I enjoy my newspaper. So, it came as something of a mild annoyance when I walked in to my local Tesco on Saturday to see the shelves entirely emptied of newspapers. All that remained were a few copies of The Guardian. I asked if they had a copy of The Times and was told “there was something big going down in London.” I then remembered Extinction Rebellion (XR) were taking part in a new ten day protest. I took a deep sigh and walked home.
It turns out I was right. Everyone’s favourite Waitrose warriors have returned from shouting at petrol, or whatever else it is they actually do for the rest of the year, with their latest plan to annoy the public.
On Friday evening, XR protestors targeted the free press, blockading the entrances of printing plants at Merseyside, Hertfordshire and North Lanarkshire and preventing lorries leaving the depots. Fewer than 150 activists managed to prevent the delivery of over a million newspapers on Saturday morning, affecting the Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Sun and Daily Mail, and the financial lives of small business owners and newsstands up and down the country.
I could hazard a guess as to why these papers were targeted. The Sun and The Times are part of the Murdoch-owned, evil “right-wing” press. The other newspapers form part of what XR believe to be part of a cabal of climate-denying rags. As such they must be stopped!
The problem is that you cannot simply shut down one side of the argument for the purported crime of being “right-wing”. This is a crime I’ve been charged with many times, I might add, simply for daring to have a different opinion when it comes to climate change. Without challenge there can be no nuance or balance.
The central claim made by the environmental group is that these papers are not doing enough to highlight the “climate emergency”. Yet on the very day the group blocked the press, The Sun ran a big David Attenborough feature advising readers on what they can do to be more environmentally friendly. Talk about an own goal!
Most importantly, if protesters successfully blacklist supposedly “right wing” publications, there would be little challenge to alarmist narratives which do little to promote useful discussion on climate change. Roger Hallam, co-founder of XR, has been reported as saying that “children are going to die in the next 10 to 20 years” due to global warming. In other words, we’re stuffed.
Without a free press, we would be unable to look at these insane and alarmist claims in detail, and dissect them. Many of the targeted papers don’t necessarily believe climate change is a hoax. Many simply believe the claims the group makes are ridiculous – and rightly so. Amid stories about extreme weather events it is rarely reported that deaths from global weather-related disasters have decreased by 90% over the past hundred years despite a four-fold increase in population.
Nor without a free press would we be able to challenge the group’s demands, one of which is that we must become carbon neutral by reaching net-zero emissions by 2025. In five years? Really? This is an exceptionally ambitious task, and even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has only made a commitment to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030.
The group make no effort to explain how they would carry out such an ambitious commitment. It turns out, if we were to meet a net-zero target by 2025, it would mean the wholesale expropriation of all petrol cars, gas energy would have to be eliminated and all flights would have to stop. Yet the net impact of this and the cost to government revenues and economic growth are absent from the conversation. Indeed, XR hasn’t bothered to cost either of these fundamental policies, even as the group demands to be given the keys to the future of our country – and the world.
By contrast, development economist Bjorn Lomborg estimates that even meeting the Paris Agreement’s demands would result in a net temperature reduction of 0.05 degrees Celsius by 2100. In the Covid era, I think that is an important thing to know.
Extinction Rebellion act like a doomsday cult – in their pessimistic world vision, there is no possibility of redemption or salvation. Our future with a changing climate, according to them, is bleak. Yet this apocalyptic vision, far from winning over allies to their cause, has had a negative impact on public perceptions: a 2019 YouGov survey of 30,000 people across 28 countries found that in some European countries over 40% thought it likely that climate change would make humanity go extinct.
Another survey for the BBC found that one in five British children were having nightmares about climate change. No surprise we saw so many “green-washed” children protesting: they were simply scared into action. Without a free press we wouldn’t know about this.
The biggest problem with this group is that any potential good they might do is undone by frankly stupid acts such as this. Some advice: if you want to get the public on your side, to win “hearts and minds”, stop with the ridiculous stunts and the blocking of streets. Engage rationally with the public. Treat us as adults. Try to be a little more socially inclusive. Currently, they come across as rich virtue-signallers with a contempt for the working class.
The Times accepts the reality of climate change and the need to address it, as have all the other newspapers. The truth is that we have made gains to reduce our carbon footprint already, reducing emissions by 29 per cent in the last decade. Much more needs to be done, for sure, including tackling our carbon consumption along similar lines. But this is a good start.
Once again, all of this would have gone unnoticed without a free press. Removing the ability of the public to decide for themselves what they wish to read is an act of profound illiberalism, more appropriate for Soviet-era Russia than modern Britain. Their methods show us why we must not let them hijack the climate debate.
Noel Yaxley is a freelance writer and political commentator.Â
