Climate change

Wednesday

James Heale

Energy is the new political battleground

With three weeks until the Budget, the main political parties have been setting out their economic thinking. Each faces the same bind: anaemic growth, fiscal constraints and uncomfortable exposure to the bond markets. The upshot is that there is less ‘clear blue water’ on the economy between Labour, the Conservatives and Reform. Even Sir Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, irritated some colleagues by appearing to suggest he would raise income tax if he were in Rachel Reeves’s shoes at his party’s conference. ‘It’s a good job no one is listening to us,’ jokes a fellow frontbencher. If the economy is less of a dividing line in British politics, what might

Matt Ridley

Dam shame: what really caused Valencia’s floods?

Who is to blame for the devastating floods that hit Valencia on 29 October? The mob that surrounded King Felipe at the weekend and drove Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez out of town with a hail of mud and stones was angry at the failure to forecast the flood and warn people to get out of its way. The BBC would like us to be angry at man-made climate change for causing the storm – putting out a headline the very next day: ‘Scientists say climate change made Spanish floods worse.’ Charts of rainfall in Spain show no trend towards a higher frequency of more extreme downpours Yet Valencia had a

Thursday

Toby Young

Why I pity the poor eco-zealots

An email popped into my House of Lords inbox last week from Lt Gen. Richard Nugee with the subject line ‘National Emergency Briefing’. Ooh, I thought. That sounds interesting. Will it be about the pitiful state of our armed forces? The threat of war with Russia? The penetration of Britain’s deep state by the Chinese Communist party? Nothing so sexy, unfortunately. The ‘emergency’ in question is our old friend the climate emergency, with the usual suspects being wheeled out in Westminster Central Hall next month to tell us how little time we have left to avert the looming disaster. This seems a little tin-eared. The past 12 months have witnessed

Thursday

Adam Begley

On the trail of a missing masterpiece: What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan, reviewed

Ian McEwan delivers pleasure on the page with the ticktock reliability of an expensive Swiss watch. Even the lesser novels are immaculately written and cleverly plotted, full of provocative ideas, captivating characters and compelling incidents. In the better novels, he achieves a kind of elevated self-awareness, a supercharged intelligence that gives the fiction what feels like literary autonomy. My favourites, Black Dogs (1992) and Atonement (2001), seem to take on a life of their own. I imagine McEwan serenely blessing their emancipation. What We Can Know is not lesser, and the pleasures – bookish pleasures, especially –are in abundant supply. As the title implies, McEwan is testing the limits of

Thursday

Daisy Dunn

The best radio at the moment is on the BBC World Service

Online viewings of Conclave increased threefold following the death of Pope Francis last month. At least some of the traffic was rumoured to have come from the Vatican itself. This raises many questions, but the most pertinent for me this week is, what did the cardinals think of the carpets? Do they really have coffee machines in their rooms like Tremblay? Minibars like Bellini? Their peace spoiled by the sounds of a lift shaft as in the case of long-suffering Lawrence? If any of these details passed you by, it’s worth watching the film again. In fact, after listening to an interview with the production designer, to be broadcast on

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Robert Macfarlane: Is a river alive?

40 min listen

Sam Leith’s guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Robert Macfarlane. In his new book Is A River Alive? he travels from the cloud forests of Ecuador to the pollution-choked rivers of Chennai and the threatened waterways of eastern Canada. He tells Sam what he learned along the journey – and why we need to reconceptualise our relationship with the natural world.

