Greenies: the Red, the Dumb and the Angry | James Delingpole

May 22, 2010

Just back from the Oxford Union where, last night, we debated the motion: This House Would Put Economic Growth Before Combatting Climate Change. Though I wouldn’t necessarily say I sucked, my performance definitely wasn’t as strong as the one I gave at Heartland. Luckily I had the benefit of a blindingly good team in the form of Lord Lawson of Blaby, Lord Leach and Viscount Monckton – who temporarily ennobled me to Lord Delingpole of Blogosphere so I didn’t feel too left out.

Much to my surprise the motion carried. (133 Ayes; 110 Noes) I suppose I oughtn’t to be surprised, what with all the arguments so obviously in favour of our side and none in favour of theirs. But you never quite know with undergraduates – even frightfully clever Oxford ones – because, never having inhabited the real world, they can all too easily incline to dreamy idealism combined with an utter failure to grasp economic reality.

What really struck me about the occasion, though, was the unspeakable direness of the opposition. I don’t mean the nice girl from Trinity College: as an officer of the Union, she had to take whatever side of the debate she was given to argue. I mean the three others, who embodied pretty much everything wrong with the green movement: its crypto communism; its woeful ignorance; and its sphincter-popping rage.

Representing the ignorance camp was Lord Whitty – a nice chap with a moustache, but totally out of his depth on science, economics or indeed anything else. When you consider that this man was until quite recently our Environment Minister, this is rather worrying. At one point he tried to claim that Earth’s temperature was the hottest it had been in 14,000 years. “What about the Medieval Warm Period?” I asked. No, what he meant, he said was “If temperatures go on rising then by the end of the century we could be experiencing the hottest temperatures in 14,000 years.” This is such unutterable drivel, it’s not even worth deconstructing. Yet this was the guy – I said it before but it bears repeating – in charge of Britain’s Environment Policy. Still, better him than the lethal Chris Huhne, I suppose.

I shan’t bother describing the young man representing the Red faction. Suffice to say that as he rambled away about equality, injustice, the evils of growth, capitalism etc, I leaned across to Lord Lawson and said: “Jesus. If this is the **** you had to put up with from the opposite benches I’m bloody glad I was never an MP.”

Finally, we were introduced to a fellow named Mike Mason, founder and managing director of something called ClimateCare. Mike was angry. Very, very angry. He showed this by having a go at us, one by one, dismissing Lord Lawson as a “failed chancellor”, or some such, casting aspersions on Viscount Monckton’s title and describing me as a “right wing hack.” I suppose, yes, “right wing hack” is one way of describing me. But I don’t recall, when I took the floor, referring to Mike Mason as a “typical, ranty green libtard who stands to make loads of money fleecing the gullible something rotten by selling carbon offsets.” Of course I do ad hom, now and again. But not in formal Oxford debates. It’s just rude and unnecessary and exposes – as poor Mike went on most impressively to demonstrate – the abject poverty of your arguments.

Both at Heartland and Oxford we were followed by a film crew who are making a documentary about the war between Warmists and Sceptics. The director, who was a very keen Green when he started the documentary, admitted he’d altered his position quite markedly since talking to both sides. What struck him about deniers/sceptics/realists – or whatever you want to call them – was their courtesy and their thoroughness. What struck him about the warmists was their eye-popping rage.

It’s true. The Warmists really are a malign and spleen-filled bunch. As of course you would be if the science was against you, the public were growing increasingly sceptical, and all you really had left to defend your cause was bullying and bluster.

Climategate: Five Aussie MPs Lead the Way by Resigning in Disgust over Carbon Tax

Australia is leading the revolt against Al Gore’s great big AGW conspiracy

-–just as the Aussie geologist and AGW sceptic Professor Ian Plimer predicted it would.

ABC news reports that five frontbenchers from Australia’s opposition Liberal party have resigned their portfolios rather than follow their leader Malcolm Turnbull in voting with Kevin Rudd’s Government on a new Emissions Trading Scheme.

The Liberal Party is in turmoil with the resignations of five frontbenchers from their portfolios this afternoon in protest against the emissions trading scheme.

Tony Abbott, Sophie Mirabella, Tony Smith and Senators Nick Minchin and Eric Abetz have all quit their portfolios because they cannot vote for the legislation.

Senate whip Stephen Parry has also relinquished his position.

The ETS is Australia’s version of America’s proposed Cap and Trade and the EU’s various carbon reduction schemes: a way of taxing business on its CO2 output. As Professor Plimer pointed out when I interviewed him in the summer, this threatens to cause enormous economic damage in Australia’s industrial and mining heartlands, not least because both are massively dependent on Australia’s vast reserves of coal. It is correspondingly extremely unpopular with Aussie’s outside the pinko, libtard metropolitan fleshpots.

Though the ETS squeaked narrowly through Australia’s House of Representatives, its Senate is proving more robust – thanks not least to the widespread disgust by the many Senators who have read Professor Plimer’s book Heaven And Earth at the dishonesty and corruption of the AGW industry. If the Senate keeps rejecting the scheme, then the Australian government will be forced to dissolve.

For the rapidly increasing number of us who believe that AGW is little more than a scheme by bullying eco-fascists to deprive us of our liberty, by big government to spread its controlling tentacles into every aspect our lives, and scheming industrialists such as Al Gore to enrich themselves through carbon trading, this principled act by Australia’s Carbon Five is fantastic news.

Where they lead, the rest of the world’s politicians will eventually be forced to follow: their appalled electorates will make sure of it.

