Just Stop Oil has finally hit the fossil-fuel barons where it hurts: the World Snooker Championship. Last night, play was disrupted when one JSO activist climbed on to a snooker table and covered it in orange powder paint, leading the match between Robert Milkins and Joe Perry to be suspended. Another activist tried – and failed – to glue herself to the other table. Both have been arrested. Meanwhile, enraged snooker fans everywhere are trying to work out what on Earth their sport has got to do with climate change.

We could speculate. The tournament is sponsored by online used-car dealer Cazoo, which is perhaps particularly complicit in the defilement of Gaia, according to those lunatics. But in truth the setting was almost incidental. The scenes at the Crucible were just another ridiculous attempt to preach the eco-gospel, from a group convinced the world is coming to an end and that almost anything is justified to try to prevent mass death.

Now they’re going after football, racing, snooker and priceless works of art

‘We know new oil and gas will kill millions…Why would ordinary people not try everything in their power to stop that?’, JSO tweeted after the incident, seemingly missing the fact that these howling protesters are far from ordinary, and that the vast majority of ordinary people are furious about these ridiculous stunts.

We needn’t waste too much time rebutting the claims of the activists here. For the most part, their statements are self-discrediting. They fail even the most cursory sniff test.

Roger Hallam, the pony-tailed, Charles Manson-resembling ‘mastermind’ behind Just Stop Oil, likes to claim that six billion people (that is, the vast majority of people currently on Earth) will die this century due to climate change and the chaos he says it will unleash. He has repeatedly failed to back this up when challenged (including when I asked him during a debate on Spectator TV in 2021). He has also put out videos, explicitly aimed at young people, suggesting that an apocalyptic future awaits them, in which their eyes will be gouged out by marauding rape gangs (seriously).

But the scenes at the Crucible – and those at the Grand National at the weekend, where more than 100 animal-rights activists, linked to Extinction Rebellion, were arrested for trying to disrupt the race – remind us not only how mental, but also how joyless this lot are. These assorted groups’ campaign to save Mother Nature rarely seems to target government or fossil-fuel firms with their antics. Nor are they content with blocking roads and disrupting transport, as has been their calling card up until recently. Now they’re going after football, racing, snooker and priceless works of art. All the things that make being a human being in the 21st-century fun, pleasurable or inspiring apparently bring these plummy weirdos out in hives.

What we’re dealing with here is not simply an environmentalist movement. Just Stop Oil is another cheek of the arse of a modern bourgeois puritanism that dominates so many areas of public life today. Over-educated killjoys seem intent on imposing their lifestyle, morality and preoccupations on the rest of us – to tell us what we should say, do, eat, drink, think and enjoy. The justifications might change – eco-warriors say they want to save the planet; wokesters pose as the saviours of minorities; nanny statists say they are finger-wagging for the sake of our own health and wellbeing – but the endpoint is always the same: a world in which we are all as miserable as they are. Never let them win.