Ross Clark

The world of environmental science begins to resemble the Catholic Church before the Reformation. Anyone who challenges its grim orthodoxies can expect the latter-day equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition. Two years ago, the former Greenpeace activist Bjorn Lomborg published a book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, in which he comprehensively deconstructed the doctrines to which he had previously been attracted. It is not true, he argued, that the world is heading for environmental armageddon: the dangers to mankind from pollution and overconsumption of resources have been hugely overstated in order to promote the interests of environmental scientists.

Seldom does the European Union miss an opportunity to pursue its protectionist agenda. No sooner had the first slugs of crude oil from the sunken Estonian oil tanker, the Prestige, arrived on the Spanish coast than France, Spain, Portugal and Italy moved to banish single-hulled oil-tankers of more than 15 years' vintage from European waters: which means within 200 miles of European coasts. An oil slick, of course, is an ecological disaster, but would a double hull really have prevented the sinking of the Prestige? 'A double-hulled ship has more built-in redundancy,' says Robert Saunders, technical information officer for the Royal Institution of Naval Architects. 'It is possible that a crack in an outer hull won't spread to an inner hull.

Christmas shoppers are being urged to boycott the clothes store Gap on the basis that it exploits workers in the Third World. A report in the Guardian quotes a Bangladeshi who says she has her ears pulled when she makes mistakes, and a wretch from Lesotho who complains that his factory is so dusty that when he blows his nose his snot comes out the same shade of blue as the T-shirts he is making. What the report doesn't say is that the organisation demanding the boycott, Unite, is a trade union which represents American textile workers, not their brethren in the Third World. For years Unite has campaigned against US companies which have transferred their production overseas, thereby costing the jobs of Americans.

Ordinary life must go on, the government persuaded us while administering its warning two weeks ago of a possible terrorist attack: if we allow the threat of bombings to disrupt our normal activities, then we give the terrorists what they want. Fine words, indeed, except that they seem to apply only on British soil. If you are thinking of taking a holiday abroad, on the other hand, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is ready to bombard you with a thousand reasons not to go. Those who remember the lengths to which the government used to go to promote Britain to foreign travellers during the IRA's mainland bombing campaign could be excused a little puzzlement over the FCO's advice following the Bali bomb: 'We advise against all travel to Bali and elsewhere in Indonesia.

One of my wife's ancestors was consumed by cannibals in the South Seas in the mid-18th century. I don't think the government of Tonga, or wherever the meal took place, would be terribly impressed if a lawsuit arrived on its desk demanding reparations. If you are descended from a black American slave, on the other hand, it may well be worth your while dropping a line to the city authorities in Chicago where a law has just been passed demanding that any company seeking a contract from the city will have to declare any profits that they may have made from owning, insuring or trading in slaves. They now face having to pay levies to the survivors of slaves - no matter that the recipients themselves will never have known forced labour.

The survivors from the Melnikova Street Theatre are unlikely to be in a fit state to read the International Chemical Weapons Convention. But they may well be wondering exactly where Russia's poisoning of more than 100 innocent citizens fits within this much-vaunted treaty, which came into force four years ago. In fact, the treaty couldn't be clearer: while it prohibits the manufacture, storage and use of any weapon designed to bring about temporary or permanent incapacitation by chemical means, it applies only to equipment intended to be used in the course of war. It does nothing to prevent states gassing their own people for the purposes of 'law enforcement including domestic riot control purposes'.

So, the United Nations weapons inspectors are ready to go in, and this time they are not going to be put off their scent by feeble excuses. They will not be satisfied until every single weapon has been destroyed. Every slipper, every cane, every outstretched bare hand must go: the UN committee on the rights of the child has ruled Mr Blair's government to be an international pariah because it has failed to ban the smacking of children. 'We are talking about alternative forms of disciplining children because we are not saying children should not be disciplined,' the committee chairman, Jacob Doek, told reporters last week. 'But is it necessary to hit them over the head or kick them in the butt?

One might have thought that the case of Christopher Lillie and Dawn Reed - recently awarded £200,000 each in libel damages against the authors of a local government report which made fantastic claims of child abuse - would sound a warning to the government to avoid joining the general hysteria about paedophilia. But not a bit of it. The Home Office's taskforce on child protection has proposed to make it a criminal offence to 'groom' children via the Internet with intent to commit a sexual offence. Nobody doubts that the Internet has been used by paedophiles to make contact with children, and it is of course vital for parents to supervise their children's use of a computer.

'Fair trade' coffee has become as much a staple of the middle-class kitchen as organic carrots and free-range eggs. But, for the fair-trade lobby, voluntary gestures are not enough. They are lobbying the US government, with some signs of success, to establish a 'coffee purity act'. Under these provisions, all raw or 'green' coffee imported to America would have to show a moisture content of between 8 and 13 per cent and would have to contain no extraneous matter such as leaves and twigs. Few would fancy a twig or two floating around in their cappuccino, but that is not the point.