5 Responses to “Climategate: five Aussie MPs lead the way by resigning in disgust over carbon tax”

Climategate: five Aussie MPs lead the way by resigning in disgust … | Australia Today says:November 27, 2009 at 11:13 am[…] Read more from the original source: Climategate: five Aussie MPs lead the way by resigning in disgust … […]
Nick Mabbs says:November 27, 2009 at 4:48 pmWill you be joining Nigel Lawson, Prof Ian Pilmer, Prof Richard Lindzen (and me) etc
on the GWPF ? You seem to be in-tune with their call for a ‘re-count’ on the true facts of AGW
rather than on the massaged data and guesswork we have had so far.
The entire electorate of the UK must ask their politicians what their
revised viewpoint is on Global Warming post Climategate/KiwiClimategate
They may not have an answer ready, because no one will have told them what to say yet,
but if enough of their electorate e-mail them they may just get the point that we have been lied
to far too often on this subject and it’s time one or more of the spineless spongers stood up
and earned our money; and maybe some respect too !The Science is currently very unsettling. The fact that Al Gore nearly became US President
is even more unsettling.

Al Gore: “I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it [anthropogenic global warming] is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are.”
Chris Vere says:November 27, 2009 at 7:01 pmReminds me of the ‘fart tax’ that was propsed in New Zealand a couple of years ago. A plan by the then Labour government to excessively tax meat and dairy producers for the byproduct of their produce; methane. In a very Australian-like demonstration an MP drove a tractor up the steps of parliament. The laughable tax was blown out of the window. I must say though, the Aussies could have protested with a little more gusto.
Aqua Fyre says:November 28, 2009 at 6:48 amTo think, that the Australian Labor Party would so willingly abandon its principles of “a fair go for working families” in order to support an international clique of Fraudulent scientists and IPCC hucksters is beyond the pale.They are gleeful over the current Liberal Party (conservatives) tearing itself apart over the ETS scheme; but what they don’t realize, is that it will be the Labor party that will be shaken to its very foundations in the next election if it stays its course on Carbon Trade.
Rudd & his Ecofascist elite, are seemingly oblivious to the very deep and palpable hatred that is growing in the hearts & minds of Australians from every walk of life. Outside of the cozy cocoon called Canberra (the home of Australian Federal government) there is a growing sea~change afoot and if the current Labor Party Prime Minister Kevin Rudd thinks that the Australian people will take this Carbon Trade ETS lying down, then he has another thing coming to him. They now know that every family will be forced to pay over $1500 to the United Nations. They now know, that electricity, water, gas, & petrol prices will jump anywhere between 10% to 20% per year, alongside this new Carbon Tax grab.

Already, a poll set up on Yahoo shows that if there were an election today, the Labor Party along with their Carbon Tax scheme, would be swept out of office.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/polls/popup/-/poll_id/50265

As of today, the Liberals would hold a combined 54% of the vote (with other liberals & nationals) : while the Labor party would barely hold onto 36% (including Greens).

In anyone’s language, that would be a landslide.

Little wonder Prime Minister Rudd has backed down on bringing on an election over this issue.

He is terrified of the fallout.
Con Michael says:January 16, 2010 at 1:26 amThe rigors of scientific discipline demand,inter alia,that a hypothesis or theory imply the kind of evidence that would prove it wrong.If something happens that should not have,and vice versa,the theory is discarded.In recent decades,global cooling occurred during and after a period of increasing CO2 emissions.Ergo the AGW theory has been discredited.End of story;game over;the AGW alarmists lose.Interestingly enough,the present widespread freezing temperatures have been deemed to be evidence of global warming.The MSM have not responded to this nonsense.There are encouraging signs that the public has had enough of the lies,cheating,filibuster and obfuscation.

How ‘Tech-Savvy’ Barack Obama Lost the Health Care Debate Thanks to Sinister Right-Wing Blogs Like This One

If theres one thing President Obamas good at, you would have thought, it would be harnessing the powers of new technology. Hes got the Blackberry addiction. Hes got the Twitter feeds. Hes the most tech-savvy POTUS in US history, who quite possibly wouldnt even be doing the job hes doing now if it werent for his supreme, almost Neo-like mastery of that thing we call the Interweb.

So how come he has just gone and managed to lose the most important debate of his political career so far over health care largely as a result of being beaten hollow by his opponents in the conservative blogosphere?

This is the question being asked by the new media monitoring organization Market Sentinel, in its latest report, pithily entitled How Obama lost the healthcare debate online.

It reports:

Our research suggests that Obama – the candidate who wrote the rules for achieving political success on the Internet – has lost the argument online.

To show this Market Sentinel took just one strand of that debate (comparisons between Obama’s proposals and the UK’s NHS service) and used citation analysis to identify who has influence in relation to the topic. For the technically minded, this means that we crawl the internet looking for pages which are about the topic, then we track mutual references between people, institutions, entities mentioned in the context. The resulting structure gives us a mathematically verifiable measurement of “authority” in the context. This analysis began on August 28th and was completed on September 3rd. We have sorted the results according to a sentiment metric where the negative quadrants represent hostility to state run healthcare (as exemplified by the NHS) and the positive quadrants show support for it.

graph

Note the dismal performance in terms of influence by the dead tree press. Note too the mighty power ascribed to Telegraph blogs (led, of course, in this instance by the great Dan Hannan). OK, so were not exactly Fox News yet. But if Market Sentinel is to be believed, than two key points emerge:

1. The Blogosphere is now more powerful in shaping the worlds political agenda than the Dead Tree media.

2. Right wing blogs (Fox News; DT blogs, etc) trump Libtard blogs (Huffington Post, Matthew Yglesias, etc) every time.

Look carefully at the chart and you will also noticed an appearance on the right by Michael Moore. Almost certainly the first time in the mans life he has ever been thus categorised.

Tag: Libtards