A rare outbreak of sanity at the Daily Telegraph this week as one of its ordinarily headbanging columnists left his house, felt the sweat on his brow and began to wonder if maybe – just possibly – there might be something in this climate change thing after all.
Columnist and podcaster Tim Stanley – random recent column: “Trump embodies the spirit of George Washington” – wrote an article headlined “Climate change is real – and the Right needs to get serious about it, presumably shocking readers fed years of climate denial by the increasingly bonkers organ.
“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now,” he wrote. “Global warming – yes, we can call it that – is killing things conservatives claim to love. Farming. Rural tradition. Millions of French chickens, the poor things practically boiled alive.
“Here in the UK, we’ve endured the three worst harvests on record in the last six years, and England received only three percent of its typical rainfall in the first three weeks of July.
“It is bizarre that while the politics of agriculture has focused on invidious taxes, the actual business is threatened by a phenomenon that some bloggers still think is a hoax.”
Some bloggers? Perhaps Stanley was confusing them with his fellow Telegraph columnists. Late last year the investigative website DeSmog analysed opinion and editorial articles about the environment published on the Telegraph’s website in the first 100 days of the current Labour government and found that 94 percent were anti-green – attacking or undermining climate science, policy and technological solutions, or environmental activists.
The paper focused on then energy secretary Ed Miliband, with its columnists regularly deploying attacks labelling him “red Ed” and “mad Ed”. In one article, columnist Allison Pearson called Miliband “thoroughly mental Mili”.
In one article about the BBC, Pearson said: “We have become accustomed to BBC journalists lying by omission and the prioritisation of pet subjects – I swear there isn’t a spark caused by two sticks rubbed together in southern Europe that hasn’t been seized on by climate editor Justin Rowlatt as evidence of man-made global warming.”
In his article this week, Stanley wrote: “I’m not arguing for an ideological commitment to decarbonisation – the whole point of conservatism is to reject prescriptive ideology – and Kemi Badenoch is correct to abandon the dogma of targets. Oil and gas, as Labour has conceded many times, will remain in the mix and smooth the transition.
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“But the renewal revolution is very much already happening, making its hardcore opponents in the Online Right look very silly – still boosting fossil fuels as the secret sauce of a philosophy of boundless growth that is, at heart, unconservative. It rejects frugality and altruism; it assumes everyone operates on self-interest. Materialism trumps spirituality.”
Still, just three days later one of his fellow Telegraph columnists had his revenge – the ever-reliable Allister Heath posting an article headlined “We’ve lost the war against climate change. Time to scrap net zero”.
“Fuelled by a neo-Victorian moral revivalism, the UK’s cross-party elites, having lost an empire and searching for a role as international central planners, convinced themselves that we should lead by example and through self-sacrifice, and bet the house on net zero,” he babbled. “Ordinary people are paying the price for this delusion.
“We should commend the Tories under Kemi Badenoch and Claire Coutinho for seeing the light and embracing a far more rational energy policy, and Reform under Nigel Farage and Richard Tice for having the courage to smash the net zero taboo. This new, broad consensus on the Right is one of the rare hopeful signs in an otherwise bleak Burnhamite Britain.”
Too right! Heath, incidentally, was born in France. If only there was something happening there which might persuade him that climate change is a thing.
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