Guest essay by Eric Worrall
After heaping praise on saint Greta trashing Britain’s historical contribution, and praising activist efforts to raise awareness of climate change, British politician Michael Gove infuriated those same activists by stopping short of declaring a climate emergency.
Gove infuriates climate change activists by refusing to declare an ‘climate emergency’ and telling them to judge politicians on actions not words
By DAVID WILCOCK, WHITEHALL CORRESPONDENT FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 02:52 AEST, 1 May 2019 | UPDATED: 02:53 AEST, 1 May 2019Michael Gove was blasted today for refusing to ‘declare a climate changeemergency’, after meeting climate change protesters who brought London to a halt over Easter.
The Environment Secretary met members of Extinction Rebellion, who brought 10 days of disruption to the capital, in Westminster but they said he refused their demand.
They accused him of ‘a moral and political failure’ after prior meetings with Labour’s shadow John McDonnell and Sadiq Khan.
Mr told them climate change was a ‘grave’ challenge, but stopped short of calling it a climate emergency.
‘Politicians should be judged on actions not words,‘ he said.
‘We should show that we’re making a difference rather than simply telling everyone how important it is to change.’Extinction rebellion’s Clare Farrell, who was at the meeting at Defra headquarters, said it had been ‘less sh*t than I thought it would be, but only mildly‘
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Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6977303/Gove-infuriates-climate-change-activists-refusing-declare-climate-emergency.html
What can I say – trying to manipulate and appease climate activists is a bit like playing with a lit stick of dynamite.
Mr Gove is a typical British MP!
Nothing more needs to be written.
You can always stop a lit stick of dynamite from exploding by snipping the lit fuse. These morons in the Extinction Rebellion group will explode no matter what is done or not done because it will NEVER be enough for them because they are cultural Marxists intent on bringing down Western Civilizations as we know it.
100+
Climate cult. End Days are always near, the reasoning just changes.
Emergency’s been called off. Time to go and get a life.
Touché!
Climate what? Show me a graph of anything interesting going on in climate. No time series. Just CO2 and climate metric graphed with a trend of something bad. Trends only have meaning with dependent variables, so the x-axis must be CO2, not time, as time does not make climate. Yawn. Still waiting. Oh right, I see, there is no such graph in our science, everything is a meaningless time series. Okay, go graph the London silver spot price and use that time series to tell me silver prices in 10 years. Right, doesn’t work, because time does not make silver. In the same way, time does not make climate. Only dependent variables in a graph set to a trend have predictive meaning. This is what I would ask the climate cult for as minister, or throw them out of my office.
Not sure which pair of eyes frightens me most.
If you think Gove looks glaikit then you are right.
This is the man who, at a difficult time for the car industry generally, announced that government policy was to phase out diesel as a matter of urgency and ordained that only electric cars would be available for purchase in ten years time.
It is reported that Greta has Aspergers syndrome causing her irrational obsessive fixations.Perhaps Gove should present for a diagnosis?
The child has a lot more issues than being on the spectrum. Her parents and the climate communities are guilty of extreme child abuse
https://quillette.com/2019/04/23/self-harm-versus-the-greater-good-greta-thunberg-and-child-activism/
This is sad, pathetic that the they are using a young girl who is biologically prone to obsession and who thinks in black and white to push the cult of CAGW’s message.
“After years of depression, eating disorders, and anxiety attacks, she finally receives a medical diagnosis: Asperger’s syndrome, high-functioning autism, and OCD. She also suffers from selective mutism—which explains why she sometimes can’t speak to anyone outside her closest family. When she wants to tell a climate researcher that she plans a school strike on behalf of the environment, she speaks through her father.”
who better than someone with OCD to lead climate crusaders. They all have OCD.
What’s worse than OCD? CDO, which is similar but with the letters in the proper order. 🙂
A Midwich Cuckoo or Gollum…. not much in it.
I wonder how long it took her handlers to train her to make that face?
These people need to be IGNORED, not appeased. Why do we suddenly give lunatic-fringe, miniscule radical “groups” power to control the mass narrative? Anyone with a rant and a FB page today can form a “group.”
