Climate change

There’s a lot of anger about — and it’s not pleasant. But at least it means people are engaged as well as enraged. What’s more worrying and increasingly irritating is the negativity, the drip-drip of despondency that’s been allowed to seep into so much of daily life. Everything is broken! All is lost! The end is nigh! Which is fine if you’re a Jehovah’s Witness or believe that the eschatological prophecies of the Bible have pretty much all come to pass. Every day we are told repeatedly that ‘catastrophe’ awaits.

Why are MPs so pathetically in thrall to Extinction Rebellion? This morning, while the world was focused on the Conservative leadership campaign six Commons select committees (Treasury, BEIS, Environmental Audit, Housing, Communities and Local Government, Science and Technology, and Transport) jointly launched a 'Citizens' Assembly' on climate change. If you think you have heard that term before, it was one of the central demands of the climate change activists who occupied Oxford Circus for two weeks in April. One by one, they seem to be having their demands met as if they were a conquering army as opposed to a ragbag of anti-capitalist protesters. They demanded that Parliament declare a ‘climate emergency’ – which it duly did on 1 May.

In a last-ditch effort to find a domestic legacy, Theresa May has set her sights on the hot topic of the day: climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions in Britain will be cut to zero by 2050, the PM has pledged. May's promise is a response to the Extinction Rebellion protests that ground the capital to a halt back in April. It is also an answer to pig-tailed climate change activist Greta Thunberg who captured the imaginations of politicians from Michael Gove to Jeremy Corbyn earlier this year. The pledge is certainly ambitious. In May, the Climate Change Committee said that with an awful lot of cash and political will, Britain can become net zero emitters of all greenhouse gases within 30 years.

A festival of inertia at PMQs today. A party without a leader, a Government without a purpose and a Parliament without a programme. Theresa May, in Portsmouth for the D-Day commemorations, was understudied by David Lidington who looks like a maths professor but performs like a comedian. His waggish streak is undermined by his gentlemanly dislike of mocking women. He blushed and giggled as he pointed out that Jeremy Corbyn’s regular deputy, Emily Thornberry, had been ‘despatched to internal exile somewhere’. Her crime, he teased, was to ‘outshine the Dear Leader’ at PMQs. In Corbyn’s place stood Rebecca Long-Bailey. Lidington warned that she too risked being ‘airbrushed out of Politburo history’ if her performance was deemed too effective.

When John Glenn was asked what went through his mind as he became the first American in space, he said it was the nerve-wracking thought that 'every part of this rocket was supplied by the lowest bidder.' It’s a revealing insight. Perhaps even more so than the ‘Blue Marble’ photograph of Earth taken by Apollo 17 astronauts, which inspired early environmentalists. Glenn was acknowledging that market economics made it possible for a government to achieve Herculean feats. True, the Soviets were in the race too, but then their system collapsed completely. Capitalism has staying power – and that’s what we need now in the fight against climate change.