Sensible, incremental precautionary measures (and no, they don’t include economically destructive cap-and-trade regimes) to scale down the scale of carbon emissions do not appear to me to be beyond the bounds of commonsense steps that should be taken against the possibility that man may be contributing to a significant extent to such global warming as (however stop-go) there may be, but the last way for the global warming crowd to win over environmentalists of doubt is with screaming, authoritarian lunacy of the type described by Christopher Booker in his latest Telegraph column:
Does one not get the feeling that all this propaganda over the terrifying threat of global warming is beginning ever so slightly to turn people’s minds? Caroline Lucas MEP, the leader of the Green Party, last week agreed on television that flying to Spain was “as bad as knifing a person in the street”, because air travel like this is causing people to die “from climate change”.
Dr Richard Dixon, director of the Scottish WWF, was at the same time claiming that failing to ensure one’s home is “energy efficient” was a “moral crime”, as “anti-social as drink driving”, and “we should be having a discussion as to whether it should become an actual crime”.
This echoed the recent observation of Ed Miliband, our Energy and Climate Change Secretary, that opposing wind farms should be as “socially unacceptable” as not wearing a seatbelt. Meanwhile, no doubt encouraged by this kind of talk from ministers, 100 “climate campaigners” were arrested by the police, who feared they were planning to put out of action a coal-fired power station in Nottinghamshire, to stop it continuously contributing to the National Grid 1,000 megawatts of electricity – considerably more than the average output of all the 2,400 wind turbines in the country.