I think they are being demonized and are not the baddies most people think they are.
First of all, one needs to put things in to perspective: Actions of JSO are victimless crimes. Throwing soup on a painting protected by a glass or blocking a road from vehicles.
I haven’t read about JSO’s protests disrupting any emergency services. Usually in protests like these the protesters let emergency vehicles pass.
JSO is using these methods to gain attention that climate movement wouldn’t otherwise get. There still are many people who don’t understand or care about climate change.
We would not even be talking about JSO if they did not pull off these kinds of stunts. If they only wrote blogs and open letters nobody would even know about them.
Climate change is already killing people: 60,000 people died due to heat in Europe last year. More people will die due to extreme heat and drought. Millions of people will become climate refugees. Oil companies, those that JSO is protesting against, have falsified information about climate change for years. They know that fossil fuel is not a solution. They are killing our planet for profit.
So no, I don’t think that JSO is the bad guy here.
Well, price caps are against the principles of the free market. So, on an ideological level it doesn’t make sense.
Any ideology hardly ever works as it is, so changes need to be adapted to make the ideology work. Capitalism is very much tied to western electoral “democracy”. The idea in capitalism is that the economy works as a separate entity from government. This simpy is not true since it is the legislation that allows for capitalism to function in the first place.
The so called " free market" has never been free. When there is a crisis, governments give aid to capitalists, which is againts capitalistic principles. Capitalism would not function without governmental intervention and would collapse. The price caps are simply just a another tool to preserve capitalism.
Price caps can also be a way to limit profits made by capitalists. Basic necessities like water, food and electricity should have price caps in a way, that profit cannot be made.
But at the end of the day, price caps are a tool to preserve capitalism, not to change economical status quo.