A climate of change threatens our green-loving elites

Bingo! It was a red-letter day for the BBC, as UK temperatures finally passed the 40° milestone so long heralded. The Corporation had a disappointing day on Monday, when it reported the highest temperature had “registered 38.1°, which is a record for this year”. That anticlimactic qualification was clearly a hasty substitution for the news the Corporation had hoped to broadcast. Tuesday, however, brought joy unconfined to the alarmist broadcaster, until its overblown staff had to put away the party poppers and don black cowls and scythes to scare the public.

The science is settled. If the temperature exceeds 40° at Heathrow or anywhere else, for an hour or so, on one day out of 365, there can only be one response. Shut down every remaining well in the North Sea, increase green taxes, ban petrol-driven cars earlier than proposed, smash every gas boiler in the country, feed children insects for school meals and reduce the speed limit to five mph. The public has to be weaned off meat, air travel and fertiliser-grown foods. It is already five minutes past midnight.

Meanwhile, the gruesome contest continued to select the future leader of the opposition, privileged to lead the Conservative Party into oblivion at the next election. The fast-diminishing pool of contenders is testimony to the unelectable condition of This Great Party of Ours. Ponder this: 92 sitting (for the moment) Conservative MPs want Penny Mordaunt to be prime minister. That says it all. The three duds in the final run-off represent respectively plutocracy, wokery and entitlement. What’s not to like, from the Red Wall perspective?

Even a collection of people so lacking in self-awareness as the parliamentary Tory Party realised that allowing the public to see them up close was lethal for their election chances, so the third television debate was aborted. The damage had already been done and much of the electorate feels nothing but contempt for its aspiring rulers. The same applies to the opposition. Belief in the parliamentary system of so-called democracy has never been weaker.

There was nothing obscure about what Britain voted for in 2019. It voted to break the logjam of obstruction in Parliament, where entitled Remainer MPs tried to defy the wishes of the electorate; to complete Brexit with a clean break from the European Union; to reduce immigration drastically; to take advantage of the opportunities Brexit afforded to build a tiger market economy; to end all the woke nonsense; to inject some sanity into the climate non-debate and devise a practical policy for dealing with manageable climate change instead of stampeding towards Net Zero, when it is known to be unaffordable and therefore unrealistic.

But what did Britain get? A hobbled form of Brexit, with part of the United Kingdom placed behind an international border down the Irish Sea and EU officials resident on British soil; immigration soaring to massive levels, under a government with no solution, apart from a stunt involving Rwanda, because it cannot bring itself to leave the ECHR; Brexit opportunities squandered; laws devised by Stonewall; and a collective inhibition that makes it impossible for anyone in the Westminster bubble to denounce Net Zero for the poverty-creating, unaffordable zealot’s covenant that it is.

The climate madness is becoming lethal. As the BBC leads the clamour for punitive, hair-shirt greenery because we have recorded a temperature of 40°Celsius – remember when the alarmist pundits told us “Weather is not climate” – the early consequences of green cultism are already manifesting themselves around the world.

Green zealotry provoked the fall of the Sri Lankan government – the first of many, if the elites persist (as they will) in their entitled folly. Last year Sri Lanka’s president Gotabaya Rajapaksa banned all agrochemicals, in an effort to turn his country into a wholly organic food producer. This attempt at creating a giant Highgrove had catastrophic consequences. Without artificial fertiliser, almost one-third of agricultural land remained dormant. Within six months rice production dropped 20 per cent, forcing the country to import $450m of rice, while the price of rice rose 50 per cent. The tea industry lost $425m.

Previously, modern fertilisers had enabled Sri Lanka to change from subsistence farming to commercial farming; the country had been self-sufficient in rice production since 2005. Per capita GDP doubled over the past 20 years, to $6,000 greater than India by 2020. Now, both the economy and public order have broken down. Bhutan, a nation that pledged to go organic back in 2008, but has progressed so cautiously that only 10 per cent of crop production and 1 per cent of land are farmed organically, having looked at Sri Lanka’s experience, has now postponed the target date to 2035.

It would be foolish to imagine the Western elites will similarly take note of this cautionary tale. The BBC, hilariously, has resorted to a “fact-checking” exercise to discredit the notion that greenery brought down Sri Lanka’s government. There were indeed other factors – Covid’s devastation of the tourist trade chiefly – but none of them played such a key role or threatened hunger: half a million Sri Lankans were brought below the poverty line by food prices.

“Fact-checkers” are the latest leftist device to try to discredit their opponents’ arguments as “misinformation” or “fake news”. Kindred spirits review “unhelpful” claims and pronounce them unfounded; New Labour used to call it “instant rebuttal”.

Farmers are being targeted closer to home, in the Netherlands, whose prime minister Mark Rutte is Europe’s Justin Trudeau. Just as Trudeau employed totalitarian methods in his fight with Canadian truckers, Rutte is at war with Dutch farmers. The government ordered farmers to curb nitrogen emissions by up to 70 per cent in the next eight years. For smaller farmers, this means losing their farms and livelihoods. It also involves reductions in livestock.

But the bigger picture is outrageous. The Netherlands contributes just 0.46 per cent of global CO2 emissions, but it is the second largest agricultural exporter after the United States. That equation is a “no-brainer”: carbon reductions are of minimal importance in the Netherlands, but the country’s contribution to feeding the world, at a time of food insecurity, is critical. Some 30,000 farmers have demonstrated in protest against the government’s extremist attack on agriculture, with police responding by firing warning shots.

The Dutch public supports the farmers. Polls show the Farmers Political Party, formed to fight the new regulations and already holding one parliamentary seat, would win 11 seats if an election were held now. This conforms to a pattern set in Britain by UKIP and the Brexit Party, of citizens creating their own electoral vehicles to impose their will on tyrannical elites.

The Dutch debacle is a manifestation of the “Great Reset” proposed by Klaus Schwab, of the World Economic Forum. The ideological minuet is bizarrely choreographed. First, the elite leaders decree some innovation, such as the Great Reset; then, when it is put into operation, with disastrous results, and observers point this out, they are accused of “conspiracy theory”.

Writing about this green aggression against Dutch farming and its potential consequences for world food supplies, Professor Ralph Schoellhammer, assistant professor in economics and political science at Webster University, Vienna, observed: “Ultimately, there is a risk that climate policies will do to Europe what Marxism did to Latin America. A continent with all the conditions for widespread prosperity and a healthy environment will impoverish and ruin itself for ideological reasons.”

We have seen that destructive ideology at work in Britain, in tandem with other woke creeds. The moment it became clear that Boris Johnson was neither a Conservative nor a credible prime minister was when he re-committed Britain to a suicidal policy at COP26. The essential problem with politicians is that they have become programmed to toe the leftist line: no self-proclaimed “Tory” would dare advocate abrogation of the Northern Ireland Protocol, withdrawal from the ECHR or abandonment of Net Zero.

They are forced, from time to time, to tinker with such issues, whittling down the offending instruments a little further, but never cutting the Gordian knot. To do so would invite disdain from the elites, exclusion from the gnostic consensus that regards progressive “values” as axiomatic and irremovable. In the long term, they will be removed, and those timid collaborators along with them. The culture of managed decline, which Boris Johnson showed false promise of ending, is one big climate change on its way.