Thank you for your response Jasper.

Clearly we disagree. I believe people are smarter than you give them credit for and can discriminate quite well between bogus and real information although at times uncertainty can make judgements cloudy. It seems common to me for the highly engaged and/or educated to view the lesser engaged or educated as empty vessels and berate them for it. Our lessers know this and will happily bloody our arrogant noses when they get the chance.

I think the majority of UK/European voters do accept environmental issues are real but may not prioritise them. That is a problem to solve

No, mate. Their ideas won because they used their deep pockets to pay people to parrot and broadcast and inculcate their insane ideas – the insanest of them being denial that the laws of physics apply to the carbon-climate cycle, but there are crazy ideas aplenty in Kochworld.

Had the Kochs had other ideas, those ideas would have won, instead. They simply used their insanely vast financial resources to programme the institutions and the opinions of the right-wing opinion-leaders, and through them, the clueless “heartland” voters… greatly assisted by their keen ally Rupert Murdoch (and a few other media tycoons).

It was the money that did it. The ideas were secondary. People will parrot whatever ideas you like, if you pay them to do it. If you can pay to have entire institutions set up to parrot your crank ideas, you’ll get results. Consider this: it isn’t just the Koch Brothers’ crank ideas that have been propagated through money and organisational capacity. So have wildly crank ideas like those of the Mormon Church, which is a wealthy, thriving organization … and it thrives because its members give it 10% of their income.

Money doesn’t just talk – it talks loudest and longest, and drowns out all other voices, including the all-too-quite Voice of Reason and the Whispers of Conscience.