Delingpole: 2020 Is the Year We Storm the Green Barricades!

Obviously, if we try to list all the influential public figures – aka useful idiots – who are ignorantly and irresponsibly promoting the climate scare we’d be here for many months.

But that’s exactly my point. Green groupthink is now so dominant in Western Culture that it’s starting to feel like the final scene in Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. None of the useful idiots I’ve just singled out above, well, not the top three at least, is remotely stupid. Yet each has found it convenient not to do his homework, to ignore the facts and glibly promulgate the climate change narrative regardless of the actual evidence. Truly climate change is the new Western religion; and as zealous and intolerant of heresy as any of the old religions.

And I think the time has come for us to stop letting these people get a free ride. Whether they are full-on enviro-loon activists like Extinction Rebellion or merely fellow travellers of convenience on the green gravy train, we need to stop indulging them and make it clear that what they are doing to our civilisation, our economies, and our freedoms is unacceptable.

Let me give you another example of the scale of the problem and the urgency of the need for a counter-revolution, courtesy of writer, journalist and zoologist Matt Ridley.

Matt  — who sits in the House of Lords as Lord Ridley — is one of only a handful of figures in public life who has dared to take on the Green Blob.

In this article for Reaction Life he describes a recent guest appearance on the BBC’s flagship political news show, Radio 4’s Today programme. Ridley was only there on sufferance: because four guest-editor slots had been given to greenies and lefties, including Greta Thunberg, the BBC permitted one solitary show to be guest-edited by a Conservative journalist Charles Moore.

Ridley made some good points about the climate change scare, all of them factually accurate. But in the interests of ‘balance’, the BBC then interviewed a professional climate alarmist — former government chief science advisor Sir David King —  who was allowed to spout a load of eco-propaganda nonsense, unchallenged.

I sat there open-mouthed as he beautifully demonstrated my point with one exaggeration after another. He said that Europe’s dash for diesel had nothing to do with greens, when green pressure groups pushed actively for it. He said that we will see 1-2 metres of sea level rise this century, when the current rate of rise is 3.4 millimetres a year with no acceleration (or 0.3 metres per century). He said that all of Greenland’s ice cap might melt and could cause 5-6 metres of sea level rise, though at current rates of melting, Greenland’s ice cap will be 99% intact in 2100. He said that wild fires were being caused by trees dying out because of rising temperatures, rather than a failure to manage increasingly luxuriant vegetation in fire-risk areas leading to a build up of tinder. He said scientists are agreed that Calcutta will have to be moved, when the Ganges delta is actually expanding in area, not shrinking.

So here you have a significant problem: Britain’s de facto state broadcaster, still taken seriously by a worrying percentage of the population, is pumping out not environmental news but pure green propaganda. And almost no one is correcting it or gainsaying it.

But it gets worse. Normally, you might expect the print media – at least the conservative print media – to counter the BBC’s relentlessly leftist green narrative. It rarely does though because its editors are running scared.

What readers of newspapers and listeners to the radio do not see is the sustained and deliberate pressure put on editors to toe the alarmist line on climate change. Take Bob Ward, who works at the London School of Economics, where his salary is paid by a billionaire, Jeremy Grantham. Ward is not employed to do research, but to “communicate” climate science. He chooses to interpret this as a duty to put pressure on the media to censor people like me. He complains to the Times almost every time I mention climate change, often getting his facts wrong, and kicked up a huge fuss when the Times, after publishing half a dozen of his letters declined to publish another one.

Recently he has taken to complaining to the Independent Press Standards Organisation. Whenever Charles Moore, James Delingpole, David Rose, the late Christopher Booker, I or any other journalist writes an article arguing against exaggerated climate alarmism in one of the newspapers self-regulated by IPSO, he sends in a detailed and lengthy complaint. He never complains about the myriad alarmist mistakes that appear all the time like articles saying that “the science” tells us six billion people are going to die soon because of climate change.

Yes. Can confirm. Britain is a country that prides itself on its robust, fearless free press. Yet in the field of the environment and climate change it has sold the pass completely: in some cases because the editors and writers are already fully onboard with the green narrative, in others because they are not prepared to go through the hassle of yet another vexatious complaint submitted to IPSO.

Think of all those stories British newspapers ran last year standing up to bullying billionaires like Sir Philip Green, railing against ‘gagging orders’   —     and then congratulating themselves on their own crusading courage.

So how come they’re prepared to give another billionaire — one who doesn’t even live in the UK — Jeremy Grantham, carte blanche effectively to gag the UK print media on the entire field of climate change?

Britain’s newspapers are guilty here not just of cowardice, but of something even more reprehensible in the media: repeatedly misunderstanding and misrepresenting one of the biggest stories of our age.

Just to return briefly to Australian bush fires story — because it’s the most recent — why aren’t the correspondents of the Mail, the Telegraph, the Times and the Sun all over it, reporting on every last detail of this crying global scandal: the warnings over a period of decades from experts in forest management; the green activists deliberately preventing controlled burning; the arsonists — quite possibly motivated by eco-activism — the total, utter lack of evidence showing any connection with climate change?

Environmentalism, never forget, is a totalitarian ideology inimical to the freedoms and prosperity of Western Civilisation. Our media, our elites, our politicians are betraying us hideously on this most important of issues. They are allowing a small but shrill minority of green activists and bent scientists to get away with murder by permitting their lies to go unchallenged.

My mission in 2020 is to blow this scam wide open. I’m shortly going to be announcing a project with which you might want to help me…

James Delingpole is the host of the Delingpod