I thought the absolute rock bottom had been reached by the San Fransisco Chronicle’s article that global warming caused the Haiti earthquake, but only one day later, The Guardian newspaper manages to sink to new depths . . .

The Guardian newspaper has a column which argues that emitting Co2 is genocide, and equates capitalist democracy with Nazism (it probably makes some kind of sense in bizzaro-world).

The author of the column, Ms Polly Higgins, is a lawyer and activist who campaigns for laws against what she terms ‘ecocide’ – the destruction or degradation of the environment, which she places on a moral par with genocide. Her website, Trees Have Rights, lists some examples of Ecocide:

the threatened existence of the low lying Maldives due to rising sea levels;

the shrinking of the Greenland ice sheet;

the melting of the Himalayan Glaciers;

the pacific gyre, the ‘island of garbage twice the size of Texas’, slowly spinning in the ocean. (1)

Although a lawyer, Ms Higgins seems to have a problem grasping the difference between an innocent person being executed by a tyrannical regime, and someone being found guiltt of criminal damage by their peers in an open court. Discussing the recent guilty verdict a jury pronounced on several activists who broke into a coal-fired power station with the intention of shutting it down, she writes:

Sophie Scholl, a Munich University student, was executed for revealing the truth about the activities of the Nazi authorities; today 20 brave Ratcliffe whistleblowers have been sentenced at Nottingham crown court for plotting to draw attention to the truth of the activities of another German entity. This time, replace the tyranny of the Nazis with the tyranny of the energy giant E.ON. (2)

Was Ms Higgins off law college sick on the day they lectured on the idea of proportionality and justice? She doesn’t say. What she does say is that democracy and capitalism are allowing ‘Ecocide’ to take place:

climate campaigners do not have the support of the judiciary in preventing the corporate ecocide that is daily occurring under our very noses. Ecocide is permitted (as genocide was in Nazi Germany) by the government and, by dint of the global reach of modern-day transnational business, every government in the world. (2)

This, according to the Guardian newspaper article, has resulted in the tyranny of democratic capitalism:

Sixty years ago the tyranny was Nazism. Today it is pursuit of profit without moral compass or responsibility. (2)

Say what? Democratic capitalism is a tyranny? Ms Higgins clearly and repeatedly compares capitalist democracy with Nazi Germany. I don’t know about you, but I find this kind of instrumentality deeply repugnant.

At the end of it all, this article is a perfect example of what belief in global warming has done. It has allowed extremists like Ms Higgins to broadcast their fanatical views in what is supposedly a liberal publication. Having tried to label global warming sceptics as ‘deniers’ so as to equate them with holocaust deniers, they now trivialize the wholesale and deliberate, planned slaughter of people in Nazi Germany by equating it with the production of electricity which powers our schools, hospitals and homes.

This is the kind of thinking behind global warming.

1) http://www.treeshaverightstoo.com/ecocide

2) http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2011/jan/05/ecocide-law-ratcliffe?showallcomments=true#end-of-comments