So the world is getting colder – uncomfortably, perhaps dangerously so. Historically, periods of cooling have led to poor harvests, food shortages, starvation and civil unrest. Despite the advances we have made in biotechnology, the world’s total grain production still operates at no more than a 15 per cent surplus. If the wheat- and corn-growing regions of the northern hemisphere were affected by prolonged cooling – and they would be – surplus could turn to deficit in no time at all. And if those already-thin harvests were to be further blighted by another major volcanic eruption such as the one that caused ‘the Year Without a Summer’, then there would be widespread starvation around the world, especially among those communities unable to afford the inevitably massive hike in food prices. This would lead to climate-induced disaster and suffering on a scale never once experienced during the bountiful period of global warming our civilisation was lucky enough to experience between the mid-1970s and 1998.
Can anyone spot the absurdity here? Global warming is good. It has coincided with some of the most bounteous, culturally efflorescent periods in human history, including the glorious, largely peaceful recent decades now sadly past. Human beings thrive in warmth. It means we have to devote less energy to the raw business of survival and have more time to enjoy ourselves and make the great social and technological leaps, through which (unlike in cold, grim periods like the Dark Ages) each generation has grown more prosperous, longer-lived and more comfortable than the one preceding it.
In the days of our supposedly more primitive, credulous ancestors this would have gone without saying. Can you imagine a legionary, standing atop Hadrian’s Wall in the middle of an English winter, in the days before fleece, Gore-tex and Thinsulate, grumbling to a fellow soldier: ‘By Jupiter, this climate is far too mild for my liking?’ Can you imagine wool merchants in the twelfth century praying anxiously for God to restore a semblance of balance to the natural order by ridding the medieval world of this satanic period of warming? This is pure speculation, I concede. But am I right or am I right? Which sane human being, at any period throughout the 10,000 or so years our kind has spent on this planet since we emerged from the horrors of the last Ice Age, has wished for the climate to grow colder rather than warmer?
None until now. Gosh what a special generation we are! How proud of ourselves we must feel! We are the first one in all history to conquer reason and logic on such a massive scale that, as far as most of our policy-makers are concerned, black is now white and white is black; warmth something to be feared, cold something to be welcomed; abundance something to be rejected, economic stagnation something actively to be sought; reason and evidence something to be shunned, frenzied emotionalism and cheap sentiment something to be stoked and encouraged. With good reason, the US meteorologist Roy Spencer describes our current global-warming paranoia as the ‘world’s worst outbreak of mass hysteria’.
And few have been infected quite so badly as our political class. Consider my old Oxford chum, David Cameron. They say it’s a pretty terrifying experience when you wake up one morning to find your teenage friends now running the country – and I can vouch for that. But what’s more terrifying still is when one of those friends declares, upon becoming your new Prime Minister, that he intends to make the wearing of tin-foil hats compulsory for every citizen and that he plans to invest £18.3bn a year every year, until 2050, building a series of Giant Death-Ray Lasers on every British hilltop so as to avert the potential threat of alien invasion.
All right, so Cameron didn’t actually phrase it quite like that when he announced his intentions to ‘combat climate change’ and to lead the ‘greenest government ever’. But the net result so far has been just the same: stupendous waste, outrageous governmental intrusion into free citizens’ private lives, skyrocketing taxes that will be difficult to repeal, and a hefty kick in the economy’s most tender regions just when it needs it least. And all of this to deal with a threat so vanishingly small, it makes about as much sense as building garlic farms to ward off vampires, or blue whale shelters in case any stray cetaceans get sucked from the oceans by freak tornadoes and dumped over the British countryside during rain showers.
