STEPHEN GLOVER STRIKES AGAIN
With reference to Stephen Glover’s
Daily Mail column for 13th June 2019: ‘I fear Mrs May’s plan for a
green legacy is as doomed as her lost Brexit deal’: I have reasons for agreeing
with Mr Glover’s scepticism but from a wholly opposite viewpoint.
‘Yesterday,’ he writes, ‘she announced
that Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced to zero, or almost
zero, by 2050 – an undertaking that has not so far been matched by any other developed
country.’
Of course Mrs May was also going to
rehouse the victims of the Grenfell disaster within three months – and they are
still waiting after two years. So one takes her ‘green legacy’ with a pinch of
salt.
No: Glover’s argument is that Britain’s
emissions are a tiny ‘1.2 per cent – and falling’ of total world emissions. That
is, compared to China’s 27 per cent (22 times as much as the British) and those
emissions from a rapidly growing India of ‘about 6.5 per cent’. Glover really
ought to mention a third country here, the United States of America, which is
third largest in population after India and China, if by a long way. But the
USA uses up some 25% of the world’s energy with a consumption per capita far
outweighing that of the average Indian or Chinese. Moreover its government
under President Trump has eschewed the whole idea of world climate change as he
rips up environmental protection laws thereby forcing individual states to take
their own action - for self-protection, as it were. If things deteriorate this
could lead to the worst separation of powers clash in the history of the
Republic. But perhaps best not to mention Uncle Sam here, who is Britain’s
closest ally.
‘My point,’ says Glover, ‘is that
nothing we do in this country by way of reducing our emissions – which have
already gone down by 44 per cent since 1990, a barely equalled performance, is
going to have a discernible influence on the overall situation.’ Never mind
that this barely equalled performance was brought about by the barely equalled
performance of the decimation of British industry in the Tory years under
Thatcher and co. which saw manufacturing reduced to a present 13% of the
British economy, giving way to our present predominating services, finance and
investment, insurance, entertainment – with irreparable loss in, for example,
the north of England, and in Wales. Fifth or sixth-largest economy in the world
Britain may be but it is not now an especially important manufacturing economy.
The reduction in emissions may be a good thing but it was not brought about by
all-wise British social planning.
The really important point here is
that Britain’s reduced level of
emissions is paralleled and dwarfed by British overseas investment in, amongst
other activities, mining, fracking and oil drilling, drivers of emissions on a
gigantic scale, most of these in the developing world. Britain’s power is capital, not loads of machine goods and
services, except financial services. That is why climate activists are
demonstrating against BP, not because of its emissions inside Britain but
because of its massive polluting all around the world, in the company of others
such as Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon and so on – as well as Glencore and other
mining conglomerates. Mrs May’s pronouncement and Stephen Glover’s response to
it are entirely beside the point. What Britain doesn’t do at home it activates
abroad – and both at home and abroad
once the gigantic expansion of Heathrow Airport gets underway, around its now
waved-through third runway and all the masses of new aircraft discharging
emissions wherever they fly, take off and land.
Speaking of which, I am against Glover
inasmuch as it is obvious that Britain is
domestically polluted in the cities and in the countryside, which is doing
our people, our children (inexcusable asthma disease and deaths amongst the
latter due to exhaust fumes) and our wildlife no good at all. We have far too
many cars, vans and heavy lorries while rail freight potential lies neglected;
we have a potential for tidal power also ignored, at the same time as we are
faced with enormous, deadly and increasing methane emissions from more herds of
bovines than ever before, within the worldwide growth of what is now referred
to as McDonaldisation: vast herds around the globe whose sole purpose is to
supply cheeseburgers, and not only to President Trump, would you believe. Even
if petrol and diesel are replaced by electric in our transport, who has decided
what is to be done about the heavy atmospheric poison emitted by enhanced
battery manufacture?
Apparently we should be complacent
about our pollution on the grounds that Britain produces so little of it: but
(a) it produces quite enough to poison a not-very-big country, and (b) its
overseas investments ensure that the rest of humanity is to be poisoned as
well, perhaps at the very least on the same scale as India’s and maybe in time
China’s.
Meanwhile, too, our climate protesters
are labelled and treated as ‘terrorists’ and Greta Thunberg – who has the temerity
to argue in favour of the interests of our children – being vilified by
journalists and others as only, perhaps, a 16-year-old girl with Asperger’s
should be. Mr Glover ought to be working, if he can, to persuade his Daily Mail
to reverse its position towards being in favour of humanity, not to speak of a
beautiful blue planet, the only one we know.
