Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future

by James Delingpole

  In this, our trust has been exploited and betrayed. Like the majority of citizens in free democracies we hold – despite the occasional profession of cynicism – a reasonable measure of faith in our public officials. We expect that when they warn us of a major new threat, they have done their research and they are speaking the truth. We don’t expect them to make major policy decisions based on the dubious word of a handful of biased activists. Nor do we expect them to abuse the apparatus of the state to try to quell our entirely justified doubts with a deluge of disinformation and propaganda.

  I’m thinking, for example, of the government’s 2009 ‘Bedtime Stories’ advertising campaign, organised by the Department of Energy and Climate Change. This propaganda exercise squandered £6m of taxpayers’ money to scare kids and misinform grown-ups with a pack of lies about ‘climate change’. After nearly a thousand complaints from members of the public, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled that at least two of the posters had breached its ‘legal, decent, honest, truthful’ guidelines.

  One poster said: ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. There was none as extreme weather due to climate change had caused a drought.’ Beneath was written: ‘Extreme weather conditions such as flooding, heat waves and storms will become more frequent and intense.’

  The other said: ‘Rub a dub dub, three men in a tub – a necessary course of action due to flash flooding caused by climate change.’ It was captioned: ‘Climate change is happening. Temperature and sea levels are rising. Extreme weather events such as storms, floods and heat waves will become more frequent and intense. If we carry on at this rate, life in twenty-five years could be very different.’

  If the ASA had been better informed and more robust, it also would have censured the most offensive advertisement of the lot – a TV ad campaign in which a father is shown reading a bedtime story to his sweet little girl:

  …Scientists said it was being caused by too much CO2 which went into the sky when the grown-ups used energy. They said it was getting dangerous. Its effects were happening faster than they had thought. Some places could even disappear under the sea. And it was the children of the land who’d have to live with the horrible consequences…

  The little girl frowns as she looks at the illustrations in the picture book: a scary black-fanged carbon monster ravaging the drowning land; a cartoon cat floating on an upturned table, reaching out in vain to stop a cartoon dog – or is it a rabbit? – from disappearing beneath the grim, grey floodwater.

  Beyond the high production values, it’s the kind of ad you can imagine generating a warm glow of recognition in, say, Nazi Germany or Czechoslovakia during the Soviet occupation, or Kim Jong Il’s North Korea. But in a supposedly liberal Western democracy like Britain, it’s surely odd that in the depths of a recession, a government with a massive structural deficit should yet consider it proper to spend £6m peddling blatant lies in order to soften up the public for yet more green taxes and regulations, which an increasing proportion of that public suspects to be unnecessary.

  This is the stage we have now reached in the public debate on ‘climate change’. The more sceptical and better informed we ordinary punters become about ‘Climate Change’, the more our governments strive to push, bully, brainwash, coax, seduce and bribe us in the opposite direction. It’s as if we’re living in parallel universes – the real world you and I inhabit, and the fantasy world occupied by the political class where apparently Climategate never happened, the scientists are still trustworthy and the consensus is as strong as ever.

  Consider, for example, this statement made in Britain’s House of Lords in July 2010 by Lord Marland, the Energy and Climate Change Under-Secretary for the coalition government:

  We must have two million heat pumps by 2020. We must have bioenergy, which will create 100,000 jobs at a value of £116m. Wind alone should create 130,000 jobs at a value of £36bn. At a time when the country needs investment, these are heartening numbers.

  Heartening, perhaps, to the blissfully ignorant – but not to anyone familiar with the disastrous experience in Spain, where for every such ‘green job’ created by government subsidy, another 2.2 jobs were lost in the real economy. Heartening, maybe, to those unaware of the shortage of specialist engineers and British-based wind farm manufacturing plants (which means the majority of those jobs and economic activity will be created in countries like China). Heartening to anyone still clueless enough to imagine that ‘alternative energy’ is anything other than an alternative to energy, that wind farms aren’t a costly, grotesquely inefficient eco-blight and that any of the government’s draconian reductions in carbon emissions will make the slightest bit of difference to the global climate anyway.

