The thin green line: cross it at your peril

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  Amander Baillieu

  The thin green line: cross it at your peril

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Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

As rival magazines started to crank out the usual unquestioning pieces in the run-up to Copenhagen, I doubted if all architects agreed with their institute’s line. I had recently talked to a scientist, newly retired from the Met Office, who said he thought the emphasis on CO2 concentration was ‘misplaced’ and told me, off the record, that the Met’s new computerised climate models did not tally with the old models.

I wrote my column suggesting that the reason so few architects had turned up to listen to Hillary Benn, the Energy Secretary, was ‘a weariness with a government that trots out the same line year after year — that climate change is predominantly man-made — without allowing this claim to be challenged, and despite the growing wealth of scientific evidence that it is not’.

The reaction was swift and shocking. The UK Green Building Council — an organisation whose role I’d always found a mystery — finally had a target. Me. Its chief executive was incandescent and wanted ‘right of reply’; while its head of advocacy sent the first of many emails ticking me off for my bad behaviour. How could I be so out of touch with our elected public servants?

I went out for a lunch and later received an email from the Guardian’s architecture correspondent, Jonathan Glancey: ‘Well done questioning climate change orthodoxy.’ Presumably not a sentiment he can openly express when he’s in the office. Late on a Friday night the bloggers, fortified by a few drinks, really got going. I soon realised that what I saw as provocative journalism had put me in the camp of the climate change deniers — a sort of outer darkness from which you can only come back if you undergo ‘re-education’ and a public apology.

Along with the anonymous Riba member who said I should have the word ‘bitch’ tattooed across my forehead, my critics said I was clearly mad, dangerous, and most likely in the pay of the petrochemical industry. ‘Calling for debate on this issue is like calling for debate on evolution. The debate is settled,’ thundered one. ‘How impertinent, disobedient and ungrateful,’ wrote another. That night I dreamt about George Monbiot.

At a Downing Street reception, hosted by Gordon Brown to mark Riba’s 175th anniversary, architects came up to me, and whispered ‘Well done’. It seems I did have some supporters, more maybe than I thought. I had dinner afterwards with Paul Finch, the new chairman of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe), the New Labour quango. ‘I liked your article,’ he said, once we were safely out of No. 10. He admitted Cabe had drifted far too far into climate change issues and hinted that when he takes over next month they would take a back seat.

Meanwhile, the Guardian had warned me (via Twitter) that it had me in its sights and I was to be the subject of a blog. Missing the fact that I support low-energy buildings and the need to conserve natural resources, it said ‘I had laid bare my utter contempt for environmentalism’, which soon turned into a vicious verbal punch-up. After the initial shock of watching as the comments poured in, I came to the conclusion that the journalists who work on the Guardian environment desk would do my job for me.

The people who flock to its website to hunt down the unbeliever make its cause look even less credible. They claim to argue from a scientific viewpoint but reject anything that conflicts with this, regardless of its value. But what they hate with a passion is a journalist like myself entering the fray. How dare I?

But I did dare, and I have no regrets. The whole episode highlighted the hysterical intellectual climate, the hatred of debate, and the surprising number of people who whisper that they don’t actually agree. It’s not particularly pleasant being attacked by colleagues, but if magazines and newspapers can’t be places where ideas are debated, criticised, analysed and tossed about without restraint, where is this debate to be had?

Amanda Baillieu is editor of Building Design.