EnviroSpin Watch

Down on the farm (with Laura Cantrell).....

I must apologise that I shall not be posting frequently for the next few days as I am out and about, including presenting a talk to 200 farmers on biofuels and biopackaging (government policy on these is a total mystery!). This should be fun, and I expect to learn far more than I impart.

In the meantime, I also feature in an excellent piece on climate change by Charlie Flindt, a Hampshire farmer, in this week's Farmers Weekly (always a worthwhile read - you'll need your cookies enabled for this): 'Brace yourself for a roller-coaster climate' (Farmers Weekly, April 16 - 22, pp. 71 - 72). The article kindly concludes:

"I think it's because we know Prof Stott has a point. We know about climate change because we deal with climate every day, and it's true, it changes all the time. We - as an industry - have been around for a good few years, and for a good few changes in climate. We'll adapt and cope with the worst Mother Nature decides to throw at us. It can't be any worse than Mrs Beckett's mid-term review proposals."

Poor Margaret Beckett - 'Rosa Klebb', of course, in Private Eye.

Charlie was an excellent interviewer, and I find the down-to-earth common sense of many farmers a much needed corrective to the Islington babble.

Hence, why I'm looking forward to being down on the farm.....

In the meantime, just remember that (for your sanity):

- the global warming myth is not complex climate change;

- wind farms have an enormous footprint for a piddling amount of energy;

- in twenty years time, we will marvel at the fuss over GM;

- most re-cycling is both economic and environmental rubbish;

- 'organic' food is a jolly expensive fad;

- the measured species extinction rate is only 0.006% every 50 years, and this is a worst case scenario which takes into account neither new species nor rediscoveries and which is based on one of the lowest estimates of the total number of species in the wide, wide world.

Or better still, of course, treat yourself to Laura Cantrell's haunting album, 'When The Roses Bloom Again' (Spit and Polish, Shoeshine Records [SPITCD 014]) (review and teasers at BBC Music>>Folk & Country (April 17). Some of the songs, including the title piece itself, 'Mountain Fern', 'Yonder Comes a Freight Train', 'Too Late for Tonight', and 'Broken Again' are pure 'Cold Mountain'. An immediate classic. To be taken with a smoke-filled Islay malt in the wee small hours. And I bet you sob into your glass!

Philip, a romantic ploughing the Enlightenment furrow. Will be back soon..... ("Oh no!", I hear you cry!). Now, for that turnip wine..... or single malt?

Jackie Ashley, please note - 'global warming' isn't 'climate change'.....

‘Global warming’ is one of the grand narratives of the new Millennium, especially among the ‘citizen scientists’ of the countries of the North. The narrative comprises a number of constituent units of mythical discourse, or mythemes (Barthes 1966; Lévi-Strauss 1977), including limits to growth (Meadows 1972), sustainability (WCED 1987), neo-Malthusian constructs of population (Ehrlich 1990), pollution (Carson 1962), anti-corporate Americanism (Reich 1970; Callenbach 1975), and human sin and greed disturbing the ecological 'harmony' and 'balance' of the Earth and its systems (Gore 1992). The narrative was invented in 1988 when the phrase was coined. It replaced two earlier, and contingent narratives, namely an imminent plunge into another Ice Age and the threat of a nuclear winter.

Initially, the ‘global warming’ narrative was embraced by both the right and the left politically. The right was concerned with breaking the power of traditional trades unions, such as the coal miners - the labour force behind a major source of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions -, and promoting the development of nuclear power. The left, by contrast, was obsessed with population growth, industrialisation, the car, development, world capitalism and, more recently, globalisation. Today, the narrative has evolved into an emblematic issue for authoritarian ‘Greens’, who employ a form of language that has been characterised by the physicist, P.H. Borcherds (1999), as ‘the hysterical subjunctive’, and this is vehemently opposed by neo-libertarian economists typical of the administration of George W. Bush.

The grand narrative of ‘global warming’ has always been legitimised primarily by the social bond. The narrative, or consensus, normally precedes its legitimising science, and currently the science that supports the narrative is legitimised in turn by the mythmakers. It has become somewhat axiomatic that much of the British media, such as The Guardian and The Independent newspapers, tend not to report science which questions the grand narrative, or which undermines the certainty of the processes of circular legitimation.

But this is now becoming worrying for socialists. Today, for example, Jackie Ashley ('It's time to call time on our cheap flight hypocrisy', The Guardian, April 15) takes up the increasingly shrill cry of the metropolitan elite, namely that anything which is cheap, such as cheap air travel, must be changed at once.

Coming from the left politically, I despair when I read such nonsense, which employs the rhetoric of 'global warming' (under the guise of 'climate change') to curtail the options of the poor. There is only one thing to be said about climate change. If we crushed every car and plane, closed every factory, shut down every power station, and put 4 billion people worldwide out of work, climate would still change, and often dramatically. Unfortunately, we would then be all too poor to adapt.

The real left should be increasingly wary of 'Green' politics and agendas. They are, at heart, intrinsically elitist and neo-colonial.

Philip - about to entertain his grandson! Help!