Telegraph.
Owen Paterson is facing calls to apologise after claiming that he was “burnt in effigy” by green protesters when he was temporarily blinded from an illness.Odd, they only want him to apologise about the effigy which may (or may not) have been burned, not the other claims he made which were far more serious. Still, I suppose if you can force someone to apologise for one part of a claim they can make it look like he's apologising for all.
The former Environment secretary said Greenpeace had set an image of him on fire in protest as his controversial plans to control TB in cattle by culling badgers.
Mr Paterson made the claim as part of an attack on professional environmental campaigners who repeatedly lobbied him when he was in office.
These were “the highly paid globe-trotters of the Green Blob who besieged me with their self-serving demands, many of which would have harmed the natural environment”, he said.
“I soon realised that the greens and their industrial and bureaucratic allies are used to getting things their own way.
The problem for the enviroloonies is that Paterson's tale is credible, it has the ring of truth about it as we've all seen the tales of the swampies breaking the law to try and prevent any kind of progress. We also saw the results of their efforts in the Environment Dept in Somerset with the flooding when EU directives influenced by the Green movement in Brussels caused rivers to silt up and the flood plains become water traps again.
So my first thoughts on what to do if I were Paterson would simply be to ignore Greenpeace, but after a few more minutes thought, I reckon a good 'f*#k you!' wouldn't go amiss either.
The Green movement like all leftard movements are not about saving the planet, they are about taking over and forcing us to comply to their will. They are dangerous because they hide their intent behind what appears to be good intentions.
Like all leftard groups through, they simply cannot be trusted.
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I was bemused to hear a Fiends of the Earth spokesman on BBC Radio 4 the other day saying that their opinions were driven by the science.
Now I suspect that if a selection of the general public, (with little science training), were presented with a range of political and social issues and asked to say what position they thought FoE would take on them they would do far better than chance.
The position of FoE and Greenpeace is far better known than that of any of our flexible, vote-seeking main parties. "Policy based evidence making" sums them both up; the science is of the selective variety.
The badger cull plans are really only controversial with the hard of thinking. Everyone else (i.e. farmers, biologists, people who can count up to twenty without removing their shoes) can see the logic behind the action.
Badgers catch zoonotic TB very easily, and don't respond very well to it, immunologically. All a badger seems to do is produce antibodies (the standard anti-bacterial response) whereas TB hides so effectively that antibodies don't work. Cows use the anti-parasite inflammatory response on TB, and this works well.
For this reason, trying to vaccinate badgers against TB doesn't work. All you end up with is a badger which dies of TB somewhat more slowly than it otherwise would, since free TB in its bloodstream gets killed, but everywhere else it thrives.
The basic problem, exacerbated by enviroloons, is that we don't know how big the badger population actually is and nor do we know what percentage are infected with TB at any one time, nor do we know what effect endemic TB has on a badger population. For all we know, an endemic TB population may be very patchy, with infected setts dying out over a year or so, then getting re-occupied by uninfected animals from elsewhere. We just don't know, courtesy of enviroloons raising merry hell every time anyone tries to do any basic research.
All we know in actual fact is that extermination policies work well for getting rid of TB. Several large-scale experiments the aimed at locally extincting badgers showed that this works like a charm for stopping TB breakdowns in cows (whether all the TB in a herd is caught from badgers, or whether some is cow-to-cow inside a herd we also don't know).
Finally, we do know that BCG vaccination of cows vaguely works, but isn't good enough to be useful. It provides immunity for a year in only about 40-60% of cows, so that's that one off the table too.
Well Greenpeace tried to actually BAN Chlorine, an element in the Periodic Table. No amount of wishful thinking would make Element Number 17 disappear from the Universe, not even theirs.
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