James Delingpole
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Well, I’ll tell you. It’s because the sooner they can persuade the world that the debate is over, the sooner they’ll be able to inflict on us their self-hating, breast-beating, hair-shirt agenda, viz: every upland beauty spot to be destroyed by windfarms; 4 x 4 owners to be fed to starving polar bears stranded on melting ice floes; Mukharabat-style torture blocks to be built for householders who flout stringent recycling laws; the Western capitalist economy to be dragged back to the agrarian age; all meat to be phased out and replaced by tofu by 2025; etc.
I wish I were joking. Eco-fundamentalism is probably the greatest threat to our way of life after Islamism, and what’s so terrifying is the way that, more and more, its shrill and hysterical claims are passing unchallenged by a gullible public, bandwagon-jumping politicians and a compliant media.
Climate Change: Britain Under Threat was typical. Though it did temper its scary predictions with the odd ‘could’ and ‘might’, the firm impression it gave was that by 2080 our summer temperatures will be akin to those of Crete in August, our lovely great crested newts will all be dead, our ptarmigans’ winter plumage will be useless because there won’t be any snow, and half our cities will be under water because of all the extra flash-flooding somehow generated by the predicted temperature rise of 4.5ÞC.
Normally with TV you can forgive a bit of exaggeration: they were hardly going to commission a programme called Climate Change: But Not So You’d Notice, were they? But what I thought especially dangerous about this one was its ingenious deployment of David Attenborough as chief presenter. So thoroughly have we all grown to love and trust Attenborough over the years that if he suddenly told us the tall things with long necks were elephants and not, as previously thought, giraffes, we’d believe him. Imagine, then, the effect of him standing emotively in front of a coal-fired power station and confiding in his whispery, sorrowful voice that, yes, climate change basically is our fault and we haven’t got a prayer — well, I can’t imagine a TV-owning household in the land that hasn’t now thrown in its lot with the swivel-eyed eco-loons.
Should I Really Give Up Flying? Can’t say it’s a question that has been preying on my mind much, of late, and if it’s ever crossed yours I’d suggest you need your head examining. Which doesn’t say much for the Prince of Wales’s recent decision to reduce his Carbon Footprint (dread concept!) by cancelling his annual Klosters skiing holiday. Did he do it because he genuinely believes all that guff or because he’d allowed himself to be bullied by the eco-fascist lobby? Either way it augurs ill for his kingship.
Anyway, this programme made a good point which I thought ought to have been pretty obvious to those British people who agonise about the effect their carbon footprints are wreaking on the planet, viz: nothing we do is going to make the blindest bit of difference, not with 1 billion Indians cottoning on fast to the joys of air travel. One Indian airline is buying a plane a month for the next 30 months, while the owner of Kingfisher lager has ordered another 50.
You could make a similar point about Chinese coal-fired power stations (currently opening at the rate of one every five days) and Chinese coal mines. Guess how many of the latter they’ve got at the moment. Go on, have a guess. Thirty thousand. So it’s just as well, isn’t it, that the Chinese are a famously biddable race, always willing to put the interests of the West and Mother Nature before their own economic needs? And that middle-class Indians are all going to go, ‘Nice though it might be to enjoy the fruits of our thriving economy, we have decided to forgo motor transport, cheap power and air travel because An Inconvenient Truth was such a moving, persuasive film’? Otherwise we might be in trouble.
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