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.
This is really quite something. The BBC basically chose a Dutch millennial Monbiot, who has all the derangement syndromes -- especially Trump -- to give its annual Reith Lecture series. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1…
Good show, but far too generous - perhaps to the point of naivety - to the Conservatives.
It is currently fashionable on the right to identify Blair as the cause of all our woes, for his constitutional meddling. There is much truth to this, but it puts far too much credit at the feet of one man.
When the Climate Change Bill was being debated, the Tories' position on emissions-reduction targets was more radical than the then Labour government's.
And it was the Conservatives who went even further than the CCA, increasing it to Net Zero.
Those positions were not the result of being misinformed by civil servants, nor being unaware of criticisms of the agenda, as is claimed. Conservatives and their advisors knew full well what the objections to the CCA and NZ were. We can know this because we know that very senior Tories pointed it out to them -- including the consequences of antidemocratic constitutional meddling.
They chose to ignore those objections, to extend the climate/green agenda. Kemi herself, in office, wanted to repeat -- not repeal -- the climate agenda with the biodiversity agenda.
And now out of office, the Conservative Party is signalling that it has learned nothing by taking is initiatives from the green blob-funded think tanks formed by its former advisers, who got us into this mess.
The problems of the green agenda are not technical. They are ideological and political. And they are deeper than discussions about policy can address.
Here is a discussion on a BBC News show between Nigel Lawson and SoS @ DECC Ed Miliband, shortly after Lawson had set up the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
GWPF produced countless reports explaining the problems of climate/energy policy for MPs.
Lawson was not the only Parliamentarian raising the issue of Miliband's intransigence, ignorance and arrogance, characteristic of the green agenda's advocates.
Peter Lilley, in the Bill's debate, highlighted the problem, now identified as Blairite constitutional meddling:
Ed Miliband here doing the accuse-others-of-what-we-are-doing-ourselves trick.
He's literally talking at an LCEF event. The Labour Climate and Environment Forum is the ECF-funded opposite of the ECF-funded Conservative Environment Network, but with the same grantors.
Here's a list of ECF, and by implication LCEF, grantors.
It's billionaires, top to bottom.
Some tycoon's daughter way paying £20k a month for staff in @Ed_Miliband's office while in opposition.
You're a massive hypocrite, Ed.
@Ed_Miliband I would challenge @Ed_Miliband to produce any receipts whatsoever, to support his claim that there exists a "global network of the right".
He wouldn't be able to. The Guardian hasn't been able to. And even the ECF-funded blob hasn't been able, despite grants available for it.
George is concerned that conversations @ number 10 about "growth" do not include his favoured organisations, such as No Foundation Economics and the Institute for Public Policy Making Stuff Up.
They instead include alumni of Tufton St, Tory-aligned think tanks!
"Who funds you" is the leitmotif of George's analysis of all Westminster politics. He believes that "dark money" explains everything he doesn't like.
By my calcs, and on these stats a battery that could power the UK for a two-week midwinter Dunkelflaute would cost £5.8 trillion, and occupy a site with a footprint of 536 square miles, or a square area 23 miles long on each side.
This chap thinks that offshore wind farms grow like seaweed from the seafloor, and that their roots burrow massive trenches across the sea floor all the way to the coast, where they bud into substations to connect to the Grid. Wind is free, you see.
There's a lot of it about. I get dozens of replies like this a day from people, some claiming academic expertise, who are strongly convinced that they know that wind is free, but have never looked at the very simple arithmetic.
Renewable energy is invariably more:
* capital intensive
* resource intensive
* labour intensive
* land intensive
... than conventional energy production. Yet people still believe it is 'free' or cheaper.
It's an article of faith, not a conclusion of a rational process.