The difficulty and importance of the global warming campaign is many times greater than every other environmental struggle. Controlling carbon pollution requires a wholesale industrial restructuring... In the face of the failure of mainstream environmentalism to achieve significant progress on the biggest issue it will ever face, we need a new environmental radicalism.... A wave of environmental radicalism, of uncivil disobedience, will have succeeded when the conservative press begin praising Bob Brown and Christine Milne as voices of reason and moderation, as indeed they are.... Sometimes coaxing the public to your point of view reaches an immovable barrier. Sometimes people must be jolted out of their complacency by militancy, even if that means a period of rancour, turmoil and danger... So let me leave you with a final thought. The historic responsibility of environmentalism cannot be overstated. Beyond women’s suffrage, beyond civil rights, its mission is nothing less than saving humanity as a whole. Today’s environment movement is no place for the faint-hearted.

I've worried before that Professor Clive Hamilton, the former Greens candidate, has within him a totalitarian instinct . Now come more classic signs of a man so convinced of the rightness of his cause that it justifies the use of force - or at least the deliberate breaking of democratically agreed laws:Some people wonder why the great revolutions, launched by people convinced of their moral superiority, usually end in tyranny and cruelty. It's because the "good" who seize power feel licensed to crush the "evil". (Thanks to reader Craig.)