Climate change

The media has a climate change blind spot

Are you someone who is delighted by the government’s eye-wateringly expensive commitment to deliver ‘net zero’ by 2035, or are you a dissenter on the grounds that its plans do not go far, or fast, enough? According to the BBC and many other media organisations, you must surely belong to one of those two groups. Somehow the widely held viewpoint to which I subscribe – that the weight of evidence suggests man-made climate change is a big problem but we should still scrutinise climate policies on grounds of proportionality, value for money and how they measure up against less idealistic alternatives – has been squeezed out. Tuesday morning’s news bulletins

Join: The Spectator’s online COP26 summit

The two-week COP26 climate change summit starts this weekend, with 100,000 expected on a protest march in Glasgow. And tomorrow, we at The Spectator will hold our own (virtual) summit looking at what lies ahead — and asking if history is about to be made, and how much of this is likely to be political theatre. The morning will open at 9.30am with a keynote speech from Dieter Helm, professor of energy policy at New College, Oxford: I’ll be in discussion with him afterwards. His book, Net Zero, is perhaps the best primer you’ll read on the topic: he supports the objective but is sceptical about the “jaw-jaw” of climate summits

It’s no wonder young people have ‘eco-anxiety’

Is it any wonder that children and young adults are going down with ‘eco-anxiety’ , as claimed in an opinion piece in the BMJ this week? One of the pieces of evidence it cites is a survey published in 2020, which claimed that 57 per cent of child psychiatrists had dealt with patients who were feeling anxious about climate change. It would be easy to dismiss this as another case of the ‘snowflake generation’ lacking the toughness of their forebears. But even if it is true that earlier generations of children, such as those brought up during the second world war, seemed to cope much better with the genuine threat

James Kirkup

Does Sunak care about net zero?

The biggest story of the Tory conference wasn’t about a gaffe or a controversial statement. It was about something that wasn’t said, and the person who didn’t say it. Rishi Sunak’s silence on net zero is a big deal, as the next few weeks will prove. The Chancellor didn’t mention net zero in his conference speech. So what, you might ask? After all, it’s an environmental thing and he’s Chancellor, right? No. net zero is an economic story, and a big one. It’s about growth, investment, public spending, tax and jobs. According to Sunak’s Treasury: This will be a collective effort, requiring changes from households, businesses and government. It will

Why Johnson sounds pessimistic about Cop26

The Prime Minister has touched down in New York for the UN General Assembly where he hopes to press countries on committing funds for the Cop26 climate talks. Ahead of the summit, Boris Johnson has urged wealthier countries to contribute to a £100 billion a year funding target aimed at helping developing nations to cut carbon emissions. That commitment is viewed as key to getting the ball rolling when the negotiations get underway at the summit in Glasgow in November.  Behind the scenes there is increasing pessimism about what Cop26 will achieve But things aren’t going to plan. Speaking to hacks on the trip, Johnson said it would be a stretch to get the money

Does Nicola Sturgeon care more about oil revenue or climate change?

‘Now, as I’ve hopefully made clear throughout all of my remarks, the North Sea will continue to produce oil for decades to come. It still contains up to 20 billion barrels of recoverable reserves. Our primary aim – and I want to underline and emphasis this – our primary aim is to maximise economic recovery of those reserves.’ The words are from a speech made in June 2017, a few months after the Paris Agreement that aimed to limit climate change came into effect. A speech by a pro-oil Conservative, or perhaps the head of an industry group working on behalf of the oil sector? No. They are, in fact,

Are China’s climate promises just a load of hot air?

Few cities in China represent the country’s addiction to coal more than Tianjin, where Alok Sharma travelled this week to talk about cooperation on climate issues. It sits on the coast of one of China’s most polluted regions, and its port is a key hub for trading 100 million tons a year of the stuff – that’s roughly 12 times Britain’s annual coal burn. Chinese coal consumption is on track to increase this year by around ten per cent. To meet that demand, vast new open cast pits are being rushed into service in Inner Mongolia, China’s biggest coal production region, from where supplies are brought down the coast to

Justin Welby is missing a trick on climate change

Justin Welby urges us, echoing Deuteronomy, to ‘choose life’, so that our children may live. It is an apt use of scripture, in the face of the climate emergency. But his performance on Radio 4 this morning was far from impressive. The Archbishop of Canterbury spoke of the need for ‘meaningful sacrifices’, but when asked which ones he was making he sounded a bit muddled, as if he was not ready for such an obvious question. His first answer was ‘recycling and all that’, a locution with an air of irritation, like a man too often nagged to take the bins out.  Can’t Lambeth Palace afford daily sausages? Asked about

Was Hurricane Ida really caused by climate change?

It’s climate change, innit? No sooner had Hurricane Ida smashed into the coast of Louisiana with winds of around 150 mph than the usual claims began to be made, the ones we get every time a hurricane makes landfall in the US: that it has been caused in part by man-made climate change. Climate models have tended to predict that tropical storms will become stronger as warmer seas lead to more energy being absorbed by the storms. Trouble is, observational evidence does not suggest that this has happened — at least not yet. While records of storms exist since 1851 they cannot be taken to be complete records A Princeton University

Extinction Rebellion and the hypocrisy of the new eco-elite

Do you ever get the feeling that the elites are just taking the mick? That behind our backs they’re high-fiving each other and saying, ‘I can’t believe we’re still getting away with this?’ I do. Especially on the climate-change issue. The gall of an establishment that lives it up in carbon-fuelled luxury while telling the rest of us to stop being so eco-destructive really has become too much to take. Eco-hypocrisy abounds. Take John Kerry. He is Joe Biden’s climate-change envoy, which basically means his job is to wag his finger at the entire world for being so dirty and polluting. And yet there he was a few weeks ago

