All this winter, until New Year’s Eve, and for the first time since I started keeping llamas, Vera, Ann and Lynn were happily grazing on grass that was still growing. They were managing without hay. Something seems to be happening to our climate.
Global warming alarmism is not for me. I’ve never pitched in, fists flying, to this fray. One would want scientific expertise or new information – and I lack both. I’ve grown to distrust the wildly divergent prophecies of the climate change warriors as much as I distrust their adversaries in the ‘nothing to worry about’ camp.
Whether or not it turns out to be a fiction, the scare it has given us is worth the cost and anxiety
So for the purposes of this column, let’s sideline that discussion after summarising as follows: climate change does appear to be a fact; it may be cyclical or a fixed trend; many think it’s linked to carbon dioxide emissions; others think the link, if there is one, is too hard to measure with the accuracy that would justify forswearing the convenience of cheap fossil fuels.
But I have a different case to make. I submit that whether or not the climate ‘emergency’ turns out to be a fiction, the scare it has given us is worth the cost and the anxiety. Fossil fuels are bad for us: bad for our health, bad for our domestic politics, bad for the West’s own future security, and bad (because finite) for prospects of a sustainable future for our planet. We have reason enough, without enlisting the threat of global warming, to wean ourselves from burning carbon.
Take health. A few miles from our house in the Peak District is a valley through which the Derbyshire Derwent and the busy A6 from Derby to Buxton and Manchester run. There used to be an important railway that took this route. You’d know that even if the old tracks weren’t there, though the railway was closed more than half a century ago.
Walk through what’s called Churchtown. The houses are nearly all of gritstone (a hard sandstone), most dating from at least the 19th century. And apart from more recent buildings, every wall that faces the old railway and hasn’t been cleaned is black with ingrained soot. Such too must have been the coating on the lungs of every family that lived there, or anywhere along the 200-odd miles from London to Manchester.
A couple of hundred yards from my flat in east London, the Limehouse Link road tunnel from Canary Wharf pours out its constant flow of traffic. Walk the footpath along the northern flank of St George’s Square, near the mouth of the tunnel. The whole frontage is blackened by the sooty particulates of the traffic fumes that belch from the tunnel. Yet the tunnel only opened about 30 years ago, and benefits from modern ventilation. Residents in St George’s Square wisely seal shut their windows on this side. I do too, hoping the wind from the Thames on the other side of my flat is cleaner.
This, albeit in varying and lower concentrations, is what anyone living near traffic is breathing. And the soot is only what you can see. Invisible are the nitrogen oxides and the carbon monoxide, and the like, all toxic, some carcinogenic, that research suggests damages the brains of children brought up near busy roads. Equally close to my flat is the approach to the ill-ventilated Rotherhithe tunnel. Looking into its mouth you can even see the blueness in the air.
Burning hydrocarbons is a filthy and unhealthy business, always was and always will be.
Extracting them remains an irritant in our domestic politics. Coal mining, applications for licences to frack, the scarring legacy of swaths of (for instance) the eastern part of my county of Derbyshire… we can do without more of this in the century ahead. Nor are we alone. ‘Drill baby, drill’ may be a catchphrase popular among some Americans but in a country where 10 per cent of new vehicles sold in 2024/25 were EVs, we see, I suggest, not so much a mission to combat climate change as a growing recognition that electric cars are just great vehicles. Mine does 160 miles between charges, accelerates like a jet on the runway, and is a joy to drive. I will never return to internal combustion to power a car.
Replacing gas, my London flat now relies on an almost noiseless air-source heat pump for central heating and hot water. In Derbyshire we’ve had ground-source heating for nearly 20 years, and a cottage I’ve renovated to let now has air-source. All these systems have proved efficient and trouble-free. Retrofitted heat pump technology won’t be viable for some types of property in Britain, but for many others it’s the future. Solar and wind are not the whole answer to the UK’s electricity needs, but they are part of it; and with nuclear power stations we shall one day be able to turn our backs completely on carbon.
The result will be a cleaner, healthier country. But internationally the argument is even stronger. By persisting with fossil fuel combustion we’re placing ourselves at the mercy of increasingly turbulent international politics. Some exceptionally nasty despots can place a foot on the windpipe of western democracies at the turn of a tap or the detonation of a seabed pipeline. What is there not to envy about the assurance that a nation can make its own energy, cutting reliance on shifting alliances abroad?
Sir Denis Rooke, chairman of British Gas in the 1970s, once told me that the discovery of North Sea gas saved Britain’s then coal-sourced gas industry from an otherwise certain fate: dwindling gradually to extinction. He had no doubt we could have handled it. We can handle it now. Electricity is and always has been the future, and we can make electricity without burning anything.
Voltaire said (translated): ‘If God does not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.’ Well, even if the climate emergency does not exist, it will prove useful to have invented it.
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