  Increasingly when you read what is said and done by our governments in the name of ‘combating climate change’, you have to pinch yourself in disbelief. In school history classes, we are taught to look back with a mixture of pity and superior scorn at the outrageous and destructive self-denial of Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China. Yet if one substitutes ‘carbon emissions reductions’ and ‘green jobs’ for ‘tractor production targets’ and ‘five-year plans’, you realise that exactly the same brand of wishful thinking and economically suicidal lunacy has managed to worm its way into twenty-first-century representative democracy.

  Among the many wise individuals who have seen through this political madness is the author of a 2003 book called Statecraft. In a passage entitled ‘Hot Air and Global Warming’, the author pours scorn on the ‘doomsters’ who exaggerate sea level rises, demonise CO2 and ignore the lessons of the Medieval Warm Period that global warming is more a blessing than a curse. She goes on to argue that these distortions in the science are being used to advance an anti-capitalist, left-wing political agenda, which threatens the progress and prosperity of mankind.

  And this clear-sighted woman’s name?

  Baroness Thatcher – perhaps better known under her old name Margaret Thatcher: ex-industrial chemist, ex-Prime Minister … and very, very much ex-believer in that frightful gibberish she was gulled into spouting on that regrettable evening at Fishmongers’ Hall in the City of London on 27 September 1988.

  FOUR

  IN THE PAY OF BIG KOCH

  Carter Roberts, President and CEO, World Wildlife Fund Inc., Total Compensation (2009): $455,147

  Frances Beinecke, President, Natural Resources Defense Council, Total Compensation (2009): $432,742

  Fred Krupp, President, Environmental Defense Fund, Total Compensation (2009): $423,359

  James Delingpole, Blogger, Daily Telegraph, Total Compensation (2010): less than $24,000

  One of my favourite late afternoon pastimes – before the witching hour of 6pm and the moment arrives for my customary foie gras on toasted Poilane bread served with Château d’Yquem and poached gull’s or leatherback turtle’s eggs (depending on the season) – is to lie face down on my bespoke Philippe Starck massage table, while my Crimean masseuse Ivana pours hot oil onto my back and gives me a really good pummelling, to the soothing sounds of my personal string quartet in the billiard room of my private wing of the modest £50m Regency townhouse I own on the edge of Regent’s Park. It’s a tough life but such are the sacrifices a fellow has to make when he is funded by Big Oil.

  I wish.

  The more prosaic truth about Climategate is that it has been the biggest financial disaster of my career. Instead of being able to write on any number of different subjects for diverse newspapers, as I used to in my money-earning days, I now spend huge chunks of my time trawling round the internet, boning up on science papers, keeping up with the latest climate research and finding new material for my Telegraph blog.

  Yes, it’s nice having a popular blog, I suppose. But unfortunately blogs don’t pay. Ask Jo Nova, ask Richard North, ask Bishop Hill, ask Steve McIntyre, ask Anthony Watts, ask Donna Laframboise. Most of them can barely raise enough money to pay for their running costs, let alone make a modest living out of
it. There may be all sorts of reasons why we’re involved in climate scepticism – love, duty, fun, the challenge, masochism – but the money most definitely isn’t one of them.

  If you want to make a living, then you should definitely choose to be a Warmist rather than a sceptic. In Warmism, there are grants, salaries and jobs galore. In scepticism, even now that the tide of opinion is beginning to turn, there is little but the modest satisfaction of knowing you are right.

  Before Climategate I wrote articles about cooking, men’s fashion, books, TV, rock music, drugs, politics, cars, motorbikes, popular culture. I did film reviews, interviews and restaurant criticism. I went down coal mines, I dived with great white sharks, I got to hang with Jimmy Page and Robert Plant at the Sunset Marquee in Hollywood. I travelled to Tirana, to the Skeleton Coast, from the souks of Essaouira to the brothels of Accra. I wrote darkly funny autobiographical books like Thinly Disguised Autobiography and darkly funny political books like How to Be Right and darkly funny war books like Coward On the Beach. I was nobody’s bitch. I was free. I wrote about whatever I wanted to write about because that was the kind of writer I was. Mister Generalist. Mister Surprising. Mister Hey-I-Wonder-What-He’s-Going-To-Turn-His-Hand-To-This-Week?

