Lots of people seem to hate this and I do on some level get it. I'd be happy to talk about whether its a winning strategy or what alternatives there are (I'm not sure personally its the optimum form of activism)
What I would say is the evidence suggests:
- General public do seem to hate this stuff.
- There is a relatively little spill over from the organisation to the wider issue (as in people think these guys are idiots but don't link to climate change or environmentalism more generally).
- It is evidenced to increase the saliance and perceived importance of climate change I.e. people hate them but spend more time thinking climate change is serious than before.
Lastly, what I would say is from my own visceral reaction to the Van Gogh painting: I felt a huge and sudden feeling of cultural loss. That something of our heritage was at risk and we may lose it and initially I was angry and sad but I realised that we are routinely doing this everyday with lost species. Heritage we haven't even been able to document yet. All that is to say it maybe we have a discussion about what the best activism is and who we need to influence and how (I think we need to do better than just think we need everyone on side) but what we shouldn't do is entertain for a moment that the scale of this action isn't proportional and valid to what we face. We are hurtling towards a cliff edge and some people still have their foot on the accelerator. This is the equivalent of worrying about a vase in the boot. I want to save it too but at the moment we are endangering it more through business as usual than through some cornflour.
The idea is GDP is a measure of activity. So using per GDP allows you to see the efficiency which you are producing "value". That's not a terrible idea in general but it accepts a very narrow definition of value.
GDP is a really flawed measure of how well a society is performing. I wonder what it would look like if we used Gross National Happiness or Total Quality Life Years. Could also think about ecosystem health or biodiversity as a valuable output of a country but that's highly linked to CO2 emissions so wouldnt be meaningful.
Also worth saying whilst per capita is absolutely important as a measure for us to understand the performance of human economic systems the earth systems only respond to gross total emissions.