September 19th 2008
The New Twinkie Defense
G
lobal warming has given us, most incredibly, a new version of the Twinkie defense. Fellow blogger Elvis Julep writes:
On September 11, a British court found six Greenpeace activists not guilty of causing over $50,000 in damage to a UK coal plant. It was never in dispute that the “Kingsnorth Six” did what they were accused of nor that they caused damage and endangered lives, including their own. They did it and are proud of it. Still, they were exonerated by a British court. Here’s why:
The activists argued that they possessed a “lawful excuse” for trying to shut the plant down, because they were trying to prevent the coal plant from causing greater property damage around the world by way of global warming. An example of lawful excuse, as cited by the prosecution and quoted in a Greenpeace blog, would be breaking a window to rescue a child from a burning car.
Yes, you read that correctly.
I’m not going to freak out too much … yet. It’s England, not America. Incredibly bad decisions get overturned. Judges get impeached.
Were the decision to stand, it would mean that English law would allow crime based on an unproven and unprovable belief. This would not only open the door to an assault of similar crimes against property - and even persons - with no ability to use the courts and prisons as deterrence.
Why stop at “lawful excuse” for global warming related crimes? I believe aliens are using Big Ben as their homing signal for an imminent attack, so I plead lawful excuse to the non-crime of blowing that sucker up. I believe if my ex-wife continues to live, she’s going to make some other poor bloke’s life a living Hell, so what’s the difference between breaking a window to save a child and breaking her neck to save a man?
Worse because it’s a more direct and applicable outgrowth of the decision, the court has branded conventional power generation in England criminal - based, again, on an unproven and unprovable hypothesis. It’s easy enough to prove that death and economic disaster would follow if England’s conventional power sources were lawfully excused out of business. People would die of heat or cold, or because hospitals couldn’t function, and England’s economy would quickly return to pre-industrial levels because even if sufficient alternative energy sources were on the verge (that’s a joke, feel free to laugh), it would take conventional power to get them manufactured and installed. But that proof apparently cannot stand up against the mere belief in global warming.
We eagerly await the appeal, and the jail time these Greenpeace fruitcakes must serve, but our worries about the fate of England grow and grow.
Posted in England, Environmentalism, Global warming, Law, Uncategorized | No Comments yet » | 
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