Environment

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

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

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

[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

Wild Lone is one of the most violent books I’ve ever read. It was published just before the last war and it doesn’t pull its punches: mothers are slaughtered with their babies; brothers and sisters are eaten alive; callous parents look on indifferently as their sick children die slowly beneath them; the few survivors almost invariably succumb to disease, cold or starvation. Every child should read it, for it tells you how the world really is. The natural world, I mean. It was written by one of the last century’s great amateur naturalists, Denys Watkins-Pitchford, under his nom-de-plume ‘BB’ and it purports to be the biography of a ‘Pytchley fox’ called

As soon as votes were counted in the race to be Tory candidate for London mayor, Zac Goldsmith’s problem became clear. He had won comfortably, but just 9,200 party members bothered to vote — compared with the 80,000 who took part in Labour’s contest. Goldsmith praised his party for a ‘civilised and constructive’ debate, unlike the ‘divisive and vicious’ battle won by Sadiq Khan. But if Labour can call on a machine whose activists outnumber the Tories by nine to one, the Conservative candidate faces a real disadvantage. The size of Khan’s vote, Goldsmith thinks, is deceptive and swollen by trade union members. But in May, he concedes, ‘They will