Eric
“After heaping praise (on)? saint Greta(‘s)? trashing of Britain’s historical contribution, “
Trying to appease eco-fascists works as badly as trying to appease Hitler did.
Exactly. It’s not like they’ll pack up and be happy, even if they got everything they wanted.
Biggest problem we have in the UK, so far as I can see from replies to me from both Gove and the Prime Minister, are the Civil Service which appears to be full of signed-up climate alarmists.
I have responses from them which were drafted by civil servants denying that the CO2 emissions from the manufacture and operation of electric cars are greater than from running a petrol or diesel car for 7 years. They have specifically rubbished international and other government studies that have demonstrated this.
Small wonder that our politicians are as badly informed and ‘guided’ as is the case in the UK.
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy imported a bunch of eco-NGO secondment folk (Greenpiece, WWF and Friends of The Earth) who were imported into DECC (Department for Energy and Climate Change) – and they (DECC) refused to say how many or where from (multiple FoI requests swerved).
The UK has lunatics running the asylum / vampires running the blood transfusion service.
Gove is a prat
I raised a FOI request on BEIS (Claire Perry’s mob) a couple of years ago to ask how many of the civil servants in her dept had any of the green NGO groups in their CVs. It was turned down on cost because, they said, it would be too costly to trawl through all the (paper) CVs. (As if I was meant to believe that they were not computerised!!)
I asked the same very similar question to DECC and they said they didn’t employ the people directly – but via an agency so the information wasn’t available d/t “Data Protection”
Now if we were able to get the voting breakdown for BBC or Canadian Broadcasting Corp staff we might clarify a lot of issues.
Perhaps a requirement that they be “diverse” and reflect the citizenry to whom they speak?
So DECC have no say in who they employ?
Are these people security cleared where applicable?
Who reads their CV’s, interviews and employs them?
Old England
No UK politician believes in climate change, other than as a fine tax raising ruse. If they did they wouldn’t be spending £5bn refurbishing Westminster Palace (likely £10bn knowing our lot) which is mere feet from the River Thames at high tide.
They are running to keep up with the national debt and see taxes as the solution but can’t justify more income tax, VAT, fuel duty etc.
Its all Smoke and mirrors.
“Gove infuriates climate change activists by refusing to declare an (a) ‘climate emergency’ and telling them to judge politicians on actions not words”
“Mr (Gove) told them climate change was a ‘grave’ challenge, but stopped short of calling it a climate emergency. ”
I think MAILONLINE needs better editors and writers…
Climate Change is a Grave Challenge.
Challenging the Orthodoxy will lead you to your Academic grave.
Also most proposed methods to combat it will require 50% of th epeople alive also find their graves
British society could use a heavy dose of policy hari kari to clear the decks of faux crisis and get on with learned lessons of the real world.
The current Neville Chamberlain diplomacy with the nut cases is just delaying the lesson plan.
I’d say a campaign of political taxidermy was more what is required
Okay, I’m game.
Oy, you kiss your Mum with that mouth, Clare?
Seriously, there is NO satisfying iideologues. When you attempt to assuage them, they simply move their goalposts further away. The thing to do is what Florida Gov. Rick Scott did several years ago when some oceanographers were demanding action on sea level. He politely heard their complaints, thanked them for their time, then did nothing. He made no pronouncements, took no actions. The activists were livid but there was nothing they could do.
Mumbles
This is the right approach. Always listen carefully and consider the opinions expressed. First, that is the way we learn, and second, it ennobles the speaker. When one is heard honestly and permitted a forthright opportunity to set forth their views, they immediately moderate their language and become more willing to consult, instead of shout.
Loudness is the result of frustration. Frustration is the result of unmet expectations. Expectations can be raised unreasonably through the misuse of information and ideological filtering intended to control behaviour. Consider that train of thoughts.
As others have pointed out previously, the general intention of those proposing a catastrophic narrative and the “original sin” of existing, is to gain control. We can debate the level of control sought, but as my anthropologist friend describes it, once the “oppression” is internalized, the oppressed person becomes their own “mind guardian’.
