Environment

Thursday

The Spectator

Is being green good for business?

On Monday 11th September, The Spectator hosted a round table discussion over lunch about whether being green is good for business. Guests included: Philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, Shaun Spiers, CEO of Green Alliance, Mark Saxon from Coca-Cola Great Britain, journalist Harry Mount, Tom Robinson, founder of Adaptavate, Bill Wiggin MP, Peter Aldous MP, Neil Parish MP, Scott Mann MP and Anthony Marlowe of Edelman. Fraser Nelson chaired the discussion. A podcast was recorded on the same day, which can be played above. Recent bedtime reading for Sir Roger Scruton was a 50-page treatise by an art historian on the design of the classic Coke bottle, whose twists, it transpires, were

Thursday

Tanya Harrod

Grain of truth

We routinely feel emotional about materials — often subliminally. Which is why new substances and techniques for manufacturing have provoked vivid writing, particularly during the design-reform debates of the 19th century. Think of John Ruskin on the evils of cut as opposed to blown glass or his views on wrought iron as opposed to cast iron — the latter emblematic in his view of a ‘sophisticated, unkind, uncomfortable, unprincipled society’. For the designer Gottfried Semper man’s very inventiveness was a loss. We were losing our understanding of discrete materials. Then there was, and is, our perfectly justified anxieties about the plastics family, beautifully chronicled in Jeffrey Meikle’s American Plastic: A

Sunday

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Michael Gove says ‘yes’

Michael Gove: The DUP deal is good for the union The newly installed Environment Secretary Michael Gove took to Andrew Marr’s sofa today to defend the government’s deal with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland. Controversial for awarding the province an additional £1 billion, Gove rejected the idea that deal this amounted to a ‘bung’, and argued that far from dividing the country, the ‘confidence and supply’ deal would serve to strengthen the United Kingdom: Marr: Can we at least determine that there is not going to be another… large about of money paid to the DUP? Because [Sir Nicholas] MacPherson, the former Permanent Secretary to the Treasury said

Monday

Charles Moore

Will Prince Charles’s ‘climate collapse’ prediction come true?

Each year, this column has the melancholy duty of reminding the public of the Prince of Wales’s prediction, made in Brazil in March 2009, that there were only 100 months left to prevent ‘irretrievable climate collapse’. Those 100 months will have elapsed at the end of next month, so it looks as if we are all doomed. The general election on 8 June will therefore be pretty pointless. It is noticeable, however, that the Prince has not, in recent years, repeated his exact dating of the catastrophe, muttering, in 2015, that it might be 35 years. Even more striking was his co-authorship, at the beginning of this year, of the

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 9 March 2017

Naming the weather Former BBC weatherman Bill Giles has said he’s fed up with storms being named. — The practice of naming storms in the UK began with storm Abigail in October 2015, although some earlier storms, like Bertha in 2014, were the remnants of hurricanes already named in the US. The St Jude’s Day storm of 2013 took its name from the saint’s day on which it fell. — The US National Hurricane Centre first named storms in 1950, when it started calling them by a phonetic alphabet: Able, Baker, Charlie etc. Three years later it switched to women’s names, starting with Alice, a damp squib with winds not

James Delingpole James Delingpole

‘Cash for ash’ is one green scam among many

Toffs are like jackals: always quick to sniff out new carrion. I remember a few years back one florid aristo boasting what obscene amounts of money he was saving on his heating bills thanks to a brilliant new government scheme to incentivise wood-burning. ‘Probably no use to you —your house isn’t big enough,’ he said, pityingly. Then he went on to tell me about the solar array on his estate. ‘Makes perfect sense if you’ve got a few acres spare.’ But I haven’t told you the worst of it. The worst was that my friend felt really virtuous. Some might say that here was another well-heeled scrounger with a massive

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

What will you do in the gene-editing revolution?

