From a former Trotskyite activist:
"This is one of the nastiest and stupidest outbreaks of intolerant, irrational zealotry since mankind emerged from the Dark Ages. I speak as a former intolerant zealot, who grew out of it.
I know the fierce joy which comes from despising others, only too well. And I fear it.
Will sane people have to glue themselves to aircraft and bridges to get anyone to listen? And if they do, will they be indulged by our politicised, biased police, as the Warmists are?
Perhaps the most dispiriting version of it is to be seen in the painted, beatific faces of the red-robed mime-artists who are to be found on so many of the demonstrations demanding that this country commits economic suicide.
Who can tell what is going on behind those self-satisfied, ethereal expressions? But they give these marches a strong whiff of the Age of Inquisitions, which I once thought we had escaped.
I won’t try to argue here on the rightness or wrongness of the Warmists’ theory about the causes of climate change.
I know from long, multiple experience that they respond to reasonable doubt with fury and defamatory cries of ‘denier’.
Thanks to the political and media class’s dim acceptance of shouted propaganda, and their rejection of reason, we are already damaging ourselves. There are some causes you can’t reason with, and this is one of them.
They prefer fury to logic. This is always the sign of someone who is not sure of his own case, and hates to hear his inner doubts spoken.
We recently closed and demolished Didcot ‘A’ coal-fired power station, an efficient, reasonably modern plant with a generating capacity of about 1.44 gigawatts.
259 gigawatts (180 Didcots) of new coal-fired capacity are under development in China. That’s on top of the 993 gigawatts of coal-burning capacity China already possesses (690 Didcots).
The UK’s whole electrical generation capacity, in all forms of power, is 85 gigawatts (59 Didcots). If we gave up using electricity entirely, it would make no difference at all to the impact of Chinese coal burning on the atmosphere.
If we completely abolish all our fossil-fuel generation, including gas, it would likewise not matter in the slightest – except to us, our economy and our standard of living.
China’s planned increase in coal power is three times the size of our whole electricity-generation industry – wind, nuclear gas, and all. India is also increasing coal generation and last March reached a coal capacity of 200 gigawatts (139 Didcots).
Wind generation only functions thanks to huge hidden subsidies, paid for by the poor, and is vulnerable to power cuts unless it is backed up by fossil fuel or nuclear generation." - Peter Hitchins