Throughout history, there’s been a selection of anti-establishment figures whose dreams of creating a new world order have shone like the most brilliant stars in the firmament, and then burnt out and died. The world has been to the outermost reaches of extremism throughout the nineteenth century – from Fascism to Communism – and it has survived. When the Wall fell down we all breathed a sigh of relief, but there will always be anti-establishmentism, hell bent on suppressing free thought and democracy. Idealists will never go away; they’ll just surface again with a new corporate identity.
Now they’re back under the environmentalist banner. Only this time, in their quest to bring down commercialism and give power to the people, they really do seem to have hit a raw nerve. ‘If we carry on like this, the planet will die. In five minutes of geological time, we have turned paradise into a rubbish dump.’
Horse shit. They are not the slightest bit bothered about the environment; it’s just a weapon that allows them to attack a system that no idealist has ever accepted: democracy.
But they’ve had a huge effect. Fearful of creeping sympathy for the so-called Greens, stupid, short-sighted governments all over the world have imposed Draconian environmental laws on what they see as easy meat – the internal combustion engine.
Let me fill you in on a few facts. The London Marathon generates more carbon dioxide than every grand prix in the whole Formula One calendar. A house produces more so-called global warming gases than your car. And, according to a Friends of the Earth adviser I spoke to, 97 per cent of the world’s carbon dioxide is generated by nature. And even if man’s 3 per cent contribution isn’t simply absorbed by the oceans, the resultant heat rise will create more dynamic weather, more snowfall over land and therefore lower sea levels.
Cars do not cause asthma. Cars do not shit in the streets and cause typhoid. And, since the catalytic converter came along, every single noxious exhaust emission has been slashed. Lead is down two thirds. Sulphur is down tenfold.
But still the eco-twats tell us to leave our cars at home and take the bus. If they had their way, they would have us all up in trees, eating lentils and not washing our hair. They must do because their views are so completely at odds with what’s realistic.
If the environmentalists ever realise their dreams, you can kiss goodbye to free thought and say hello to the Gestapo or the KGB or whatever they decide to call their secret police. In fact, environmentalism is every bit as dangerous as Communism or Fascism.
Strong and unpopular words indeed in the present climate. But in fact, they’re nothing to do with what’s going on right now. And they’re not my strong or unpopular words either. What you’ve just read is most of the text of an article written by Jeremy Clarkson and published in May 1996, over a quarter of a century ago. And what I find interesting is how true those words still are today.
You could no more argue with a rabid environmentalist back in 1996 than you can argue with one in 2021. In fact, the word ‘argue’ is incorrect: it is impossible even to discuss the subject with most of them because they know, beyond the slightest shadow of any suggestion of a possibility of a doubt, that they are right and not only will they refuse to listen to any arguments to the contrary, but they refuse to accept the very existence of any facts or data that offer a different point of view. If you don’t agree with them, you’re obviously – to them – wrong and will immediately be labelled a climate denier or some other term of abuse, usually with an -ist tagged on the end.
Instead of discussing anything, they will explain with elaborate and condescending patience, as if they were talking to a stupid or subnormal child, that the questioner simply doesn’t understand the situation, implying that they and they alone have the knowledge and the determination to solve the problem and that if you fail to not just acknowledge their views but to accept them without question and do exactly what they tell you to do, you are beneath contempt.
In fact, on one radio programme a man representing Insulate Britain – perhaps the most utterly pointless, ill-informed and completely misguided of all the current environmental lobbies – told the interviewer that people who refuse to unquestioningly accept what he was saying should be placed in exactly the same category as the people who appeased Hitler and did nothing to stop the rise of the Nazi party. That brings insults down to a whole new and completely unacceptable level. And the interviewer’s ‘crime’ that sparked this diatribe was to give the man a platform for his cause and politely ask him perfectly sensible and reasonable questions about the Insulate Britain campaign – if that word really can be applied to the flock of brainless idiots who spend their time super-gluing themselves to roads – questions for which, predictably enough, he had no answers.
And then there was the fiasco of COP26 – the acronym stands for Conference of the Parties – held in Glasgow. Not the aims and intentions of the event, which were laudable enough and with which most people would agree, at least in principle, because polluting the world can hardly be considered to be a good thing, but the conduct of the delegates.
We had Sleepy Joe Biden, who looks more and more like a badly constructed animatronic puppet, grunting and farting and driving everywhere as part of an 85-vehicle motorcade while Boris Johnson, other world leaders and a positive flock of billionaire businessman polluted the skies with the exhaust gases generated by their private jets, before solemnly telling everybody else, the normal people who don’t have motorcades or jets, exactly how they should live their lives. Which in this context means extensively rebuilding their homes to accommodate heat pumps that don’t actually work, buying ridiculously expensive electric cars which also don’t actually work unless you are prepared to spend three days on the road getting from, say, Exeter to Edinburgh via London rather than the one day it would take in a petrol or diesel car, working from home instead of travelling to the office and of course taking no foreign holidays because that would involve flying. The arrogance and hypocrisy of these people, who are utterly and completely out of touch with anything even approaching reality, simply beggars belief: don’t do what I do, just do what I tell you to do.
All of which means we’re all in trouble, and not just because we are governed by a bunch of people who appear incapable of realising the long-term consequences of policies that have most probably been formulated between the sheets in Boris’s bedroom at Number 10 rather than in consultation with people who actually know what they’re talking about. That’s bad enough, obviously, but what is far more concerning is what’s happening in our society as a whole.
When people cease to listen to anybody who deviates from the party line and start to spout dogma without bothering to actually research anything or to think things through, when all they care about is climbing onto the nearest bandwagon, when free speech and even free thought are threatened – as is happening at the moment to people who are being cancelled, ostracised or even sacked because they refuse to embrace the Woke agenda – then the very future of democracy itself is under threat. Which, if Jeremy Clarkson was right a quarter of a century ago, is exactly what the idealists and environmentalists really want.
Climate change may or may not be a problem: despite the gloomy and cataclysmic prognostications of the more rabid members of the environmental lobby, according to a couple of reports I’ve seen recently the Antarctic ice sheet is actually increasing in size, not decreasing, and the population of polar bears – the kind of furry poster boy for the climate change radicals – is apparently at an all-time high. And, as a number of people have pointed out, it might also be significant that despite the massive worldwide lockdown caused by the Covid pandemic and the consequent enormous reduction in travel of all sorts from cars to aircraft over the last two years, and the consequent huge and undeniable reduction in the production of greenhouse gases, there has been no measurable difference in global temperature. So perhaps man’s activities aren’t having anything like the catastrophic effect on the climate that the environmentalists are claiming. I have no idea. But what is becoming increasingly clear, with alleged ‘facts’ about climate change being released, countered, challenged and in some cases altered to support a particular position, is that none of the alleged experts have any real idea either.
But what I do know is that the messianic, unyielding and utterly ill-informed attitude of these rabid activists and environmentalists is actually potentially far more dangerous to the future of humanity than any possibility of climate change.