This madness has been endorsed by all three of Britain’s main political parties. Under the terms of the Climate Change Act 2008, Britain is currently the only country in the world committed by law to cut its CO2 emissions in the next forty years by 80 per cent. Not only will this prove physically impossible without shutting down the economy, but by the Department of Energy’s own estimate it will cost the taxpayer at least £734bn (£18.3bn a year, every year for the next forty years). It is suicidal, it is iniquitous, it is mind-bogglingly pointless. Yet when the bill came to the vote in the House of Commons, only five MPs from any party voted against it. Such is the power of the Jonestown Cult of Climatism: once you drink the special Kool-Aid, no sacrifice is too great, no act of self-debasement too demeaning, no grand gesture too suicidal.
All of this to achieve an entirely arbitrary, pointless target (why 80 per cent? Why not 64 per cent? Or 92.3 per cent?) which will make not the slightest difference to global warming (even if it were happening, which it currently isn’t), but which will most certainly lead to severe energy shortages, massively rising costs, industrial disruption, unemployment, declining standards of living, fuel poverty – and increase the death rate among the infirm and elderly.
And should you require further convincing, consider this statement:
I suspect the public doesn’t realise how radical this legislation is… These cuts are going to have to be very deep and they go long-term. And we are now going to see changes occurring over time which do impact very significantly on people and I’m not sure the public fully understands that yet.
These words did not originate with some rabid climate-change denier. In fact, they came from a BBC Radio 4 interview in May 2010 with one of the people who helped shaped the Act – Michael Jacobs, formerly Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s special advisor on Climate Change in the Environment.
Rather appropriately for this apocalyptic final chapter – and entirely typically of the BBC – the documentary was called Doomed By Democracy? If you hadn’t already guessed, the programme suggested that climate change was now such a serious threat that the only effective way to deal with it might be to suspend the democratic process. Jacobs seemed to think that this had more or less happened already. Justin Rowlatt, the presenter, asked Jacobs whether it wasn’t a bit ‘anti-democratic’ having all three main political parties railroading through legislation based on a ‘consensus’ that the public hadn’t actually approved.
Jacobs replied pertly: ‘I don’t think it’s right to call something anti-democratic if it has the consent of the public, even if you couldn’t say that they were actively in favour of it.’
Hmm. So the public didn’t vote for it. And they’re not in favour of it. But legislation that they don’t understand and will ruin their lives is still OK because, hey, it’s not actually ‘anti-democratic.’
Will there ever be an end to this madness? Well, possibly. As I complete this book in November 2011, there are encouraging signs of a backlash, as the public becomes increasingly aware of the scale of the con trick being perpetrated against them by the political class.
Politicians like Barack Obama, David Cameron and Chris Huhne may boast all they like about the marvellous ‘green jobs’ they’re going to create. But the weight of evidence is against them. Research from Spain, by economics professor Dr Gabriel Calzada Alvarez of Madrid’s University of Rey Juan Carlos, has shown that for every ‘green job’ created by the Spanish government, another 2.2 jobs were destroyed in the real economy. And in Britain, the destruction wrought by the ‘green jobs’ boondoggle is even worse. According to research by Verso Economics, for every green job created through government subsidy another 3.7 jobs are killed in the real economy.
Then, of course, there’s the rather awkward business of the ‘green jobs’ experience in the US, where President
Obama has pledged $38.6bn on a loan guarantee programme for ‘clean tech’ start-up companies, around half of which has been so far disbursed. Unfortunately, many of these start-ups have gone the way of Solyndra, the solar energy company which collapsed in September 2011 with losses to the US taxpayer of $527m. Of the 65,000 jobs Obama’s splurge was supposed to create – reduced from an initial promise of ‘five million green jobs’ – just 3,545 new permanent jobs had materialised by the time of Solyndra’s collapse. This means that each ‘green job’ created by President Obama has currently cost the US taxpayer $5.4m.
These are not the kind facts and figures that play too well with a voting public in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Depression. People look at their ever-rising heating bills, and their shrinking bank balances, and all that white ‘global warming’ flaking down from the sky, and they begin asking difficult questions. Questions like: ‘If we’re “all in this together”, how come David Cameron’s millionaire landowning father-in-law Sir Reginald Sheffield Bt is being taxpayer-subsidised to the tune of nearly £1,000 a day for the eight wind farms on his estates, while I’m so skint I can’t even afford to heat my home because of all the “renewables obligations” that have made energy bills so perishingly expensive?’
