The Age celebrates civil disobedience

Well, anything goes when we're talking about "saving the planet". In a barking mad opinion piece, Melissa Fyfe sucks up to the new "people power" (i.e. breaking the law) in order to achieve aims that cannot be achieved through the proper democratic process. As we have seen already, the courts in the UK are quite prepared to turn a blind eye to criminal offences where "climate change" is concerned - coal-fired power stations are fair game.

In the wake of Rudd's decision, some in the environment movement are talking about a return to people power. They are talking not just about individual action but national campaigns of "direct action": protests, civil disobedience, making life hard for coal-fired power stations. They are talking about moving out of the boardroom and back to front-line action. They know that they will be risking jail.

I wouldn't bet on it.

A similar shift is happening globally. As the Crikey website mentioned recently, a man managed to walk into a British coal and oil-fired power station and shut down a whole turbine. "No new coal" was on the note he left.

This glorifying of criminal action is incredible for a supposedly serious newspaper. All I hope is that the courts, at least in Australia, treat such "civil disobedience" as what it is: criminal action that requires suitable punishment. That everyone should be equal before the law is a fundamental tenet of Western democracy, and to lose it for the sake of nebulous "climate change" claims would be a disaster.

But in the end, however, we discover the whole rant is built on thin air, as the sources of her climate (mis-)information are revealed: James "Let's massage our data retrospectively" Hansen and Al "High Priest of Global Warming, who, by the way, won't debate the issues with anyone" Gore. She has swallowed the alarmist agenda whole - well, this is The Age after all.

Read it here if you can bear it.