Greta Thunberg is right

I am not usually on the same page as Greta Thunberg but she is absolutely right when she accuses the UK of lying about cutting its carbon emissions by 44 per cent since 1990. I have heard ministers repeatedly make this claim on radio and television while hardly ever being challenged on it — so I am thankful that Thurnberg has done what others have failed to do. The government’s 44 per cent claim is based on its official figures for territorial emissions — i.e. those physically spewed out within the UK. It excludes emissions from international shipping, aviation, the manufacture of goods elsewhere in the world for the benefit

Portrait of the week: Cameron’s cash, A-grades abound and Tower Bridge won’t budge

Home With less frightening domestic data on the coronavirus pandemic to ponder, subjects such as the rivalry between Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, and Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, found time for discussion. The seven-day average of coronavirus cases detected by tests remained below 30,000. In the seven days up to the beginning of the week, 637 people had died with coronavirus, bringing the total of deaths (within 28 days of testing positive) to 130,281. (In the previous week deaths had numbered 524.) In a week, numbers remaining in hospital fell from 5,943 to 5,631. Three quarters of adults had received two doses of vaccine, but numbers crept

Charles Moore

What ministers won’t admit about A-levels

The tale of A-levels shows how ministers can sometimes find themselves in a position when it is simply too dangerous to admit something that is true. To the exterior eye, it is obvious that the temporary abolition of exams and its replacement by teacher assessment has produced grade inflation. This year’s A-level cohort has not suddenly got a third better than its pre-Covid equivalent. You or I can point that out, but if Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, says it, he thereby implies that he has presided over a change which devalues the exam, seriously weakening the basis of admissions to university. He will also be accused of disparaging pupils

James Kirkup

In defence of net zero: yes, we can afford it

Late in 2013, David Cameron snapped. ‘Get rid of all the green crap,’ the then prime minister told energy ministers. His demand came after a backbench revolt over the surcharges tacked on to household energy bills to support onshore wind power. Not for the last time, his decision was based on a spectacular failure to see one of the big trends of the age: the stunning fall in the costs of renewable energy that was already under way. In the past decade, the cost of generating electricity from onshore wind has fallen by 40 per cent. For offshore turbines, it’s down almost a third. Globally, it’s now generally cheaper to

The Greek wildfires and the failings of the state

The wildfires raging across Greece for what is by now more than a week, show no sign of abating. High temperatures continue in what is the country’s worst heatwave in almost four decades. While no region of the country has been spared, the images coming from the northern part of Evia island are particularly striking. One, showing an elderly woman in despair – the grim atmosphere behind her painted dark red by fire and smoke, like a still from a post-apocalyptic film – became the prime example of what the new reality of extreme temperatures will look like. It was from Greece, but it could as easily have been taken

What’s the truth about the UN’s ‘code red’ climate warning?

Predictably enough, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report has been greeted with hyperbole about fire, flood and tempest. It is ‘code red for humanity,’ according to UN general-secretary Antonio Guterres. ‘This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels before they destroy our planet.’ As ever with IPCC reports, the content doesn’t live up to the hysterical reviews. If the vision presented in it were the basis of a disaster movie you would want your money back.  No, it doesn’t say that the German floods were caused by man-made climate change – something implied by much of the press coverage, which used photos of the damage in

Revealed: the BBC guide for covering climate change

Climate change is once again dominating the news agenda. A report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that even if emissions are cut rapidly, the effects of global warming will be felt across the world. The report – which Boris Johnson has declared sobering reading – leads the news today, with the BBC dedicating seven stories on its homepage today to climate change. So just as well then that BBC staffers were recently treated to an internal audience research briefing telling them how best to convey messages about climate change to different audiences. The briefing – which one insider described as being more reminiscent of ‘a campaigning organisation’ – identifies seven different groups

Chris Packham’s suggestions to save the world

On Monday 2 August, the BBC Today programme offered its ‘Countdown to COP26’. For the rest of the month, Amol Rajan announced, Chris Packham would give us ‘a different suggestion’ about climate change EVERY DAY. I make that 26 Packham slots — Sunday being Today-free — on the main national news magazine programme. Chris’s Day One suggestion to address the ‘colossal, planet-threatening mess that we find ourselves in’ was that everyone should buy an alarm clock (second-hand if possible to save on emissions), set it to wake up 15 minutes earlier and devote that quarter of an hour to doing something helpful, rather as we did, he said, when we

Can Scotland reach net zero without the Union?

What’s more important to supporters of Scottish secession, achieving the break-up of Britain or seeing Scotland successfully transition to net zero greenhouse gas emissions? It is a difficult question for environmentally conscious independence supporters to face, but face it they must, for it is becoming increasingly clear that Scotland cutting itself out of the UK will see England, Wales and Northern Ireland power ahead to net zero while Scotland gets left behind. This month saw the publication of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) latest fiscal risks report. The bi-annual document identifies and models potential shocks to the public finances. The new analysis has lengthy, detailed sections dedicated to examining

Boris Johnson’s dangerous eco-obsession

It is a notable feather in Nigel Farage’s cap that his new evening show on GB News has already become essential viewing for Tory high-ups. Last week brought a series of reports by well-connected commentators suggesting that Boris Johnson was worried about Farage highlighting the government’s chaotic failure to stem the cross-Channel flow of migrant boats. The issue has suddenly shot up the list of issues mentioned by Tory voters, with new polling from Redfield & Wilton Strategies now identifying immigration as their top concern. This week the former Ukip leader has touched another nerve with some Tory MPs by wondering aloud whether their party’s green obsession is reaching a