Thread by @clim8resistance

Ask a silly question.

I've been arguing against stupid climate policy for 20 years.

It has never occurred to me to block roads to 'raise awareness'.

There has been nothing but 'awareness raising' about climate change in that time.

There has been zero debate.

https://twitter.com/talkRADIO/status/1440273360613642245

Before I argued against stupid climate policy, I argued for it. But I was very young.

It was listening to greens -- and watching them -- that made me pivot to climate scepticism and then to broader criticism of political environmentalism.

What kind of world do they want?

They do not simply want a world in which there is no global warming.

None of them.

*All* of them -- from Greta and the XR, up through to the Chief Scientific Advisor and scientific research institutions -- want to change society.

You cannot and should not take any environmentalist's argument at face value.

They know very little about their actual cause.

They want to change society more than they want to end global warming.

Thus they do not want a solution to global warming.

If there was a pivotal moment in my transformation from green to sceptic, it was this. Mark Lynas custard pied @BjornLomborg, and the local greens campaigned to get the University to prohibit him from University property.

I thought, "there's something seriously wrong with these people".

So I bought Lomborg's book.

And I took a harder look at the people involved with shutting him down. I knew them quite well.

What's wrong with them?

Then, as now, greens of *all* kinds are incapable of meeting people they disagree with in good faith debate.

There are very few exceptions.

They do not believe in democratic control of politics.

They do not believe that government requires consent.

This thread is broken. It continues here...

https://twitter.com/clim8resistance/status/1440282545430487040

My faith in democracy may well be misplaced.

But active hostility to democracy underpins all green perspectives of consequence.

I have found that the tendency remains as one moves away from the custard pie-chucking and motorway-blocking kind of green, into the establishment.

Presidents of the Royal Society, Chairs of the IPCC, elected officials and senior civil servants are *exactly* the same as the road-blockers.

They do not believe that they need to persuade the public, nor answer their critics, nor achieve a mandate.

They are ALL like this.

Presidents of the @royalsociety and chairs of the IPCC do not throw pies.

But they wilfully lie and smear anyone who disagrees with them, and use their institutional muscle to remove obstacles to their agenda rather than debate them in good faith.

At a climate event in Oxford, I watched the late Robert May, ex president of the Royal Society claim that @Martin_Durkin had produced films that denied the link between HIV and AIDS. I read the late IPCC chair Pachauri comparing Lomborg to Hitler. They are of a piece with XR.

And I watch as even apparently 'world-leading' climate scientists spit feathers when it is shown empirically that climate -- changing or not -- claims fewer and fewer lives and has less and less impact on society.

It's not about climate change.

They want to change society.

So when I see people blocking roads, or hard-peddling the claim that we face a 'crisis', I know *for sure* that they have departed from facts, from reason, from debate and from democracy, and that their actions have nothing at all to do with wanting to save the planet.

They are liars, who have deceived only themselves, and who are angry that the rest of society has dared to disagree with them.

They have not changed one bit in the 20 years I have been watching them.

Do not take them at face value.