IT must be a tipping point in the climate debate when a senior Shell executive notices something odd about the green activists with whom he has been consorting.

David Hone, Shell UK's Melbourne-born "senior climate change adviser", went to an academic conference on "radical emission reduction strategies" in London on December 10-11.

He concluded that he had fallen among eco-idiots wanting to remould society from the ground up.

Hone, also a director of the Emissions Trading Association, has a background in oil- and shipping-trade markets. One explanation for his blog outburst could be that he was still in shock from the collapse of carbon pricing and trading schemes at the Warsaw IPCC conference. Hone wrote: "This was a room of catastrophists (as in 'catastrophic global warming'), with the prevailing view, at least to my ears, that the issue could only be addressed by the complete transformation of the global energy and political systems, with the latter moving to one of state control and regulated consumerism. There would be no room for 'ruthless individualism' in such a world. The posters that dotted the lecture theatre lobby area covered topics as diverse as vegan diets to an eventual return to low technology hunter-gatherer societies. Much to my surprise I was not really at an emission reduction conference (despite the label saying I was), but a political ideology conference."

The conference, sadly, was no less unhinged than the UK government's legally mandated goal to cut CO2 emissions by at least 80 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050. Stand by, hardy Britons, for brown and black-outs. Australian national targets are 5 per cent emission cuts by 2020, compared with 2000 levels.

UK climate blogger Andrew Montford noted: "Hone's sudden realisation that many of his fellow-travellers in the environmental movement are completely round the twist is rather comical and you can't help but wonder where he has been in the last 20 years."

At this loopy conference, Australia's ideas on climate catastrophism were well represented. One weblink paper was from Laurence Delina and Dr Mark Diesendorf, of the Institute of Environmental Studies, University of NSW. The title? "Is wartime mobilisation a suitable policy model for rapid national climate mitigation?" No wonder Shell's Hone felt trapped in a madhouse!

media_camera Reverse evolution of climate fanatics / Artwork: John Tiedemann

Our two experts in war-time mobilisations wrote: "Climate activists assert that rapid mitigation is feasible, invoking the scale and scope of wartime mobilisation strategies. This paper draws upon historical accounts of social, technological and economic restructurings in several countries during World War II in order to investigate potential applications of wartime experience to radical, rigorous and rapid climate mitigation strategies …We find that, while wartime experience suggests some potential strategies for rapid climate mitigation in the areas of finance and labour, it also has severe limitations, resulting from its lack of democratic processes. Furthermore, since restructuring the existing socio-economic system to mitigate climate change is more complex than fighting a war and since the threat of climate change is less obvious to non-scientists, it is unlikely the public will be unified in support of such executive action …"

Yep, that could be right.

Another participant was Professor John Wiseman, of Melbourne University's Sustainable Society Institute, whose weblink talk was titled, ''Winning the climate war: removing political roadblocks to radical emissions reductions''.

I particularly enjoyed a portrait of Professor Wiseman at an Australian conference last October, shown alongside a slide projection quoting excitable green activist Miriam Lyons: "The highest priority action for achieving a rapid transition to a just health and resilient post-carbon future is to sculpt visions of the future that are beautiful, and lifelike enough to fall in love with." (Needless to say, Ms Lyons is a regular guest on Radio National's Drive and Outsiders programs, along with ABC-TV's Q&A and The Drum).

Among Wiseman's authorships is ''Hope, Despair and Transformation: Climate Change and the Promotion of Mental Health and Wellbeing''. Hopefully the absence of global warming since 1997 has restored to sanity the victims of climate scare campaigns.

Another Aussie was Dr Jane O'Sullivan, of the University of Queensland, whose topic was, "Reducing emissions through family planning and women's empowerment." A gung-ho person on carbon taxes, Dr O'Sullivan shows symptoms of Life of Brian's People's Front of Judea divisiveness, being "frustrated by the tangled web of misconceptions and the determination of environmental activists to regard any criticism of the cap-and-trade proposal as climate change denial."

However, our Aussie presenters seem conservative compared to the Poms.

Typical of the green contingent was Pete Brace, an IT nerd and seven-year careerist in computer games, who wound up three years ago in a community called Tinkers Bubble which prohibits fossil fuels. His ambition is zero emissions plus a high quality of life. The whole show, including David Hone's epiphany, would be funny - except that taxpayers, including Australia's, must have funded 90 per cent of it.

Tony Thomas is a writer for Quadrant, where this piece first appeared.