  Not any more, though. Today, tomorrow, next week, next month and – oh God, I hope not but quite possibly – next year, I am, and will be, Mister Climate Change Sceptic. If you’re a sceptic yourself, I’m one of those bloggers you rely on to give you the latest sceptic news. And if you’re not a sceptic, I’m one of those bloggers you love to hate. Either way, and there’s no getting out of it, global warming is my shtick.

  Normally in journalism acquiring a speciality is helpful and financially rewarding. If you’re a movie buff, you get to go to all the advance screenings, and you land the reviews, the interviews, the on-location reports and the Hollywood junkets; in everything from theatre and music to fashion and sport, much the same rules apply. Once you’ve established yourself as an expert, your knowledge base and contacts book and reputation earn you a string of lucrative commissions.

  With climate scepticism, unfortunately, these rules don’t apply. You can be as fluent in sunspots and negative feedbacks and isostatic rebounds as a motoring specialist is on torque, handling and pistons, but it will make sod-all difference to your ability to get paid commissions.

  The reason is that in Britain – and the same rules apply from Australia to the US – almost all the coverage given to AGW in the mainstream media (MSM) is written from a Warmist perspective. This is true even of my own blog-hosting newspaper, the Daily Telegraph. It employs an Environment Editor and an Environment Correspondent, both of whom (unlike me) are on full salaries; both of whom are committed Warmists; both of whom get to publish stories on the subject in print (as opposed to a mere blog) six days a week.

  Even if I had a really juicy climate story, there are very few publications that would pay me for it. They are limited to the Daily Mail and the Mail On Sunday – though they don’t run sceptical stuff that often, and competition when they do is stiff – the Express and the Sunday Express, and The Spectator. On top of that, you might be able to earn £75 a throw here and there, by appearing on the odd BBC TV or radio show as their token evil climate ‘denier’. None of this will turn you into the next Bill Gates.

  Can you see now, from a journalist’s perspective, why climate change scepticism would be the last route you’d want to take if you really were in it for the money? The ratio of time-spent-on-research to number-of-paid-articles-published is about as rubbish as it gets. It’s a journalist’s nightmare. It’s a journalist’s bank manager’s nightmare. Above all – just ask my wife – it’s a journalist’s spouse’s nightmare.

  Mind you, there’s always Big Oil, isn’t there? Big Oil, which according to environmental activist George Monbiot is largely responsible for funding the lies and disinformation fomented by the foolish media. In one of his Guardian articles, he sought to prove his point with four ‘shocking’ examples:

  1. In 1991 a group of fossil fuel companies set up a group called Information Company for the Environment (ICE) which spent $510,000 on a campaign designed to sow doubt in the minds of the vulnerable about AGW. Its target groups were ‘Older, less educated males’ and ‘younger, lower income women’. [!]

  2. Climate sceptic Dr Pat Michaels, of the Cato Institute, was once paid $100,000 by the Intermountain Rural Electric Association. [!!]

  3. The Heartland Institute – which received grants from ExxonMobil totalling $676,000 over a period of more than a decade – once published a list of ‘500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares’. And forty-five of them got upset that they’d been included on the list. [!!!]

  4. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, which received a little more than $2,000,000 from ExxonMobil between 1998–2005, was shown (in a memo leaked in 2004 to Harpers magazine) to have collaborated with the Bush administration to discredit a report on climate change by the Environmental Protection Agency. [!!!!]

  Those ‘!!!!’ I inserted were ironic, by the way. This wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been struck by the Grand-Canyon-sized gulf between the momentousness of Monbiot’s apparent ‘scandal’ and the ho-hum banality of what he actually reveals. But for its bizarre mix of absurdity and hypocrisy, that particular column really is one of the Great Moonbat’s more collectable pieces of lunacy. It’s the eco-equivalent of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lecturing the West on human rights abuses, moments after he’s had another thirteen-year old schoolgirl hanged from a crane for ‘adultery’.

  Why? Well, apart from the fairly obvious point that, of course, big industry is going to fund right-wing think tanks to push an agenda that favours industry over left-leaning, anti-competitive, regulatory bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency, let us do the math.

