campaign of slow marches in central London.
He said that even though he was still “comfortable with their methods”, Just Stop Oil’s tactics had not worked fast enough and it was time for a new strategy.
“The next general election is the most important of our lifetimes,” he wrote in the Guardian.
“And what the Tories will do if they get another stretch in power is crystal clear: abandon net zero, open new coalmines and oilfields, and continue presiding over spiralling living costs. And so today I announced a change of direction: I am no longer going to fund Just Stop Oil. Under the current government, protest cannot work. I would go so far as to say that anything that could feed the Tories’ culture-war narrative is counter-productive.
“The dividing lines have been drawn: Labour is green, the Tories are not. A vote for anyone other than Labour, or no vote at all, is a vote for another Tory government – this time with a mandate to pursue its anti-green crusade. Preventing that from happening is the only way to ‘just stop oil’.”
As well as funding direct action protest groups, Vince has given at least £1.5m to Labour over the past decade. His funding for both had led to accusations from the prime minister that “eco-zealots” were writing the opposition’s energy policies.
Labour has said that if elected it would grant no new licences for oil and gas projects, a key demand of Just Stop Oil, as well as begin a programme of retrofit insulation for 19m homes, which was a key demand of the environmental activist group Insulate Britain.
A green policy offering led by Ed Miliband, the shadow climate change and net zero secretary, also includes plans to quadruple off-shore wind, change planning rules to ease the way for more on-shore wind projects and an upgrade to the electricity grid, create a new public-private energy company and reach £28bn in green investment by the end of the second half of a Labour-led parliament.
By contrast, Rishi Sunak last month announced U-turns on a number of green initiatives, pushing back the deadline for ending sales of new petrol and diesel cars and the phasing out of gas boilers, in an effort to draw populist dividing lines between the Conservatives and Labour as his party trails in the polls.
Just Stop Oil said most of its funding came from private individual donations. An initiative by Vince to match donations over 48 hours in May raised £340,000 for the campaign. It has also received significant sums of money from the Climate Emergency Fund, a US philanthropic fund that directs money from donors to direct action groups around the world.
Margaret Klein Salamon, the executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund, said: “Climate Emergency Fund is proud to be a funder of Just Stop Oil because we believe that non-violent disruptive protest is the fastest way to create transformative change. While these activists are controversial, they are correct about the science, about the efficacy of their approach, and they are morally righteous.
“It’s time to wake up. These are not normal times. The climate emergency is accelerating, and all of us should be looking for the most effective ways to deploy our time and resources. We thank Dale Vince, and anyone who is willing to support these brave and effective activists, and we hope more funders will join us.”
A Just Stop Oil spokesperson said: “We are grateful to Dale Vince for his amazing financial and moral support over the past year. He has willingly given up his time to help mobilise people to take action to end new oil and gas. We can all see the need to remove this genocidal government from office and so we wish Dale well in his next campaign.
However, we remain convinced that politics is utterly broken and the Labour party is tinkering around the edges while the world burns. More and more people are coming round to what really works – civil resistance.”