Thursday

Dylan Neri

A meditation on the beauty of carbon

There’s a scene in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One in which a magazine’s advice columnist ‘the Guru Brahmin’ (in fact ‘two gloomy men and a bright young secretary’) receives yet another letter from a compulsive nail-biter: ‘What did we advise her last time?’ Mr Slump, the chain-smoking drunk, asks. ‘Meditation on the Beautiful.’ ‘Well, tell her to go on meditating.’ The opening of Paul Hawken’s Carbon gives the impression that it was dictated by the gloomy Mr Slump in response to a climate activist asking what he should think about the destruction of the planet. Tell him that ‘to better understand the riddles and luminosity of life’ he must ‘go

Thursday

James Delingpole

The downfall of climate change poster boy Michael Mann

Even if you’ve never heard of Michael Mann, you will have felt his baleful influence on your energy bills. He is the inventor of the hockey stick chart, which shows a sharp increase in late 20th century global temperatures, like the blade of an ice hockey stick. It put rocket boosters on the climate change scare and was used as an excuse by policymakers to send green taxes, tariffs and regulations soaring. Mann was an obscure academic who had just been given his PhD at the University of Massachusetts when his graph was published in the journal Nature in 1998. Within months – fêted everywhere from the New York Times

The Spectator

Kemi’s stance on net zero is courageous – and correct

Kemi Badenoch secured the Conservative leadership on the basis that she would confront her party and the country with uncomfortable truths. This week, in a speech to launch the Tories’ policy renewal programme, she effectively told Theresa May and Boris Johnson that they were naifs for committing to unachievable climate targets. The decarbonisation of our economy, she said, was a ruinously expensive folly. By stating baldly and unapologetically that it will be impossible for Britain to get to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 without huge economic pain she has broken a consensus and breached a taboo. It is difficult for opposition parties to attract attention for policy announcements so

Wednesday

Sam Leith

James Bradley: The World in the Ocean

49 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the novelist and critic James Bradley whose new book is Deep Water: The World in the Ocean. He tells me how we need to rethink our relationship with the sea and the life it contains, why fish are much more intelligent than we are used to imagining, and why – amid planetary doom – there’s still room for hope.

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Pious bilge: Kyoto, at @sohoplace, reviewed

The West End’s new political show, Kyoto, can’t be classed as a drama. A drama involves a main character engaged in a transformative personal journey. This is a secretarial round-up of various environmental summits, or ‘Cop’ meetings, held during the late 1980s and 1990s. If you remove the private jets, a Cop summit is a sort of parish council seminar about the probable weather during the summer fête. The material is extremely dull and yet it’s possible to turn dross into a gripping story if you hire a dramatist. So Big Oil has been torching the planet for 66 years and yet the West End hasn’t been burned to ashes

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: The dangers of the ADHD ‘industry’

Nothing left Sir: Rod Liddle is right to ascribe the establishment’s desire to suppress the truth in relation to grooming gangs to its fundamentally anti-working class mindset (‘We demand a right to truth’, 11 January). But he’s characteristically wrong to attribute this to ‘liberalism’. The contemporary left’s identity-politics agenda is born from the opposite: the postmodernist-derived idea that reality can be radically reconstructed through control of what is, and is not, communicated. Its various fantasies – and the public-sector interests that depend upon them – necessarily involve suppressing our powers of rational cognition. Culture-control leftism has been able quite brilliantly to simultaneously pass itself off as a manifestation of ‘progressive

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

The case against a ‘climate emergency’

January is the ideal month for gaining a sense of perspective. I’m increasingly convinced that the ‘climate emergency’ is another social mania we’ll look back on with: ‘J-eez, what was that about?’ Why? The paradigm displays the classic anthropocentrism of our era. As organised religion declines, we replace God with humanity. Arrogating to our species the power to dial global temperature up or down is typically arrogant (see: pride, goeth, fall). Claiming that something is all your fault is as vain as claiming it’s to your credit. Regarding ‘the planet’ as a frightened fluff ball that requires our protection is the ultimate hubris. ‘The planet’ can squash us like bugs.

