Instead of gluing themselves to roads and throwing paint at priceless artworks; the mullahs simply fired a barrage of munitions at random oil tankers.

As such, the trade route for 20 per cent of the world’s oil has been reduced to a trickle.

MOVEMENT

The mullahs’ objective differs only slightly from those of their would-be emulators in the protest movement.

The former wants to destroy the West for being too decadent, the latter wants to destroy the West for not being decadent enough.

But, their desired method is the same: grind developed countries to a halt by choking off the fuel that keeps them operating.

And they’ve done it!

More than 23,000 international flights have been cancelled, and motorists are queueing up to panic-buy petrol at unprecedented prices or reducing their use of cars altogether.

Life in the indulgently lazy West is suddenly imbued with an extra level of panic and uncertainty.

So, you’d think that this would be a moment of triumph for the protesters, right?

After all those years of yelling at car drivers, waving banners about rampant consumerism and chaining themselves to coal trains, why aren’t they on the streets celebrating the fact that they are now finally getting what they wanted?

Their beloved planet is now enjoying a slight breather from humanity’s relentless polluting.

Two reasons. One, this brief interruption to oil consumption was caused by US President Donald Trump’s attack on Iran.

He’s not the most die-hard warrior for planetary health.

He would never stoop so low as to ally himself, even indirectly, with a man whose own carbon footprint is bigger than the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The other reason is that the West’s home-grown protesters are actually afraid of achieving their own goals, although they would rather die than admit it.

The more affluent among them are the Teal-voting Karens who live in inner-city mansions.

The Karens’ political activism is carefully confined, however, to voting for Teals like Zali Steggall, Monique Ryan and Allegra Spender, whose obsession with climate action stops judiciously short of planting windmills between their constituents’ mansions.

Windmills are lovely and all that, but salubrious surroundings are lovelier. Let the people who don’t have million-dollar views look at them instead.

Unlikely though it sounds, the hypocrisy of the environmentalists at the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum is even more overt.

I was reminded about this as the nation struck up a debate this week about the importance of fuel supply and how vulnerable that supply is to geopolitics if, like Australia, you make yourself reliant on foreign sources.

There have been countless protest campaigns in Australia in recent years, but I doubt any have been as retarded as the one that came under the banner of “Fight for the Bight”, which culminated in a win for the environmentalists six years ago.

The goal was to prevent Norwegian energy company Equinor from exploring for oil and gas in deep water 400km off the beach in the middle of the Great Australian Bight.

BATSHIT

Equinor naively thought that keeping potential protesters informed about the proposal would generate goodwill and prevent their antagonists going batshit crazy.

But whoever made that decision didn’t know how batshit crazy Australian protesters already were.

Greenpeace conflated more than 100 worst-case spill scenarios into one illustration depicting a spill almost as big as the Australian continent.

This inflamed surfers from the southwest cape of WA to SA, Victoria and Tasmania and all the way up to Port Macquarie in NSW.

For most of these surfers, the oil and gas fields of Bass Strait were hundreds of kilometres closer, and had been operating without incident for more than half a century.

But Equinor’s single rig further away, far out in the Bight, somehow posed a bigger threat, inspiring a relentless campaign.

The protest featured two hilarious moments.

Firstly, former pro surfer Heath Joske flew to Oslo to tell the Norwegians how angry he and other Australian surfers were with them.

While there, he paddled a surfboard into the harbour for a photo opportunity in which he showed how angry he was.

Every stage and prop of this pantomime – including the flight to Oslo, the surfboard he used, the wetsuit that saved him catching hypothermia and the camera that recorded the moment for posterity – was made possible by oil.