The only time I ever saw a wolf in the wild, a small one, I was so frightened that I closed my eyes. It was a useful insight into the depths of my own cowardice. Every day, with each new story about the exciting breakthroughs we’re making in genetic engineering, I feel that same shameful urge to shut my eyes. Far faster than anybody thought, we’re working out the genes responsible for all manner of traits in all creatures great and small. Far more easily than anyone expected, we’ve moved from standard gene therapies to figuring out how to actually edit our own DNA, to ferret around inside living cells,

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 2 March 2017

My partner has become a recycling fascist. She checks everything I put into the bin. I received two bollockings today alone — the first at breakfast because I did not make a distinction between the top of my small bottle of Actimel (non-recyclable) and the bottle (recyclable). I do try to do my best, but is it time for her to be recycled? I can’t go on like this. — Name withheld, Hampshire A. First bear in mind that your best will never be good enough. The booby-trap potential is too great for anyone who hasn’t had the time or inclination to mug up on all the complex requirements for correct

Thursday

James Delingpole

Killing spree of the fluffy green idiots

Who do you think was responsible for Europe’s biggest environmental disaster of the past three decades; one that caused more widespread damage and killed more people than even the nuclear accident at Chernobyl? Was it a) greedy and selfish capitalists, probably linked to Big Oil, riding roughshod over the stringent health and safety regulations our wise, caring politicians have designed to protect us and our natural environment? Or b) an alliance of fluffy green activists, campaigning journalists and virtue-signalling politicians, united on a noble mission to save the planet from the greatest environmental threat it has ever known? If you guessed b) then you may appreciate why we climate sceptics

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 2 February 2017

Trump’s rivals More than 1.7m people signed a petition on Parliament’s website demanding that Donald Trump’s state visit be cancelled, and more than 200,000 one calling for it to go ahead. What are the most and least signed of the 2,500 or so other live petitions? Most signed Repeal new surveillance laws 209,000 Ban firework sales to public 150,000 Set £1,200 maximum price on car insurance for 18- to 25-year-olds 148,000 Least signed Offer discounted counselling to housing professionals 6 Plain bottles for alcoholic drinks 6 Scrap juries 6 Visiting rites Which countries have been awarded the most state visits to Britain? 64 countries have had a state visit during

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 20 October 2016

Vote Leave was the most successful electoral campaign in British history. Against the opposition of all three political parties, it won, achieving the largest vote for anything in this country, ever. But voting to leave is only the essential start, not the fulfilment, and now there is no Vote Leave. After victory, the campaign’s leaders went their various ways. Some were lulled into a false sense of security by Mrs May’s clear declaration of Brexit intent, and by the fact that one of their top colleagues, Stephen Parkinson, is now installed in 10 Downing Street. Nick Timothy, now all-powerful in Mrs May’s counsels, was running the New Schools Network during

Matt Ridley

Climate of ignorance

Global greening is the name given to a gradual, but large, increase in green vegetation on the planet over the past three decades. The climate change lobby is keen to ensure that if you hear about it at all, you hear that it is a minor thing, dwarfed by the dangers of global warming. Actually, it could be the other way round: greening is a bigger effect than warming. It is a story in which I have been both vilified and vindicated. Four years ago, I came across an online video of a lecture given by Ranga Myneni of Boston University in which he presented an ingenious analysis of data

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 8 September 2016

There is no cherished assumption that now goes unchallenged. The latest one is that country air is good for you. Ronald Reagan was much mocked when he said in 1981 that ‘trees cause more pollution than automobiles do’, but scientists later surprised everyone by saying that he was at least partially right. And now it is claimed that if you live near to a pig, cow or chicken farm, you might as well be living in Oxford Street. A study conducted by Utrecht University in Holland has found that more Europeans die from air pollution in the countryside than in cities, mainly from the fumes of manure storage and slurry

