Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Evidence is mounting that Brexit, and possible “contagion” of the British exit from the EU, the empowerment of nationalist movements throughout Europe demanding their own exit referenda, is the worst nightmare come true for green groups which had been counting on the bureaucratic authoritarianism of the European Union to bind democratically elected politicians to strong green policies.
Brexit: Environmentalists fear ‘bonfire’ of regulations designed to fight climate change and protect wildlife
Remain campaigners have argued that EU legislation has helped towards tackling water and air pollution, protect endangered species and imposed tough safeguards on the use of genetically modified crops and potentially dangerous chemicals.
Regulations set in place to help fight climate change and protect Britain’s wildlife may be destroyed following the Brexit result, top environmentalists have warned.
Reacting to the vote to leave the European Union, charity groups and climate change campaigners said the result could have a “devastating” effect on the UK environment, since more than 70 per cent of environmental safeguarding comes from European legislation.
Greenpeace UK executive director John Sauven said: “Many of the laws that make our drinking and bathing water safe, our air cleaner, our fishing industry more sustainable and our climate safer now hang by a thread… There is a very real fear that Cameron’s successor will come from the school that supports a bonfire of anti-pollution protections.”
Plastic should be considered toxic once it gets into the environment, MPs told
In an post-referendum statement, Friends of the Earth said the group could “no longer rely on the EU to protect our nature and habitats”, adding that clean beaches, air quality and bees were among the factors put at risk by potential loss of EU legislation.
My opinion is green groups are paying the price for putting all their eggs in one basket, for decades of ignoring the wishes of their membership, for relying on their influence with establishment politicians and agencies to fulfil their agenda. Now those establishment politicians and agencies are preoccupied with fighting for their own political survival, My guess is they are simply not taking calls from representatives of the increasingly irrelevant establishment green groups.
Britain votes to exit EU. A Limerick on the teakettle revolt.
Item: EU bureaucrats hold off banning high power small appliances such as electric teakettles until just after the British referendum to stay in or leave EU.
With bureaucrats wisdom uncanning;
electrical teakettles banning.
T’was the last straw for Brits,
so they did call it quits.
End EU one world order planning? https://lenbilen.com/2016/06/24/britain-votes-to-exit-eu-a-limerick-on-the-teakettle-revolt/
‘Greenpeace UK executive director John Sauven said: “ …..our fishing industry more sustainable…’
Would these be the same laws that see more fish thrown back dead than our landed? And that have seen ‘Our’ fishing industry in the UK destroyed after the EU illegally declared fish as a common resource? The Maastricht Treaty finally closed the fish snatch loophole. Fish stocks are best managed locally where people know what they are doing not by some gauleiter in Brussels. Norway is doing just fine with its fish stocks.
Music to my ears.
The Green idea of fishing sustainability is no fishing industry. Maybe now too Britain can dredge its rivers properly. And did anyone notice suddenly protecting wildlife is back on their list? Didn’t seem to be there when they were drowning small furry creatures in the flooded meadows of Somerset, and where has it ever been shown in regard to bird dicing windmills littering the landscape?
Good riddance, I say, to the lot of them.
May the bonfires be big and bright everywhere.
Hopefully that bonfire will spread Down Under to spell the demise of abominable alarmist agencies like the Climate Council.
April 2016: “Endless summer” squawks the Climate Council.
https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/endless-summer-australias-hottest-march-on-record
But not a peep this weekend about coldest days on record.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/coldest_june_day_on_record_but_theres_no_scaremongering_though/
I think the big thing here is that the world has now been shown there are more people against green nonsense and dictatorial policies than the Greens and their handlers would ever want known. Dissent is popular, not rare. Those people thinking they were on their own with their doubts and their questions will be more willing to speak up now.
Watch the avalanche, it ought to be a beauty. 🙂
Michael Rimmer and of course Hitler would have been very disappointed by this result! Who remembers Michael Rimmer???