Indeed, one of the very few consolations to be drawn from the current Global Economic Meltdown is that it will render it almost impossible for politicians to pursue their pet green projects. This became evident, for example, in the winter of 2011, in the clash between British coalition government ministers over the issue of shale gas. The then (but, happily, no longer) Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Chris Huhne pronounced himself opposed to another ‘dash for gas’ because, like many watermelons, he is ideologically committed to renewable energy. But his Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne was having none of it. It seems almost certain – despite attempts by green campaigners to whip up public opposition by vastly exaggerating the threat of earthquakes, water contamination and taps of flaming methane – that shale gas will be allowed to revolutionise Britain’s energy economy just like it has America’s. Shale gas, after all, is one-third of the price of wind energy and one-ninth the price of offshore wind energy. When a country is battling for its economic survival, ecological correctness is one of the first unaffordable luxuries to go.
So it could yet be that, thanks to the Greater Depression, the British landscape doesn’t quite end up being utterly ruined by wind farms. (Just partially ruined.) And that instead of rising inexorably – as green ideologues would prefer because it teaches us the virtues of thrift, hair-shirt self-denial and energy conservation – our electricity bills may one day actually start to fall. And that all those parasitical rent-seeking businesses which have been leeching off the back of the taxpayer, thanks to the generous feed-in tariffs for solar energy, may be about to be cut off from their supply of free blood. And that our politicians may start paying less attention to wish lists of the watermelon activists Greenpeace and the WWF and Friends of the Earth, and more to the concerns of the ordinary voting public. And so on. Does this mean that we can all rest easy, secure in the knowledge that the battle for common sense over environmental alarmism will soon be won?
Sadly not.
The first reason why we cannot afford to be triumphalist is that much of the damage has already been done. We’re never going to get a rebate on the billions our governments have spent funding global-warming junk science, nor on all those utterly pointless, eye-wateringly expensive projects, from Solyndra to Edinburgh’s disastrous low-carbon tramline scheme, which only ever got the go-ahead because of fashionable concerns about climate change. It will be a very long time before we manage to dismantle all those entirely unnecessary green taxes and regulations – the feed-in tariffs, the Renewable Obligation Certificates, the various forms of Carbon Tax introduced at the height of the global warming scare. And though governments may be forced now to scale back on such environmental lunacies as offshore wind farms, carbon capture and the decommissioning of coal power stations we’ll need in the short term if we’re to keep the lights on, that doesn’t mean that the great green oil tanker will be easy to turn round. For those unlucky enough, for example, to live in stretches of countryside where wind farms already have planning permission, those eyesores will remain, spinning listlessly (or not, as the case may be), uglifying the view, disturbing the peace, long after their purpose has been acknowledged as redundant. As for those flickery yellow, headache-inducing light bulbs we now have to use instead of the nice, bright old ones: looks like we’ll be stuck with those forever.
And besides the economic damage up to and including the watermelons’ partial responsibility for the current global meltdown, which of course they’ve been willing all along – there’s the socio-political damage. All the brainwashing our kids get at school about everything from ‘sustainability’ to ‘carbon footprints’, all the nonsense our culture has imbibed about the need to preserve scarce resources and rein in economic growth, all the viciously anti-liberty, eco-Fascistic political activism which has been stoked and nurtured and made to seem normal under the seemingly wholesome, fluffy, caring guise of saving the planet: these, you can be sure, aren’t going to go away any time soon. Like stranded Japanese soldiers on remote Pacific islands who still haven’t yet heard the War is over, the watermelons and their fellow travellers and their useful idiots will carry on fighting their fanatical cause to the bitter end. And they’re certainly not going to let a little local difficulty like the abject failure of their Great Climate Scam get in the way of their ongoing narrative of environmental apocalysm.