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

The Ginger Rogers theory of information

I had a friend whose approach to entrepreneurialism was to take two separate things that seemed stupidly popular and somehow find a way to combine them. He thought karaoke was ridiculous; his friend thought 24-hour rolling news channels were daft. The two of them created a 24-hour karaoke channel in Asia – and sold it at a sizeable profit. The idea of gynogenic climate change holds that the planet is warming up, but that it is women who are to blame Following this model, I wondered if it might be a useful thought-experiment to contrive political theories which are annoying to people on both the left and the right. The

Tuesday

James Bradley

A scorched Earth: Juice, by Tim Winton, reviewed

Late last year in Australia’s The Monthly, Tim Winton wrote an essay on the urgent need for writers to look the climate crisis in the eye. Quoting Amitav Ghosh’s observation about the ‘patterns of evasion’ that continue to conceal the scale of the catastrophe, he argued that writers must overcome the habits of mind that treat the natural world as an inert externality. Instead, they must find ways to recognise that we are part of nature, and our fate is inseparable from the world around us. ‘We have difficult work to do,’ he declared. ‘And we’re late to the bushfire.’ Of course, Winton is not someone who could ever be

Monday

Sam Leith

The grandstanding against the Hay Festival is short-sighted 

When the country’s largest literary festival parts ways with its main sponsor, it is not usually a cause for rejoicing among writers, performers, and the sorts of people who like to go to literary festivals. It is usually a disaster for the festival. Yet when on Friday the Hay Festival sacked (yes, it was that way round) the investment fund Baillie Gifford as its main sponsor, it was felt that a mighty blow had been struck against injustice. The decision was the result of a campaign that took exception to the colour of Baillie Gifford’s money, seeing the company as part of a disaster-capitalist enterprise that profits from the destruction of the planet by investing in fossil fuels, and that indirectly

Thursday

Toby Young

Why won’t Chris Packham have a real debate on climate?

On Sunday, the BBC did something unusual. It invited Luke Johnson, a climate contrarian, to join a panel with Laura Kuenssberg to discuss net zero. As followers of this debate will know, the BBC’s editorial policy unit issued guidance to staff in 2018 saying: ‘As climate change is accepted as happening, you do not need a “denier” to balance the debate.’ Although it did allow for exceptions to this rule: ‘There are occasions where contrarians and sceptics should be included within climate change and sustainability debates.’ Presumably this was one such occasion. I can’t help thinking Packham’s ‘devastating put-down’ would have been more effective if it had been true The

Thursday

Adam Begley

In the grip of apocalypse angst

You have to love a book about the end of the world in which the first two references are to Saul Bellow’s Herzog and the HBO series The White Lotus, a high/low combo that preps us for authorial omniscience. In the next few paragraphs we get Marc Maron, Sally Rooney and Frank Kermode. Buckle up, kids, a cultural whirlwind is coming! The day of judgment is at hand, and the all-knowing Dorian Lynskey, who seems to have doomscrolled through every card catalogue on the planet, is just the person to provide live commentary. A capacious cultural history of ‘apocalyptic angst’, his Everything Must Go will make you happy to be

Tuesday

Toby Young

I’ve found the cure for climate anxiety

A new documentary, Climate: The Movie, by the maverick filmmaker Martin Durkin, is becoming a phenomenon, though it’s received almost no publicity in the mainstream media. It rejects the idea that we’re in the midst of a ‘climate emergency’, so that’s hardly surprising. But it has already racked up millions of views online and been translated into ten languages. I watched it on YouTube on Monday and can confirm it’s a dazzlingly entertaining film that distils the case against climate alarmism into a succinct 80 minutes. One of the reasons it’s so hard to challenge the narrative about climate change is because it supposedly reflects the ‘settled’ scientific consensus. We’re

Wednesday

Melissa Kite

In defence of cows

‘They’re going to have to stop cows,’ said my mother, looking doubtfully down at her plate as we tucked into a roast dinner. It was not like her to come over all veganistic, but she had been watching the BBC where she had got hold of the idea that cows might have to be banned because ‘they can’t stop them breaking wind’. Put the entire working population on veganism for a week and see what happens And nor should they, said I, cutting off a juicy slice to push into my mouth, the builder boyfriend and my father also chomping away as we sat around my parents’ dining table. I