  Let’s add up all those shocking figures: They come to a grand total of $3,286,000.

  Now let’s give George the benefit of the doubt and assume these aren’t the only occasions when the fossil fuel industry/Big Oil/sinister vested interests have bankrolled the cause of scepticism. If we are to believe the UK campaigning organisation Campaign Against Climate Change (honorary president: one G. Monbiot), the figure may well be at least twenty times higher.

  ‘An insight into how sceptics work – follow the funding,’ it urges on its website. It says: ‘It has recently been revealed that Koch Industries, a little-known, privately owned US oil company, paid nearly US$50m to climate denial groups and individuals between 1997 and 2008. In a similar period ExxonMobil paid out around $17m to $23m.’

  Actually when you examine this a bit more closely – the figures come from Greenpeace – you notice that the sums went towards funding conservative think tanks generally (Mercatus Center; Americans for Prosperity Foundation; the Heritage Foundation; Cato Institute) rather than the cause of Evil Climate Change DenialismTM specifically. But let’s be generous and let that detail pass. In fact, let’s be über-generous, and more than double that $73m total. Let’s say that since 1997, Big Oil, Big Koch, Big Coal and their Satanic Industrial Confreres have splurged a total of $200m to fund Evil Climate Change DenialismTM. Does that sound sufficiently scary? It jolly well should do. Not even Michael Mann’s friends at RealClimate have managed to drum up a figure that high.

  So how are we sceptics going to answer it, this damning charge that is levelled against us with such wearisome frequency by our Warmist critics that they evidently imagine it’s an argument-clincher? Well, I suppose the first line of defence would be to point out that they are guilty of what philosopher Jamie Whyte calls the ‘Motive Fallacy’. This is the demonstrably false notion that if you have some particular interest (financial or otherwise) in holding an opinion this must automatically render it untrue.

  Whyte offers a simple example in his book Bad Thoughts: A Guide to Clear Thinking: ‘A man may stand to gain a great deal of peace and quiet from telling his wife that he loves her. But he may really love
her nevertheless.’ Equally, the fact that I am heavily in the pay of Big Koch – I’m not really: this is just a fantasy of mine, and I like saying ‘Big Koch’ even though the joke isn’t as funny as it could be because the Koch brothers’ surname is in fact pronounced ‘Coke’ – does not necessarily mean my argument is corrupt.

  What we see being employed here, in fact, is a classic technique beloved by left-liberals, greenies and greenie liberal-lefties alike. It’s known as ‘closing down the argument’. Rather than engage their opponents in a debate they probably cannot win, they instead duck the issue by impugning their opponent’s motives. The technique says: ‘This right-wing person in the pay of Big Oil is so unspeakably vile that his despicable views cannot be taken seriously.’

  You find it in most areas of political debate. Worried about immigration? You’re a racist. Want your kids to get a good education? You’re an elitist. Suspect all the fuss about AGW might be a little overdone? You’re just the kind of scummy Nazi-sympathising revisionist who thinks Hitler didn’t murder six million Jews…

  The term ‘denier’, it goes without saying, was designed explicitly to provoke comparisons with Holocaust Denial. Shortly after Climategate, I took part in a debate with George Monbiot. When I put this point to him he – funnily enough – denied he was making any such connection. So I gently reminded him of a Guardian article he’d written in 2006: ‘Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and unacceptable as Holocaust denial.’

  Now, this might seem to be a get-at-George-Monbiot chapter, which was never my intention. He only figures so prominently here because, as one of the green movement’s favourite authors, columnists and spokesmen, he has become its perfect synecdoche. As Monbiot thinks, speaks and opines, so do greenies across the universe. This view of the AGW debate – as being essentially a battle in which selfless, honest, caring, science-respecting greens are pitted against a network of corrupt, irresponsible sceptics in the pay of the Carbon Industry – is not some maverick theory dreamt up by Monbiot on a particularly crazy day to get more hits for his blog. It’s how most greens really do see it: a terrible THEM vs US conspiracy by Big Business to hide the truth and destroy the world.