It is a fundamental of democracy that the proponent of a thing should actually say something intelligible, and of course, set out an argument that can be meaningfully engaged with.
But they didn't manage it.
You can't actually argue with ignorant, conspiracy-theorising street thuggery.
It's only performance from the likes of @James_BG that makes it seem respectable.
It was a rabble. It was unable to express its grievances. And it had to resort to fantasy to compensate.
For instance, the occupants of the house are charged with having "destroyed democracy", with having "blood on their hands", and with covering up "hundreds of billions of corporate profits".
Grave charges. But no actual explanation about when/how these crimes took place.
This, from the article, for e.g.
Smith: "There are people whose business it is to make science look like opinion. Who aim to transform genuine feelings of climate grief and guilt into defended ignorance and positive denial".
Ok. Like what? Where? When? How?
And so?
It's a poetic litany... "eloquent"...
But it doesn't mean anything.
Even if it is true, why should there not be organisations who question science used in policy-making?
And what are "genuine feelings of climate grief and guilt"?
Who experiences them?
And then this, too long to quote in a tweet.
What does it mean? How is it a claim against the occupants of the house?
If there is any evidence of "lobbying at the highest level of our government", it's undermined by the fact of the government's commitment to #netzero.
They have no rebuttal to the "lobbying". The lobbying being (we must assume) little more than the publications, which you can read for yourself -- and which the protesters have not read.
It is also blind to the lobbying in the other direction, which is far more substantial.
In £ terms, it is several orders of magnitude greater.
And it is not done in public.
For instance, the cross-party consensus on climate change, which *is* used to prevent the public expressing a view on climate policy, was organised by a lobbying organisation, the Green Alliance.
"Possible" needed the money because they destroyed their own image when they were called 10:10, and their adverts depicting the executions of children and other climate apostates led to their backers pulling out.
But they were outsourced PR for govt. Always were.
In this video of Cameron and Huhne declaring the greenest government ever, you can see a wonk (who I believe may be a PR for a major wind company) carrying the 10:10 logo, for some bizarre reason.
Preparation for this has been going on for quite some time. By eliding fundamentally distinct categories and even opposing arguments, the disinfo lobby has created the notion of online harms, and thereby the basis for policing political commentary.
Dale Vince claims that "environmental protesting is an act of conscience". But he does not believe in freedom of conscience. He argues that "climate denial should become a criminal offence".
Vince is also trying to use his £millions in libel action against his critics -- Richard Tice, Sean Bailey, and Paul Staines -- who reproduced his moral relativism about "terrorism" in his own words, and to force the Internet blocking of web sites.
He compares the average tariffs for various criminal offenses. But he does not compare the harms caused by those offences, either in economic terms, or deeper emotional and actual injuries caused to people by attempts to immobilise the road network. Those criminal actions were in very substantial part enabled by Vince himself, who admits that he gave the perpetrators "more than £340,000" to enable the expression of their "act of conscience". Who is to say that they are not motivated by money? On whose behalf, and in whose interests did they act? In many parts of the world, Vince would have been in the dock with the protesters for his part in their joint enterprise.
Nobody is against expressions of conscience. But JSO manifestly intended to cause far more chaos than they in fact achieved.
Disrupting the transport network to the extent that Hallam and his co-defendants intended is not the expression of "conscience". They intended to cause material harm to millions of people. They got off lightly.
They claim that they want to help save the lives of millions or even billions of people. But if you point out that JSO's actions, and the policies they demand -- and will continue to demand until they get their way, unless they are stopped -- are more harmful than climate change and its effects, then, Vince argues, you should face prison. And he uses his fortune to lobby for those policies, to fund those violent activists and their legal expenses, to prevent justice and to prevent transparent, democratic and scientific debate.
JSO do not have a rational view of the world. Their claims are not even mainstream "consensus" science. They are radical outliers, further from the consensus even than "deniers". That is why they, and their bleak ideology must be confronted.
"If you look round the world right now, there are countries in a race for who is going to provide the jobs of the future. And we know, whether it's hydrogen, whether it's solar, whether it's wind, whether it's floating offshore wind, all these new green energies are going to provide jobs for the countries that get this right."
There is no such race. There is hands-down only one player in the market and its "green" industrial sector exists only because of policies created in the west, mainly in Europe, which have created a market for it, and which is supported by a conventional industrial sector, powered by coal, oil and gas, and cheap electricity from those sources.
Britain has no general capacity to engage in such a competition. The sole effect of EU and policies of Labour, coalition and Conservative governments, and now, has been to push prices up, hastening Britain's and Europe's deindustrialisation, and loss of competitiveness. Those governments believed that you could win a "race" by first cutting off you own legs.
@LabourSJ does not know what she is talking about and it is a pity she was not challenged.
Here is the data.
The claims made by MPs owes nothing whatsoever to reality.
So either they do not understand the policies they are creating, or they are lying. Perhaps both.
But the hard fact of the matter is that green ideology, which of course underpins green policy, is an ideology of austerity and deindustrialisation. It requires them both.
Greens want the radical transformation of society & the total reorganisation of the economy, requiring the regulation of lifestyle, dismantling of democratic politics, deindustrialisation & degrowth...
But they think that people who disagree with them are driven by ideology.
Greens think that people who disagree with them should not be allowed on campuses, should not be free to publish or broadcast, should not be able to take part in politics...
Because they believe people who disagree with greens are the ones driven by extreme ideology.
Ideology is one hell of a powerful drug.
But it's not people who fail to worship Gaia who are its actual victims.
You don't see climate sceptics vandalising cultural artefacts.
The RCP's "green physician toolkit" is precisely the same patronising nonsense as the WHO's toolkit of the same name, discussed here a few months ago...
The two main ideas behind the toolkit are A) that doctors routinely make "unnecessary" decisions that have environmental impact, and that B) they should use their authority to advance an ideological agenda.