The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,’ claimed America’s most prominent young Left-wing politician, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in January 2019. Now, according to her reckoning, we have barely ten years left.
The seemingly interminable frenzy of sanctimonious virtue-signalling, histrionic fear-mongering and shameless environmental hypocrisy is certainly doing its best to make the 12 days of the COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow feel like 12 years.
Just ask Joe Biden, who nodded off at the exact moment he was being told that this was the most important event in human history. How bad must the summit have been for the US President to turn his 85-vehicle gas-guzzling motorcade and fleet of four planes back over the Atlantic so he could rush home to see his fellow Democrats get a drubbing in state and local elections?
With Biden and other world leaders safely shuffled off the stage, the United Nations’ giant green jamboree enters its second week by no doubt getting down to the real business: a bunch of unscrupulous lobbyists and mobile phone-wielding activists cooking up ever-more ambitious schemes to pressurise big businesses to pretend to go green whether their customers like it or not, and forcing taxpayers to foot the bill through shady corporate subsidies extorted from feckless politicians too timid to stand up to any of the moralising eco-blackmail.
Boris Johnson hosted the Cop26 conference in Glasgow which was designed to raise the issue of climate change
Cynical? I’m not the only one. Saint Greta Thunberg herself pronounced the summit a flop. She said: ‘It is not a secret that COP26 is a failure,’ accusing participants of ‘greenwashing’ and adding that the whole thing ‘has turned into a PR event’. Never have I agreed with her more.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking: ‘Vote Blue, Go Green.’ ‘Hug-a-Husky.’ Wasn’t the environmental agenda at the heart of David Cameron’s bid to ‘modernise’ the Conservative Party? And wasn’t I, as his special adviser in No 10, at the heart of that?
Well, yes. But the slogan wasn’t ‘Vote Blue, Go Dumb’.
I’m all for sensible policies that help protect the environment – just like pretty much every Conservative I know.
WE LOVE nature and understand and respect it a lot more than many of the Left-wing crusaders whose idea of the natural world is a pot plant on their balcony, and who need an app on their phone to tell the difference between an oak tree and a silver birch.
I agree that climate change is real, affected by human activity, and that we should take steps to fight pollution of all kinds and protect the Earth for future generations. I’m a strong supporter of the American Conservation Coalition, which mobilises the young around environmental action through common-sense, market-based and limited-government ideals.
I have regularly hosted Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of the world’s leading environmental campaigners, on my Fox News TV show to make the case for practical solutions to climate change that avoid the kind of manufactured alarmism and reckless catastrophising by ‘climate’ zealots that has most normal people rolling their eyes and reaching for some coal to burn just for the hell of it
I have regularly hosted Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of the world’s leading environmental campaigners, on my Fox News TV show to make the case for practical solutions to climate change that avoid the kind of manufactured alarmism and reckless catastrophising by ‘climate’ zealots that has most normal people rolling their eyes and reaching for some coal to burn just for the hell of it.
But the increasingly fatuous drivel served up by our leaders in the name of the ‘climate agenda’ – as they insist on calling it and which the Glasgow summit pushed to new heights of embarrassing incoherence – is not advancing the cause of environmental protection but harming it, and it’s time we said so clearly. Let’s start with the most obvious and egregious stupidity: the fact that Western countries, in the name of curbing carbon emissions, are clamping down on their own domestic production of fossil fuels while at the same time begging OPEC to pump more oil to fill the energy gap that has been the inevitable result.
In California, the ruling Democrats have moved to ban fracking and, over time, all oil and gas extraction – while increasing imports from Saudi Arabia! How does that help fight climate change?
Shipping accounts for more carbon emissions even than air travel, not to mention the fact that fracking is the main source of natural gas – which is far less damaging to the environment than oil or coal, producing around 60 per cent less carbon dioxide.
No matter, say the politicians. Let’s just get a pat on the back from the activist groups for ‘taking on the fossil fuel industry’. Who cares if it causes emissions to rise? And who cares if it empowers authoritarian dictators such as Vladimir Putin, now exploiting Europe’s self-inflicted energy crisis to bolster his power and play geo-political games?
This same disconnect between the self-righteous green groupthink and the real world applies to the fossil fuel alternatives that we are assured are ready to take on the role of powering our economies in the future. Wind ’n’ solar, wind ’n’ solar... they repeat it like a mantra at every opportunity. The problem is, nobody told Mother Nature.
Some countries have different uses of fuel according to the most recent research, pictured
What happens when there’s a ‘windless summer’ as Britain just experienced? We’re about to find out, and it may not be pretty. International
