Wow, the Kool-Aid must be coming in by the tanker load to the Crikey bunker.

How can a publication that places so much store on economics turn around and publish ludicrous claims that the US must cut carbon emissions 100% by 2020 and the rest of the first world by 2030 and China by 2035?

How many people have to die from shutting down civilisation before the climate fascists will be happy?

Crikey houses within its four walls the Eureka Report. I assume most if not all the staff there are well versed in economics and would look at a statement such as “America must cut emissions 100% by 2020” and know that it will end in complete economic collapse, untold wars, and the eventual death of millions if not billions of people.

The climate debate as fostered by Crikey in 2009 has gone off the rails and is no longer a credible force for meaningful debate. It has joined the ranks of the political nutters.

It’s this extremism to the debate that is leading to so many people just turning off. Humans are not as stupid as the hard left and hard right so often abuses them as being. Modern humans are well equipped with a BS meter and when they read claims that we will all be ruined if we don’t cut emissions by 100% in 10 years — they can clearly see that this is polemic rubbish that most people will just roll their eyes and think this is crazy talk and stop listening.

This is the problem with the approach of the green left to this topic. It could be seen yet again in this week’s rant from the Australia Institute. Paragraph after paragraph of assertions that contain not a single objective statement. Just endless subjective perversions of the debate by non-scientists armed with PHDs in the Liberal Arts.

My own background in politics is the green left from the late ’70s. I was there on the anti-uranium rides, the anti-whales sit ins, the save-the-forest blockades. And today I run a renewable energy business and a mainstream science and technology news service that reports the news and leaves it to the reader to decide. Old-fashioned and boring I know, but I can sleep at night knowing I have not debased science and economics with the nonsense that equally fills the blogosphere of the loony right as it does the the wacky left.

Crikey is a solid publication that offers great coverage of many topics, but it has to move up the food chain and stop parroting the idiotic assertions of the dark greens that the world is about to end unless we shut down civilisation by 2020 — which, come to think of it, would pretty much end the world as we know it. Maybe that’s the real aim of the climate fascists and their brave and fearless leadership seen in the likes of Clive Hamilton and Christine Milne.

Simon Mansfield is the publisher of TerraDaily.com and SpaceDaily.com