Mind guarding is that you see in the letters to the Editor and on the opinion pages. The goal is to get you to internalize the “message” and in future, oppress yourself and mind guard others, warning them when their thoughts drift away from the “true narrative”.
Resisting this requires that one be self-aware, self-confident and properly informed. Being an omnivore helps. Being systematically skeptical helps. Understanding the scientific method helps. Realising the limitations of human capacity to control the weather provides a cap on the plans we can actually implement.
So listen, hear people out, and get on with improving life, the universe and everything.
Loudness is the result of frustration. Frustration is the result of unmet expectations. Expectations can be raised unreasonably through the misuse of information and ideological filtering intended to control behaviour. Which leads to Hate which is the path to the Dark Side
Exactly. Always appoint the wing nuts to the Committee to Anticipate Everything.
The CAE produces an annual report based on the frenzied hysteria of the current members.
They are thanked for their service and the report is then tabled.
Under current circumstances, it seems quite possible to expose their lunacy by not doing what they want and then watching them react. Kind of like American Democrats.
Green creatures driven to extinction by political cannibalism ? Too good to be true though.
Appeasement with the Nazis didn’t work either.
Giving Stalin the British jet engine was not so great either.
Also, I doubt climate change is going to slow the Russian special ops teams on the streets of London.
I’m not so sure that giving the USA the jet engine and the cavity magnetron was a good idea either…
But then …. didn’t Harry Hopkins give Stalin the A-Bomb?
Ask anyone from South Korea if it was a good idea or families of Korean war vets.
What would annoy me if the activists had their way and we were totally dependent on unreliables, is how we would cope with the current situation of less than 1% of electricity being provided from windmills.
Once the sun goes down we will be mostly using fossil fuels for our electricity.
Recently the activists were crowing that 90 hours had passed with no electricity being generated from coal.
It is now getting to the situation where we will be getting next to no electricity for a longer period.
(Plug the car in dear, I need to charge it overnight.)
99% of people would have to lie in their graves
Clare Farrell should probably be looking more towards the harm she’s doing to the environment with her ridiculous hair-bleaching than anything else.
Does anyone really think that those who believe the world is ending in 12 years will accept a compromise of the world ending in 24 or 48 or even a century away?
They wouldn’t. Nor should they, if they believe it.
These fanatics need to be ignored or educated. They cannot be negotiated with.
If you think Gove looks glaikit then you are right.
This is the man who, at a difficult time for the car industry generally, announced that government policy was to phase out diesel as a matter of urgency and ordained that only electric cars would be available for purchase in ten years time.
It is reported that Greta has Aspergers syndrome causing her irrational obsessive fixations.Perhaps Gove should present for a diagnosis?
For a long time now the British Government has been governing by saying one thing and doing another.
I think the Liberals started it back in 2012, by promising to cut school fees and then raising them. Shortly afterwards Corbyn fought an election of a set of un-costed frankly impossible pledges. The Conservatives have been doing this all along.
The point is that, like the US, the people effectively had no choice in the 2-party system. The parties worked hand in glove, and if you didn’t want one, you had to have the other. The people were kept happy by promising the moon and advertising this widely in the media, which stopped the grumbling for a while, and could be repeated ad infinitum once the grumbling started again….
The main problem for me is the failure of European politicians to understand and articulate how the world works, such as the vital contributions of low cost transport and a reliable power supply. Special interest “green” groups can be fundamentalists, that is their job, but where are the grown-ups, besides in the US and Brazil, and of course in China and India?
Sociopaths R Us
+1
Exploiting this sad, frightened child for adults’ publicity stunts is akin to ancient pagans throwing virgins onto bonfires to appease angry gods. It’s NOT funny, it’s not intellectually sound, and it’s not excusable in any way.
It won’t do you any good feeding the green crocodiles hoping they won’t eat you Michael. It’s best to get right out of their swamp and back on to solid ground.
Hyperbole!
Everything to an extreme.
We should have learned the lesson centuries ago when paying the Danegeld, it was noted at the time that the Dane always comes back for more.