Thursday

Matt Ridley

Don’t grouse about grouse

The vast Bubye Valley Conservancy in southern Zimbabwe is slightly larger than County Durham, as well as much hotter and drier. Yet both contain abundant wildlife thanks almost entirely to the hunting of game. In Bubye Valley, it’s lions and buffalo that are the targets; in the Durham dales, it’s grouse. But the effect is the same — a spectacular boost to other wildlife, privately funded. Bubye Valley was a cattle ranch, owned by Unilever, until 1994 when it was turned over to wildlife. A double electric fence was put round the entire 850,000-acre reserve. Gradually the buffalo, giraffe, wildebeest, zebra and antelope numbers grew. Elephants and rhinos were moved

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 28 April 2016

Green reasons to stay in Sir: As Conservatives we are clear that the European Union has been central to improving the quality of the UK’s environment. European policy is not always perfect, but on environmental issues it has allowed us to move forward in leaps and bounds. The wealth of the environment on which our economy depends is not confined to national boundaries, which is why the EU has become such a vital forum for negotiating Britain’s interest in maintaining healthy seas, clean air, climate security and species protection. It is largely thanks to European agreements that we now have sewage-free beaches in Britain. Because of tough European vehicle standards, British car

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Acid trip

There was a breathtakingly beautiful BBC series on the Great Barrier Reef recently which my son pronounced himself almost too depressed to watch. ‘What’s the point?’ said Boy. ‘By the time I get to Australia to see it the whole bloody lot will have dissolved.’ The menace Boy was describing is ‘ocean acidification’. It’s no wonder he should find it worrying, for it has been assiduously promoted by environmentalists for more than a decade now as ‘global warming’s evil twin’. Last year, no fewer than 600 academic papers were published on the subject, so it must be serious, right? First referenced in a peer-reviewed study in Nature in 2003, it

Thursday

Laura Freeman

The cult of clean

How clean are you? I ask not as a mother confessor. I’m not interested in the state of your soul. What I want to know is: how clean is your sock drawer? Your fridge? Your gut? These are the pressing questions of the new cult of clean. Its apostles urge us to divest ourselves of worldly possessions, to renounce ‘dirty’ food and alcohol and to dress in monkish grey or bleached white. Our sins are these: we have bought too much tat, eaten to filthy excess and stuffed our wardrobes with cheap, disposable rubbish. The clean cultist says no more. Everything must go. The most high and holy of the

Thursday

Harry Mount

Trudeau family values

   Quebec City Canada is about to hit a new high. If the supercute 44-year-old prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has his way, marijuana will soon be legally available. Trudeau himself is no pothead. He last had a joint in 2010 at a family dinner party, with his children safely tucked up in bed at their grandmother’s house. Still, it is a typical policy for the Liberal leader — headline-grabbing, progressive, fashionable. To call Trudeau a press darling is an understatement. The man is a global PR sensation. Only this week, he had himself snapped with two panda cubs — ‘Say hello to Jia Panpan & Jia Yueyue,’ he tweeted —

Thursday

Simon Barnes

The song of the whales

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thenextrefugeecrisis/media.mp3″ title=”Simon Barnes and the Sea Watch Foundation’s Dr Peter Evans discuss whales” startat=1400] Listen [/audioplayer]Last week a sperm whale was beached at Hunstanton in Norfolk and there was much horrified concern. A terrible sight, lying there like a small cottage on the immensity of the beach, 46 feet long and 30 tons, surrounded by rescue workers from British Divers Marine Rescue and Hunstanton Sea Life Sanctuary who were dousing the whale with water to try and keep it going, but to no avail. It died towards the end of a long and desperate day. Last month, another sperm whale was beached just a couple of miles away and

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Peak

Near Victoria Station in London they began to build a tower-block advertised as ‘The Peak’. I expected it to resemble Mont Blanc. After a few floors, it was finished, and the top of the façade projected like the peak of a baseball cap. I felt cheated. Peak is a vogue word that itself has gone through peak usage. Earlier this month, Steve Howard, Ikea’s chief sustainability officer (yes, the chief one), said in a seminar: ‘In the West we have probably hit peak stuff. We talk about peak oil. I’d say we’ve hit peak red meat, peak sugar, peak stuff, peak home furnishings.’ It was an engaging observation, but poor