But wait just a moment. Before you top yourself, as I’m sure must be very tempting after reading this catalogue of doom, misery, idiocy, corruption, rent-seeking, mendacity, hypocrisy, power grabbing and eco-Fascist world domination, I want to conclude on a positive note. I want to talk about wonderful, amazing you.
Yes, that’s right. YOU.
Without you – and people like you – we are screwed. With you – and people like you – the possibilities for improvement are almost limitless.
What makes you so special? Well, you’ve read this book, for a start. Not only are you now better informed than almost anyone you know about the science surrounding Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) theory but – and here you’re really ahead of the game – you understand why that science is almost a sublime irrelevance.
Almost. Obviously, the CAGW debate matters inasmuch as vast swathes of government policy, taxation and regulation have been attached to it, affecting every detail of our lives. Obviously it matters, too, since it will indeed be a useful advance for mankind when climate scientists are able genuinely to understand the real causes of ‘climate change’ – as opposed to engaging in idle (and extremely expensive) speculation via tenuous computer models.
But as regards the real ideological struggle taking place in the world right now, CAGW is little more than a red herring. Or, if you prefer, just one more damn head on the Hydra. Lop off the head spewing messages of doom about CAGW, and instead of killing the beast you’ll find that two more heads are snapping at you in its place. Perhaps one of them will be hissing something about ‘Ocean Acidification’ and the other growling about ‘Biodiversity’, or ‘Rewilding’ or ‘Fracking’, though the precise details won’t much matter. All you need to know is that – like Rachel Carson’s DDT-induced cancer epidemic and Paul Ehrlich’s global food crisis, like the 1970s ‘Ice-Age scare’ and the 1980s acid rain ‘threat’ – ‘climate change’ is just another of those here-today-gone-tomorrow eco-scares exaggerated by the environmental movement to advance a particular agenda.
And having read this book you know what that agenda is. Ultimately, it’s about control.
As I said earlier, you are perfectly entitled to align yourself with that agenda. You may feel, as do many in the green movement, that the human species is a cancer on the face of the Earth. You may believe that capitalism is evi
l and that economic growth is something we should strive to curtail, because hey, there’s so much more to life than greed and consumption. You may have decided that, when left to their own devices, people generally do the wrong thing and the only possible way to make our planet fair and just and good is for everyone to have some of their freedoms removed, so that they can be coerced into correct behaviour by ‘experts’ from the government who know better.
Lots of people think these things, among them some really nice, well-meaning, caring people, so don’t worry: you’re definitely not alone if you think this way too. But all I ask, before you make up your mind, is that you consider the logical consequences of your position.
You’d be amazed at how many people don’t, how many have simply drifted into a certain set of opinions because they happen to be fashionable, promulgated by the media, by their chattering-class friends, by government propaganda, by what Doctor Johnson called ‘the Clamour of the Times’.
‘Overpopulation’, for example. OK. So you may think it’s a major worry. Perhaps you’ve even referred to it as the ‘elephant in the room’. Fine. Maybe it is. But if so, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to stop people from reproducing – and if so, which people and how? Mass sterilisation? A ruthlessly enforced one-child-per-family policy, as has wrought such misery in China? A sly, below-the-line extermination campaign, such as was successfully effected by the ban on DDT? Free condoms for every African? Or what?
Economic growth – there’s another thing I sometimes hear nice, decent, sane middle-class people yearning to abolish. ‘The perpetual growth model, it just can’t work,’ they declare. Perhaps they’re just echoing something they heard the Dalai Lama say, or read in the New York Times. Or maybe they decided for themselves after being struck on their summer hols by how much nicer it would be if we spent the rest of our lives chasing butterflies and dipping our toes in cool, clear streams and travelling by horse and cart, and escaped the ‘want want want’ of the modern rat race.
Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future Page 25