Can throwing soup at a painting have climate impacts?

In recent years, some climate activists have resorted to sabotage as a means of protest to drive their message home and garner attention on news broadcasts and social media, but is the tactic working in their favor?

A new study, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology in early July, shows that these kinds of extreme protests reduce support for the climate movement while raising awareness of climate concern. The study stands out because it dissects the psychology that leads the public to approve or disapprove of the actions, but whether it is helpful or hurtful to the overall climate cause is up for debate.

Climate activism evolved in response to scientific evidence that shows the globe continues to warm as a direct result of human activities. Civil disobedience has long been a tactic used by activists to draw attention to their causes, but in recent years, activists have employed increasingly disruptive tactics to manipulate algorithms and rise to the top of the newsfeed.

From Rachel Carson's 1962 bestseller, Silent Spring, to the first Earth Day in 1970, early climate-adjacent activism focused on educating the public and pushing lawmakers to take action. Twenty million Americans turned out for that inaugural Earth Day, demonstrating that peaceful mass mobilization could shift national policy. A year later, Greenpeace was founded, and quickly pioneered headline-grabbing direct actions at sea against nuclear testing and whaling that showed spectacle could multiply impact.

Activism expanded and professionalized throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, but frustration with the slow pace of diplomatic progress—despite agreements like the Kyoto and Paris protocols—sparked a shift in tactics. The 2014 People’s Climate March drew roughly 400,000 people to New York, setting the stage for Greta Thunberg’s lone school strike in August 2018, which ignited a global youth movement that culminated in the six million-strong September 2019 climate strikes. That same year, Extinction Rebellion (XR) emerged in the U.K., embracing non-violent civil disobedience to draw attention to the climate emergency.

More recently, headline-grabbing activism like the art glue-ons and soup protest of 2022 have begun to percolate, although these tactics actually harken back to the early 1900s when a Canadian suffragist, Mary Richardson, attacked a Velázquez painting with a hatchet to protest the arrest of another activist.  

These tactics have had some measurable impact. For example, years of roadside lock-ons, Reclaim the Power camps, and Extinction Rebellion city blockades helped turn fracking into a political third rail in the UK, where the government froze all shale-gas drilling in 2019 and has yet to lift the ban. In the US, the Keystone pipeline project was killed after years of protest, but it may yet be resuscitated in President Trump’s second term.

There has also been significant blowback resulting from these types of protests, some of which could ultimately lead to the demise of the organizations behind them. In March of this year, for example, Greenpeace was ordered to pay $660 million to a Dallas-based oil company for their actions around the Dakota Pipeline that stemmed from protest actions that took place nearly a decade ago.

As the study notes, these tactics are a double-edged sword. While direct-action campaigns have tallied some successes, they have taken a toll on public perception, a crucial factor in the long-term fight against climate change.

Researchers who conducted the study set out to test what they call the “climate activist’s dilemma”: the tendency for spectacular, norm-breaking protests (e.g., blocking traffic, gluing to art) to simultaneously hurt a movement’s popularity while increasing public concern and intentions to take action on climate change.

They ran two preregistered online surveys with national Australian samples, randomly assigning each participant to read a short news vignette describing either moderate or extreme climate-protest tactics and then measuring several outcomes. After each vignette, respondents reported how legitimate they found the protest group, how worried they felt about climate change, and how willing they were to take personal pro-climate steps (e.g., sign petitions, donate, talk to friends, etc.).

First, they found that these disruptive tactics consistently eroded support for the activist group itself. Participants judged the group less moral, felt a weaker emotional connection to it, and were less inclined to join or donate.

At the same time, these tactics heightened climate concern and boosted viewers' intentions to act—an effect that was replicated in the second study, even after adjusting the scenarios. The authors argue that this is a classic trade-off: spectacular protests alienate some bystanders but simultaneously shock them into taking the climate threat more seriously. They warn that the increase in personal action does not offset the reputational damage to the movement, leaving organizers to weigh short-term attention against long-term coalition-building.

The research quantifies a tension many activists intuitively sense: the louder the stunt, the lower the likeability—yet, paradoxically, the sharper the public’s climate alarm.

While there may be some benefit to extreme tactics, the legal and political systems around the world are starting to tighten the screws against this kind of activism.

For example, in the United Kingdom, the 2023 Public Order Act and earlier Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Act turned "public nuisance" into an offense that can carry up to 10 years in prison, a shift a UN special-rapporteur has branded "draconian" and chilling to dissent.  

Even if activists can avoid court, the social media algorithms that get them so many eyeballs may be working against them. Meta’s February 2024 decision to de-rank “political” posts on Instagram and Threads cut the average reach of large advocacy accounts by 65 percent in 11 weeks.

Yet the scorecard of disruptive protest still shows some conditional wins. Sea-borne and street-level blockades helped force Shell’s $7 billion Arctic retreat in 2015, proving that fireworks can shift the corporate cost-benefit math. And Britain's fracking moratorium remains in place, pending energy-security reviews, which underscores how easily political winds can reopen a fight that activists thought they had won.

When looked at holistically, the climate activism landscape is one in which disruptive climate action can still impact real policy, but the costs—legal, digital, financial, and reputational—are rising fast, forcing movements to decide whether each new stunt is worth both the shrinking algorithmic oxygen and the widening legal cross-hairs.