Environment

In August I wrote here about the government’s pre-announced ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2040, and how it could turn out to be a hostage to fortune if the necessary technology fails to be developed. Today, in its Clean Growth Strategy, the government announces another dubious target: insulating a million of the leakiest homes with the aid of £3.6 billion raised through the Energy Company Obligation – which is a levy on all energy customers’ bills. The proposal seems to work on the assumption that it is possible to insulate an old property,  bringing it close to the insulation standards of a new home, at

Grass-fed beef just came off the North London dinner party menu. A report by the Food Climate Research Network at the University of Oxford dismissed claims by Prince Charles and others that grazing animals on permanent pasture can reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The old argument was that the carbon dioxide absorbed by growing grass outweighed the greenhouse gas emissions generated from the stomachs of the cows. But a comprehensive study by FCRN found that this is only the case in a very small number of well-managed farms. In most cases the amount of methane in a cow’s burps far outweighs the carbon stored in the soil through allowing grass to grow.

Each year, this column has the melancholy duty of reminding the public of the Prince of Wales’s prediction, made in Brazil in March 2009, that there were only 100 months left to prevent ‘irretrievable climate collapse’. Those 100 months will have elapsed at the end of next month, so it looks as if we are all doomed. The general election on 8 June will therefore be pretty pointless. It is noticeable, however, that the Prince has not, in recent years, repeated his exact dating of the catastrophe, muttering, in 2015, that it might be 35 years. Even more striking was his co-authorship, at the beginning of this year, of the

Who do you think was responsible for Europe’s biggest environmental disaster of the past three decades; one that caused more widespread damage and killed more people than even the nuclear accident at Chernobyl? Was it a) greedy and selfish capitalists, probably linked to Big Oil, riding roughshod over the stringent health and safety regulations our wise, caring politicians have designed to protect us and our natural environment? Or b) an alliance of fluffy green activists, campaigning journalists and virtue-signalling politicians, united on a noble mission to save the planet from the greatest environmental threat it has ever known? If you guessed b) then you may appreciate why we climate sceptics

How clean are you? I ask not as a mother confessor. I’m not interested in the state of your soul. What I want to know is: how clean is your sock drawer? Your fridge? Your gut? These are the pressing questions of the new cult of clean. Its apostles urge us to divest ourselves of worldly possessions, to renounce ‘dirty’ food and alcohol and to dress in monkish grey or bleached white. Our sins are these: we have bought too much tat, eaten to filthy excess and stuffed our wardrobes with cheap, disposable rubbish. The clean cultist says no more. Everything must go. The most high and holy of the