Although to be fair to Gove or any politician who does not rely solely on climate demagogism, it might be unfair to expect them to turn and bite the extinction crowd. It would’nt look good to those who are not au fais with the issues, and might very well attract more people to the ranks of lunacy
Whats worse is that pretty much all of the most active climate protestors seem to be middle class folk. The police here used to have a saying, ‘Dont F–k with the middle class’, I’d imagine those in politics have a similar outlook ?
Deselection on the way?
If they dare hold an election it will be, Conservative voters are sick fed up with this fake Conservative party at the moment.
Their heading for a big fall, and their childishly transparent virtue signalling just drives away more of their voters.
Despite the Conservatives, the scary thing is the alternatives.
The shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer (2nd most powerful person in the prospective government if they won an election, in charge of the money, for US readers) is on video record as being almost jubilant at the 2008 financial meltdown, that this might herald the downfall of capitalism so that proper communism might be installed.
It’s really very scary that people like this come even close to gaining political power.
The girl who hates the industrial revolution. Maybe she should live life like there was no industrial revolution.
-Join a no tech fanatical religion-as a child bride.
-Join a no tech collective farm-as a child bride.
-Join a no tech group of nomadic hunter/gatherers-as a child bride.
Before the industrial revolution, not a lot of other job prospects, other than child bride/slave labour. Many years ago, one of the most valuable possessions, was a female that couldn’t get pregnant, unless they were expected to pop out babies every nine months.
The politician agrees with her, I think I know what the creepy eyed fellow is looking for.
I miss the good old days of zeolots working hard in slave/drone conditions to build compounds out of sight and torture themselves behind the fences instead of today’s lot with extensive media stunt attention, glue, government sympathizers. Find them a Burning Man site with adequate sanitation facilities–like maybe the Prince Charles compound.
I wonder what Gove will do for power when all the coal and gas are removed. currently the UK is under a stagnant high pressure zone. The windmills are producing less than 2% of the rated outputs and we have very little solar power cause it’s cloudy. Perhaps we could burn a few of the extinction rebellion crowd in the wood chip power stations. Gove has no idea about energy, he’s only interested in politics. perhaps we could burn a few MPs of those as well! Useless lot
+1
Oh well, what would you really think wold happen, when the supposed House of Just and Fair and Leadership ends up to be no more or/and no less than a House of Whores and trickery and treason?!
cheers
I’m close to giving up. Rational thinking, reasoned debate and due process are disappearing faster than you can say “Lord of the Flies”. Mass hysteria and emotional (and literal) incontinence are winning the day. The grandest and most pathetic exercise in virtue signalling that I’ve ever seen is ongoing, with politicians and other mischief-makers everywhere falling over their tongues trying to say Climate Emergency before one another.
What does it mean? It means that science has well and truly left the building. Shrieking nincompoops are demanding that everybody needs to do Something, whipped up by Trotskyists who just want to destroy the economic system that has done more to improve the lives of the world’s poor than any other. Evidence? Pah, that’s for deniers.
It also means that in the current poisonous mood, reasoned sceptics just won’t be listened to (not that they had much of a fair hearing before). The ongoing EU farce has shown that our politicians respond to angry mobs and backroom lobbying by special interest groups far more than they listen to the expressed will of the people. If they’re ignoring the electorate and ignoring rational voices, prepare to hunker down until we can vote them out. Problem is, things are going to get a lot worse before they get better if we end up getting the heinous Marxist guy who’s even less popular than the current PM as her replacement, purely because of the 25-30% who vote for the metaphorical donkey with a red rosette.
Hold on tight, folks, I fear it’s going to be a rough ride.
Sadly, I think you’re right – we are in for a rough old ride. The hordes of swivel-eyed global warming zealots won’t pack it in, and they’ve got a second wind recently by co-opting the children.
}:o(
The only thing they don’t agree on now is, how best to tackle the problem of the falling sky.
Eamon.
Doesn’t the picture of Greta Thunberg remind you a little of Vladimir Putin 🙂