Would you give up airconditioning and driving right now to save the planet?

Activists from Just Stop Oil glued their hands to the wall after throwing soup at Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers' on Oct 14, 2022. But did their point about the evils of oil and gas get across? — Handout/Reuters

On Oct 14, 2022, pictures and videos emerged of anti-oil protesters tossing soup on Van Gogh’s famous painting Sunflowers in London's National Gallery. This was an attempt to raise awareness about the greed of oil and gas companies and the world’s harmful dependence on the fossil fuels that are warming the globe and contributing to the climate crisis.

The protesters from Just Stop Oil stated: “The cost-of-living crisis is driven by fossil fuels. Everyday life has become unaffordable for millions of cold, hungry families. They can’t even afford to heat a tin of soup. Meanwhile, crops are failing and people are dying in supercharged monsoons, massive wildfires and endless droughts caused by climate breakdown. We can’t afford new oil and gas, it’s going to take everything. We will look back and mourn all we have lost unless we act immediately.”

Now, while I’m all for curbing climate change and our use of oil and gas, and do understand the energy crisis that is playing out in Europe, going to a museum and tossing soup on a work of art to raise awareness seems a little naive. For a couple reasons.

The first is, vandalising a beloved work of art, even if for a good cause, tends to taint the issues you’re fighting for. People are too appalled by the act of violence against something they like to give you any sympathy for your cause. Unfortunately, these kinds of acts grab headlines and attention – here I am, I’m writing about this one – so people want to use them to make a point. But they rarely sway people to your beliefs.

The second reason this whole thing is naive is, despite sharing the same views as Just Stop Oil – that we urgently need to move to more sustainable energy solutions – I believe making that paradigm shift isn’t possible without using oil and gas. This is just an unfortunate truth.

According to ourworldindata.com, one-third of global electricity comes from low carbon sources, but only 36.7% of total energy production comes from low carbon sources. What does that mean? It means transitioning to sustainable energy isn’t a matter of just swapping over to low carbon sources. The infrastructure doesn’t exist. So while it is being built, unfortunately, we have to keep using oil and gas.

There’s another bogeyman here, too. When I speak of low carbon sources, nuclear power is around 30% of that. And nuclear power has been vilified into the ground. Understandably.

The near nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island in the United States in 1979 and then the full-on nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in Russia in 1986 definitely gave the world a bad taste. For decades, nuclear radiation causing mutations was a recurring joke or a recurring theme in film and TV. One of TV’s most famous villains, The Simpsons’ Mr Burns, runs a nuclear power plant.

But the truth is nuclear power is the safest it has ever been. Precisely because of those near-misses in the past. According to the Geopolitical Intelligence Services (GIS), recent innovations make accidents in a nuclear facility “virtually impossible”. GIS states: “For every terawatt- hour of energy generated (roughly the annual electricity consumption of 27,000 people in the European Union) there are 32.72 deaths due to accidents and air pollution associated with lignite (coal). For nuclear energy, this figure is only 0.07 deaths.”

Not to mention the environmental benefits of not emitting carbon dioxide.

Ah, but what about nuclear waste, you ask?

The US Department of Energy’s website, Energy.gov, has this to say: “The US generates about 2,000 metric tonnes of spent nuclear fuel each year. This number may sound like a lot, but the volume of the spent fuel assemblies is actually quite small considering the amount of energy they produce. The amount is roughly equivalent to less than half the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.”

Nuclear waste could definitely become a problem in a long time frame but as a bridge to help us get to the promised land of a wind-, solar- and hydro-powered world? It’s not that big of an issue. Especially when our current energy production is actively destroying our world.

So while I agree we need to get off oil and gas, the truth is unless we are willing to make drastic cuts in our standards of living – like do without heating and airconditioning and car travel until we build the clean infrastructure necessary – we need to realise we need oil and gas and nuclear power in the short term to get to our long-term goal of a clean energy future.

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Big Smile, No Teeth columnist Jason Godfrey – a model who once was told to give the camera a ‘big smile, no teeth’ – has worked internationally for two decades in fashion and continues to work in dramas, documentaries, and lifestyle programming. Write to him at [e-mail] and follow him on Instagram @bigsmilenoteeth and facebook.com/bigsmilenoteeth. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.