"Climate warriors vidicated?" Hardly: the outcome of the case merely demonstrates that they were ineffective as well as stupid.

"Those expert managers and skilled workers, could turn their minds to the logistics of the renewables industry. Their X-Strata and Rio Tinto shareholders could still make a profit and workers would have good jobs that do not threaten our Pacific neighbours."

And after that they could get to work on making pigs fly and building a perpetual motion machine. Gosh, how easy everything is when you lack even a rudimentary knowledge of physics!

Let me also just point to Clive James's articulate -- and funny -- response to AGW: http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/3743/full

"Professor Flannery was heard all the time, and always predicting that the major cities would run out of water. The nice thing about him was that he was without guile and therefore ready to say that a certain city would run out of water in some verifiable time: say, two years. Two years later, abundant rain would be falling on that city. But he always had an explanation, and the media always liked his story best, because it was a story about Australia eventually and inevitably running out of water, even though what appeared to be water might currently be seen to be falling out of the sky. Then an awful lot of it fell on his head at once and he was finally seen to be short of credibility."

By everyone but the Federal Labor Party, that is...

yes JonJ but back in some tent out the back of nowhere in Newcastle, they're heros ..

activism eh .. what a lark

one day I guess they'll want to join the rest of society and bring up kids and will wonder at the stupidity of people who unwittingly want to damage their prospects .. but of course, these darlings will have been brought up to expect others to take responsibility for their lives and they will just demand someone make it right for them .. since they have learned you do not have to be accountable for your actions .. yay, take that lawful ordered society

Such breathless indignation. Such bravely staccato prose - Hemingwayesque, even.

"There is a change of behaviour required. The protests could stop . Those expert managers and skilled workers, could turn their minds to the logistics of the renewables industry. Their X-Strata and Rio Tinto shareholders could still make a profit and workers would have good jobs that do not threaten our Pacific neighbours. We would all win"

Even the missing full stop at the end was meaningful. Poignant, even.

We need more of this kind of journalism on OLO.

So, if your 'environmental warriors' do 'bring the fossil fuel industry to their knees', where will you get the power to run the computer you write your articles on, and the internet on which you distribute them?

And every other energy-consuming facet of your comfortable existence?

Indeed, the real victims will be the poor: without abundant, cheap energy, they will remain mired in poverty.

And their environments will suffer, as they strip the landscape for fuel.

I'm still puzzled over why the coal service bothered with these guys. The magistrate was quite right to say that a civil compensation suit should not be used to punish lunatics. All an adverse judgement would have done is draw some undeserving sympathy for them. In any case, as I know from some experience, these sort of activists are immune to reason and cannot be taught.

For them the law is fine if it supports them, but must be disobeyed if it gets in the way of expressing their extreme political beliefs.

I hope the coal service has since improved its security arrangements, which is about all it can do

They attended Court to assert they were attempting to stop coal exports to countries which use it to produce cars similar to the one they arrived in to stage the protest.

The case has upheld an important legal point: that victim's compensation should be reserved for the victims of crime (for example victims of assault), not for corporations who have been subject to a public protest but have been unable to prove to the court that they have suffered any loss of income resulting from the protest, and have also demonstrated that they don't need the compensation (by offering to donate any compensation granted to charity). This is an important decision, as increasingly corporations have been seeking new ways to silence protest. Whether you agree with the protester's stance or not, the court decision has been an important one in defending the democratic right to protest without the protesters being later harrassed by spurious "compensation" claims for an unidentifiable company loss.
However, as the atmospheric carbon pollution issue is real, and many people are genuinely concerned about it, we can expect more such protests.

Johnj,

Please enlighten me by defining the term "Carbon pollution".

There is no need to define atmospheric carbon pollution - you can look up a dictionary. On another matter, the response of plants to increased atmospheric CO2 - article on link below is one of many that establish that, unforutunately plants do not respond to increased atmospheric CO2 by growing faster: many respond by taking in less CO2. This study was done in 2006.

http://news.mongabay.com/2006/0501-ucsd.html