…Brexit: Greenpeace, FOE fears a “Bonfire” of Green Regulations…
That’s funny. I welcome a “Bonfire” of Green Regulations…
Bonfire, bonnefyre, quite coincidentally I was reading about the Midsummer traditions.
TRUMP/BREXIT nationalism ignites the Bonfire of the Vanities of environmentalism, while the ‘weepers’ (It. piagnoni) cry inadequate crocodile tears.
The Greenie’s pretense at being interested in the environment is laughably transparent. They use it as a smokescreen for their real interest; authoritarianism.
How does one make climate safer?! How do they prove that they have made climate safer!?
This alone shows that the EU AND the UN are Bureaucracies that cannot be trusted and need to go or greatly modified!
The green NGO’s haven’t considered that they are part of the problem that has led to their worst case scenario – they were the ones pushing for elitist authoritarian rules & the public is sick of it & collectively flipping them the bird & saying we’ll take our chances with something different as the current situation is unacceptable.
With just a little self-examination, they should be able to see this – that they are their own worst enemy for environmental protection, if that is in fact their goal ( vs what appears to be actually left wing political goals under the guise of environmental protection).
Similarly from a previous post,
Naomi Klein doesn’t consider that it’s the Climatists that are the “racists”,
not everyone else
Gotta love this bit: “our fishing industry more sustainable . . .”
As anyone who has seen Brexit: The Movie would know, the EU has stuffed the British fishing industry. And no doubt many more industries besides.
On a sideline topic, if a nation with some 60 to 70 million population such as the UK can’t survive (according the the Remainers) without belonging to a larger organisation, how is it that small countries like New Zealand (population four million) survive and thrive on their own. Virtually all of the countries which figure in the top ten of most desirable places to live have populations in the single-figure millions.
England just showed the importance of smaller, local government. Force government to be accountable, not appointed bureaucrats far away.
Much “local government” has been hamstrung by EU and central government regulation that makes it as near pointless as it can be. You cannot take part in a debate on some local issue if you have “an interest” in it even if that was what you were elected for?
James Bull
Some guy once wrote along the line that, “By their fruit, you shall know them.”
P.S. Stop making the claims Trump was somehow the source of this. You are grasping.
??? TRUMP was certainly not the source, no more than the kindling is the source of the bonfire, but TRUMP is certainly an anti-establishment nationalist pro-BREXIT, Bonfire of the Vanities of the environmentalists.
Watch this space. The remainers have a petition going with 2 million signatures to do the referendum again. Until they get the result they want I guess. That’s their understanding of democracy for you.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36629324
The alarmist media are all over this like a rash. Apparently, the person who created the petition did so in jest.
Much of the push for Bremain was from the younger crowd, full of brainless emotion and zeal. But traditionally, they are the ones less apt to actually vote, having more important things to do like Partying, Texting every 5 minutes, and Chattering, just to name a few.
But wait, what happened? We lost? Waaaaaah! No fair! You’re just old stupid people who don’t care about our futures! This is our world now, old stupid people. And we make up the rules, because we “Care About the Planet”, and you don’t.
Bruce,
The poor loser reaction by The Remain crew is priceless and one of the best sooky sooky la la comments comes from a Facebook posting by Hermione H.
…Watching an interview with Brexit voters, who are shocked that we are out and that David Cameron has resigned, which in itself proves why the decision should never have been put in the general public’s hands…
I know, I know Hermione. You just cannot trust the general Public to vote the proper way and in a manner approved by the socially and intellectually superiors.
Do not invite any of them to your next dinner party. That will show them! At that party you and the right thinking people can discuss how the democratic process would be greatly improved if ‘Certain Classes’ of people were discouraged from being a part of the democratic process or even if The Democratic process is a failed experiment that needs replacing.
You will find some sympathy for that action in the bitter vengeful tears of the Remain Wake. Comforted by their Big Green Associates.
David
This is a totally bollox story – read all about it here.
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/06/26/questions-raised-3m-remain-petition-activists-encourage-foreign-signatories/
Site was hacked and a ‘bot’ inserted to create fake signatories at a rate that only just enabled the site to cope.
