Climate change

Are you someone who is delighted by the government’s eye-wateringly expensive commitment to deliver ‘net zero’ by 2035, or are you a dissenter on the grounds that its plans do not go far, or fast, enough? According to the BBC and many other media organisations, you must surely belong to one of those two groups. Somehow the widely held viewpoint to which I subscribe – that the weight of evidence suggests man-made climate change is a big problem but we should still scrutinise climate policies on grounds of proportionality, value for money and how they measure up against less idealistic alternatives – has been squeezed out. Tuesday morning’s news bulletins on the Today programme provided a case study of how the debate is being framed.

The two-week COP26 climate change summit starts this weekend, with 100,000 expected on a protest march in Glasgow. And tomorrow, we at The Spectator will hold our own (virtual) summit looking at what lies ahead — and asking if history is about to be made, and how much of this is likely to be political theatre. The morning will open at 9.30am with a keynote speech from Dieter Helm, professor of energy policy at New College, Oxford: I'll be in discussion with him afterwards. His book, Net Zero, is perhaps the best primer you'll read on the topic: he supports the objective but is sceptical about the "jaw-jaw" of climate summits as a means of pushing through meaningful change. Then Kate Andrews will discuss the elephant in the room: nuclear power.

'What actions are you recommending for the pro-life movement?' the New Yorker Radio Hour host asks his guest, a tenured university professor and author of How to Blow Up an Abortion Clinic. 'Well,' the guest replies, 'I am recommending that the movement continue with the March for Life and crisis pregnancy centers but also open up for property destruction. We need to step up because so little has changed and so many babies are still being killed. So, I am in favor of destroying machines and property, not harming people. I think property can be destroyed in all manner of ways. It can be neutralized in a very gentle fashion, or in a more spectacular fashion as in potentially blowing up an abortion clinic.' 'Do you yourself plan to be involved in such actions?

The Prime Minister has touched down in New York for the UN General Assembly where he hopes to press countries on committing funds for the Cop26 climate talks. Ahead of the summit, Boris Johnson has urged wealthier countries to contribute to a £100 billion a year funding target aimed at helping developing nations to cut carbon emissions. That commitment is viewed as key to getting the ball rolling when the negotiations get underway at the summit in Glasgow in November.  Behind the scenes there is increasing pessimism about what Cop26 will achieve But things aren't going to plan. Speaking to hacks on the trip, Johnson said it would be a stretch to get the money all there during his trip.

The West’s humiliation in Afghanistan has an older brother: climate change. As siblings, the two share characteristics, most obviously an inability to confront unwelcome facts. In Afghanistan, there was a large constituency led by the Pentagon invested in the mantra of proclaiming progress in the fight against the Taliban. Climate has its own industrial complex of NGOs, climate scientists, renewable energy lobbyists profiting from the energy transition, eager helpers in the media, and politicians posing as world saviors. Energy experts tell us renewable energy is cheaper than building new fossil fuel power stations. If they’re right, why did China build the equivalent of more than one large coal plant a week last year?

'Now, as I've hopefully made clear throughout all of my remarks, the North Sea will continue to produce oil for decades to come. It still contains up to 20 billion barrels of recoverable reserves. Our primary aim – and I want to underline and emphasis this – our primary aim is to maximise economic recovery of those reserves.' The words are from a speech made in June 2017, a few months after the Paris Agreement that aimed to limit climate change came into effect. A speech by a pro-oil Conservative, or perhaps the head of an industry group working on behalf of the oil sector? No. They are, in fact, the words of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon speaking at the Oil and Gas UK Conference that year.

Few cities in China represent the country’s addiction to coal more than Tianjin, where Alok Sharma travelled this week to talk about cooperation on climate issues. It sits on the coast of one of China’s most polluted regions, and its port is a key hub for trading 100 million tons a year of the stuff – that’s roughly 12 times Britain’s annual coal burn. Chinese coal consumption is on track to increase this year by around ten per cent. To meet that demand, vast new open cast pits are being rushed into service in Inner Mongolia, China’s biggest coal production region, from where supplies are brought down the coast to Tianjin.

Justin Welby urges us, echoing Deuteronomy, to 'choose life', so that our children may live. It is an apt use of scripture, in the face of the climate emergency. But his performance on Radio 4 this morning was far from impressive. The Archbishop of Canterbury spoke of the need for ‘meaningful sacrifices’, but when asked which ones he was making he sounded a bit muddled, as if he was not ready for such an obvious question. His first answer was ‘recycling and all that’, a locution with an air of irritation, like a man too often nagged to take the bins out.  Can’t Lambeth Palace afford daily sausages? Asked about meat, he said he had cut down, but mainly for health and financial reasons. (Can’t Lambeth Palace afford daily sausages?

Do you ever get the feeling that the elites are just taking the mick? That behind our backs they’re high-fiving each other and saying, ‘I can’t believe we’re still getting away with this?’ I do. Especially on the climate-change issue. The gall of an establishment that lives it up in carbon-fuelled luxury while telling the rest of us to stop being so eco-destructive really has become too much to take. Eco-hypocrisy abounds. Take John Kerry. He is Joe Biden’s climate-change envoy, which basically means his job is to wag his finger at the entire world for being so dirty and polluting. And yet there he was a few weeks ago landing in Martha’s Vineyard in his private jet for Barack Obama’s lavish 60th birthday party.