But what's more interesting is why the last-remaining object of the Blair-era consensus is still intact.
While Blair and then Brown, and then Cameron were trying to build their projects on the Westminster consensus, to make climate change the dominant issue, the loudest voice from the public was the demand for the referendum.
The Conservatives -- each member of which has a price -- were easily bought by the green blob.
They were going to continue the project that Blair, Brown, Mandelson, the Milibands and Hilary Benn, among others, had started.
But there remains no public appetite for it.
Any *sensible* Tory analyst would look at what consensus politics, divorced from the public, brings. It would realise that is has a narrow opportunity to turn Labour's disarray into permanent advantage and divorce itself from the blob...
Or to mirror Labour's mistakes.
It doesn't need the blob. It is far ahead in the polls. And it looks like Labour are on the floor, unable to mobilise its traditional constituency.
It could scrap Net Zero, and perhaps even the Climate Change Act tomorrow.
But it would *rather* do the blob's bidding.
The Tories are determined to follow Labour into the abyss.
So be it.
It is easier to watch people set fire to themselves than it is trying to convince them not to play with matches.
As long as the fire doesn't spread.
But we should try.
How to tell them that people don't want cosy Westminster consensuses? We don't want wet think tanks drafting wet policy ideas. We don't share their green ideology. We want them to fight it out, left, right and centre! That's why we put our 'x' in their box.
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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.
I don't think it is possible to overstate the profound unreality that dominates in SW1.
Even mainstream commentators are discussing the collapse of the established parties, the economic recession that has merely yet to be inaugurated, deindustrialisation, a deep crisis of values across the public realm, an immigration crisis that cannot be stemmed, prices out of control, even blandified high streets are disintegrating, and the risk of war...
Yet here is this plonker who believes that society and the entire economy can be reorganised, and the fact of policy failure can be washed away by glib, elongated gaslighting verbiage.
I went to extremely crappy schools. But I at least learned what the antecedents to the French and Russian revolutions were. Political correctness had already dissolved the English civil wars from the curriculum, but I'm pretty sure there are some lessons in that too. Perhaps Miliband and co went to even worse schools, but cannot think it possible that they are mistaken.
I'm not talking about £300 sparking revolutions here. I am talking about the catastrophic indifference to others epitomised by such idiot zealots that believe elections are mere formalities and a sideshow to coronations, whose agendas are set by higher courts.
I get called a "denier" and "big oil funded" -- neither of which is true. My fundamental question has always been: what kind of world do adherents to green ideology want to create and on what basis do they assume legitimacy for their projects?
For those who are preoccupied by "The Science"...
If you can't interrogate ideology, you don't know what science says. And that is because you don't know what you've told it or asked it.
Too many people believe that science is objectivity rather than the attempt towards objectivity. And too many believe that what science seemingly says is self-evident. But if the putative facts that science produces were self evident, then we would have no need of science.
Far from demonstrating "extreme weather", this report shows that there are milder winters, fewer frosts and less snow. It unsafely attempts to link floods to climate change, but even the IPCC reminds us that floods are not a meteorological phenomenon, and it is difficult to find any trends for attribution. "Hotter days" in the MO's metric can mean merely mild winter days, not the "lethal heat" that Guardian headlines will scream about. And on which point, the actually hotter days are merely free holiday weather, despite attempts to link them to "excess summer deaths", which fail as a climate change metric in multiple ways: the summer months see a much lower death rate; heatwave mortality was vastly higher in the past; only extremely vulnerable people are affected (who deserve better care); the death rate has fallen dramatically.
There is no climate crisis, despite the MO's desire to find it.
This is an especially silly chart. It seems to show how many days per year the temperature anomaly exceeds various temperatures. But it doesn't discriminate between summer and winter.
Look at the stupid headline the MO's report has already generated!
There is nothing in the report to make the claim that "extreme weather" has become "normal".
"Possible", as they are now styled, were PKA 10:10 -- and they were created to appear as a "grassroots" green organisation, to support the UK government's policy agenda.
But it all went wrong with some hideous -- and extremely expensive -- TV adverts.
"Splattergate" as it became known showed teachers, bosses, football managers trying to engage their charges with the climate message, and blowing up those who didn't cooperate.
They claimed it was self-satire, but it was too close to the bone.
The Green Blob is recycling its "air pollution" proxy battle of the climate war today with this "new" report from the @RCPhysicians. It claims that air pollution kills 500 people a week and costs the economy £500 million a week.