Even the code itself has been located now. Totally bogus – BBC ran with it as did all the MSM and they all now look even more compromised than they were already !
The the US online petitions are not considered valid. Only actual signatures count.
Jazznick1 – Thanks for that. What a laugh!
What do you mean they won’t get backing for bird and bat choppers, anti drainage channel dredging which caused floods that drowned so much wildlife and the throwing dead fish back to keep in the “quota”.
How will we survive?
James Bull
@James Baldwin Bull: Exactly. there now is a chance to gauge public opinion and abandon all ‘renewable’ energy and forget about climate change and concentrate on saving birds from bird choppers, getting industrial costs down yet still caring about the lesser spotted watermelon as an endangered species in need of help, now its natural habitat of the EU gravy train is denied it.
I think a zoo is the optimal solution.
And that is of course what scares the pants off the globalists: If Britain can throw two fingers at the received wisdom of the Virtue signalling Left, it might start a fashion.
I’d call it a “Bonfire of the Inanities”.
A “bonfire of regulations”? Sign me up!
Reminds me of a news story back in the ’80s about a man who got on every junk mailing list he could manage, so companies would send him catalogs. He burned them in his wood stove to heat his house.
I don’t know about the UK, but in the US the GPO (Government Printing Office) prints a huge amount of official documents (including regulations) in way more copies than anyone ever wants, so we end up paying warehouse space to store it all. If we burned it instead to keep warm or fuel biomass generation plants, it would actually save the warehousing costs.
British environmental bureaucrats remain in place.
Their tendency to gold plate EU directives may diminish, but they won’t go away. What the EU is doing will continue to be used ad Verecundiam. In all fields.
The problem with an overbearing bureaucracy that micromanages everyone’s life and starts shutting down power plants is that eventually (one hopes) people notice that they are being strangled, and object. That is what Brexit was. The greens have a right to be worried. hahaha
Let’s get that bonfire going.
The bigger, the better!
A safe climate??
WUWT?
Yes, apparently Greenpeace is working on project ‘Camelot’:
It’s true! It’s true! The crown has made it clear.
The climate must be perfect all the year.
A law was made a distant moon ago here:
July and August cannot be too hot.
And there’s a legal limit to the snow here
In Camelot.
The winter is forbidden till December
And exits March the second on the dot.
By order, summer lingers through September
In Camelot.
Camelot! Camelot!
I know it sounds a bit bizarre,
But in Camelot, Camelot
That’s how conditions are.
The rain may never fall till after sundown.
By eight, the morning fog must disappear.
In short, there’s simply not
A more congenial spot
For happily-ever-aftering than here
In Camelot.
the main faults of the EU are : excess regulations and the extraordinay influence of lobbyists and ill-minded activists.
And excessive salaries, corruption, and the useless monthly cycling to Strassbourg. Those who want the EU to survive should tackle those obvious points of rebellion pronto.
You are both describing bureaucracies.
The bigger a bureaucracy gets, the more unwieldy and unresponsive it becomes. It is true for any form of human organization.
I once worked in a 1,500-person Railroad company, that was extremely responsie to problems and customer needs. My company was then bought out by a 15,000-person Railroad company, and the bureaucracy of that company was like a stone wall.
I could call the president of the small railroad company personally on the phone if I needed something. I couldn’t talk to the president of the other company unless I was related to Henry Kissinger. Otherwise, I got some lower level bureaucrat about five steps below the president, and nothing ever got done. Extremely frustrating.
It’s a matter of size. The smaller the government/bureaucracy the more efficient it will be. The bigger it gets, the more out-of-control it gets. The best government is the one closest to the people. That way the people can look over their representative’s shoulder and give them advice. 🙂
Britain has taken a step to reduce the unelected bureaucracy that was ruling over it, has made its government closer to the British people, and no doubt, more responsive, as now the pressure is on the local politicians to get their act together.
Lobbyists are not a cause, they are a symptom. Excess government power begets reaction. Limit government power and the lobbyists will disappear. Nothing to fight against nor advantage to be gained.
True !