Ben Heard, an Australian campaigner for nuclear energy, has been describing how he is hounded by environmental organizations, in particular, Friends of the Earth, because of his views.
‘I have been called a racist,’ he says. ‘I have been called corrupt. I am constantly called a lobbyist, which I am not . . . I receive thinly veiled death threats.’
Whenever he is invited to speak on the airwaves, the immediate response is a series of attempts to prevent him appearing:
‘Before pretty much every second public appearance he agrees to, the organizers express second thoughts after lobbying by Friends of the Earth or others.’
Heard is a fairly mainstream environmentalist; indeed, he has a Master’s degree in sustainability to his name and is fully signed up to the (alleged) climate emergency. He just thinks that part of the response is nuclear energy.
Of course, if you are not fully signed up to the climate emergency – if you think, for example, that the Earth is doing rather well, that the atmosphere is warming more slowly than scientists feared, that crop yields are breaking records every year, that the planet is greening, that polar bears numbers are shooting up, Heard’s problem – a demand for a ban before every second appearance – is just a distant dream.
If you believe any of these (entirely true) things about the environment, then the phone call to the producers will happen every time you are in danger of appearing on air.
It’s particularly bad on the BBC. The bigwigs at the corporation accept the existence of a climate emergency and have introduced a policy that no scientist should ever be challenged on the subject, and that those who do not agree should not appear on air unless faced by an environmentalist (the wilder the better, or so it seems).
On the ground, this gives journalists trying to make interesting programs a bit of a problem since the Greens have an effective veto: by refusing to appear opposite a skeptic, they can prevent the coverage going ahead at all.
After several years of struggling with this kind of thing, journalists seem mostly to have given up and now almost always allows environmentalists to appear unopposed and unchallenged.
That those running the BBC are in bed with environmentalists is not news. But it seems that the tentacles of the Green blob may now extend even further – worryingly so.
Another Australian, the science writer Jo Nova, has been describing how she was invited to speak at the Christmas function of an obscure technical club for petrophysicists, the Formation Evaluation Society of Australia.
A few months later, her invitation was withdrawn after the society’s committee meeting was hijacked by an outsider from the major liquefied natural gas (LNG) firm, Woodside, who threatened to withdraw all support for the society’s work if Nova was allowed to appear.
As Nova points out, it is remarkable that a vast corporation should go to such lengths to prevent an unpaid blogger speaking to an obscure scientific club.
She comes up with two possible explanations, one relatively innocent and the other deeply disturbing.
It is possible that a green-minded manager at the company has simply gone far beyond his or her remit; in other words, the intervention by the company is an administrative cock-up.
However, there is a more sinister possibility. She asks:
‘Is Woodside just running chicken itself? Scared of the Western Australian EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], which is currently calling for submissions, and promising draconian guidelines that threaten to kill off the industry? Woodside needs the EPA to approve all their new projects.’
If this turns out to be correct then it is genuinely worrying. It has long been clear that environmental regulators are recruited almost exclusively from among the ranks of the eco-warriors.
In fact, most Whitehall pen-pushers seem to be cut from the same green cloth.
This, of course, means that there is going to be considerable bureaucratic resistance to any policy that does not move the country and the economy back in the direction of the late Middle Ages.
But governments still have the power to change things, and one can imagine a reforming prime minister taking an ax to the whole apparatus.
However, Jo Nova’s experience suggests that the regulatory state may also be moving us in the direction of a society in which ideas can no longer be freely exchanged, and that is a society in which change is much harder to bring about.
As Nova herself puts it, ‘The Administration State has a billion reasons to silence independent thought. When the government gets too big there doesn’t need to be an edict to quash dissent. People silence themselves.’
Let us hope that it’s just an aberration.
Read more at Conservative Woman
This ongoing attack on free speech and the free exchange of ideas is particularly concerning in this case, as the proposals by the alarmist faction essentially require us to adopt a centrally planned economy that is certain to throw mankind back to its original state of hand-to-mouth poverty in short order. These people have to be stopped – by now this has become a sacred duty for every thinking individual.
This sort of thing has been going on for a very long time. I remember reading articles over ten years ago where the environmental left would find out the speaking schedule of climate skeptics and work to have their engagements canceled.
No where in science or politics does one side of the issue receive such hostility, ridicule, and subject to such censorship. Nothing happens without a reason. One obvious reason is that information from climate realists is so devastating to the climate change dogma. The low correlation of carbon dioxide to Earth’s temperature history, the high correlation to solar activity, extreme weather events not increasing, record crop yields and the greening of the earth are facts that must be kept from the public.
All of this wouldn’t matter unless the political left had something to lose. The reason the hostility is so strong is that they have a lot to lose, which different people in the left having different agendas. This includes a big tax wind fall by taxing carbon dioxide emissions, some want to force the de-industrialization of the western civilizations, and others want to have socialism hitch hike in on climate change. With so much at stake climate realists must be silenced.
What’s next green shirts painting stars and swastikas on doors to brand people who don’t drink their pee green cool-aid ?
The Green shirts have all but taken over the USA Democrat Party which CNN show cased for all to see .
The thing about the USA political system is it was designed to basically not work . Ban coal , ban straws , ban free speech , ban anything you want
but the chances of it getting approved are almost zero .
It’s absolutely astonishing how little hundreds of “law makers ” get done .
They refuse to even support the laws already in place .
They do rubber stamp $trillions in deficit spending which is arguably self serving meanwhile while they frown and stew about plastic straws China with it’s long range plans will blow by them within a decade and USA politicians will be pulling the same unproductive crap .
The brown shirts and the green shirts are very linked . Intolerant , preachy , racist (and the Democrats are ) who wish to bully their way to power .
The Eco-Nazis and Watermelons only Climate Alarmists are allowed to speak