This news story was published recently in one of England's major papers.
UK: Jury decides that threat of global warming justifies breaking the law
Independent [UK]
“The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage. Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a ‘lawful excuse’ to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater damage caused by climate change. The defence of ‘lawful excuse’ under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 allows damage to be caused to property to prevent even greater damage — such as breaking down the door of a burning house to tackle a fire. The not-guilty verdict, delivered after two days and greeted with cheers in the courtroom, raises the stakes for the most pressing issue on Britain’s green agenda and could encourage further direct action.” (09/10/08)
I am moderately familiar with Kent and the Maidstone area, having flown in and out of Kent on my last visit to the United Kingdom. It is a pleasant land, lush and green and densely populated (at least by Western standards), but increasingly, it is filled with evil people. Not viciously evil, mind you, but mundanely evil and lacking in thought. I don't know if these Greenpeace activists were local Kentish types, or if they came from elsewhere to do their damage. But clearly, the good burghers of Kent, or at least those sitting on this jury, agree with them.
The particular evil involved here has several elements:
First, there is environism. For all intents, modern "environmentalism" has become a religion with very little reason or rational mental processes involved: thus the "mental" is removed. A particularly large cult within the general "environist" religion is the Global Warming crowd, which these people firmly believe in.
Second, there is a general streak of Luddite belief and practice here. These people presumably live in houses or flats with electricity, running water, and flush toilets. They presumably drive or walk or ride at night. They also work (those that DO work) for the most part in places in which the owners or managers would not be able to employ them without benefit of electricity and all the work it does, including pumping the water (Kent isn't as flat as Kansas, but certainly is flatter than most American states) and treating the waste water that they use and generate. Yet they are willing to destroy one of the plants that provides this basic necessity of life. Luddites are, I am convinced, related to the grasshopper of Aesop's fable.
Third, there is (in addition to the environist lack of intelligence) a general lack of intelligence exhibited both by the vandals and the court (specifically the jury). Even IF shutting down the Kingsnorth power station would prevent an imaginary threat (global warming caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse glasses) from coming about, a mere thirty-five thousand pounds sterling of damage is hardly going to shut down such a station for more than a few days. Not only that, but if the wrongdoing is so minor relative to the "needed" action to stop the "greater harm," the applicability of the Criminal Damage Act is questionable at best.
Regardless of the evil demonstrated by the act and the acquittal, this opens a door - a barn door, even a hanger door, for more mischief, more evil, more destruction, more insanity. A court has determined that global warming is a threat which justified £35,000 of vandalism in one location in one county. Now, thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of Greenpeace terrorists and their ilk have a blank check to ravage the infrastructure of England, if indeed not the entire United Kingdom. It applies not just to power stations, but to ANY source of carbon dioxide or some other greenhouse gas: such as cows (methane-generators; methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2), automobiles, motor coaches (buses to Yankees), various factories, and even the Houses of Parliament, which main product is the hot air of its Members, chock full of carbon dioxide. Yes, in that I am being rather silly, but much of the rest is now fair game for vandals - and there will no doubt be an amazing number of pyros, arsonists, and yobs who are suddenly converted to militant Greenpeace-ism if they are caught by the peelers.
It will spread, no doubt, just as the Saxons and Angles and Jutes who invaded Britannia through Kent spread to destroy the ancient Celtic-Roman civilization. And with this sort of tacit approval of the vandals, modern British civilization is doomed.
