The delayers’ playbook
Bringing climate campaigners together with a former oil industry executive who has apparently seen the light raises hopes for collective progress. But Nick Butler’s apparent concessions to the protesters is really a thinly veiled list of largely unreconstructed oil and gas industry talking points, carefully crafted to appear positive but really only justifying inaction.
First, Butler’s line that the 1.5°C target is “desirable” but “not realistic.” In fact the target is more than desirable, it is the agreed international ambition, and a precautionary threshold that already entails serious human and ecological impacts. His rather blasé comment about 3°C of warming being likely normalises a shift that would likely trigger irreversible breakdown. The argument that the real problem is coal subtly implies that oil and gas are not—a classic lobbyists’ misdirection to take the heat off the industry when breaking our oil addiction is an urgent imperative.
Just as shocking, as an attempt to evade responsibility for domestic action, was the deployment of the “it’s not us, it’s China” line, which masks both the UK’s historic responsibility—we are eighth in the all-time global league for emissions—and the fact that Britain has huge global leverage through fossil fuel finance provided by the City of London. Emphasising carbon capture and storage—implying that these are realistic technofixes which can leave the fossil fuel industry in place—is misleading, at best.
The cumulative effect of these arguments is to frame climate options in such a way as to guarantee failure. Butler knows the science, which means he must know that the vast majority of reserves need to stay in the ground.
The clarity and courage of the three campaigners, prepared to get arrested to drive change, was an admirable contrast. And from bold proposals for transformative green new deals, to gathering momentum for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty and ending the advertising from major polluters—the only “realistic” steps are ones that meet climate targets.
Andrew Simms, co-ordinator of the Rapid TransitionAlliance
Your climate feature touched on some interesting questions, but what struck me was the ease with which both sides agreed that one of the most successful deliverers of clean electricity at scale should be ruled out of the discussion.
How convenient for big oil that nuclear power—a technology that if it were invented today would be hailed as a miracle—is discounted so easily. Fossil fuels are so successful because they are superabundant and provide a highly concentrated source of power. The only proven source of energy that can match that availability and power density is nuclear fission. And yet overblown fears about accidents and waste management have seen it excluded from the agenda in many countries.
Butler says he wants China and India to come off coal—but the only way they can do this at the required pace is to consider all options. The Messmer plan in France, in response to the 1973 oil crisis, showed how one industrialised country can quickly rid itself of dependency on volatile fossil fuels with nuclear. So it’s not hard to see why the oil and gas sector wouldn’t want it to take off everywhere.
For XR, which desperately needs to provide answers beyond simply asking the public what they would like to happen, blithely dismissing nuclear is a real mistake. The way forward for both sides is to stop cherry-picking information and making sweeping statements about broad technology groups. No source of man-made energy is without its potential downsides—even wind and solar.
If XR and big oil succeed in narrowing the field of solutions, it will continue to slow the transition, taking us ever further into the danger zone. Butler suggests we will need to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, and he’s not wrong. But first we need to turn off the tap of emissions with proven, scalable technology. Embracing the role of nuclear is a test of how serious someone is about the climate problem. On that score, both sides failed.
Bryony Worthington, co-chair, Peers for the Planet
Dismantling democracy
I was very pleased to read the article by Alex Dean in relation to what is now the Elections Act.
During the passage of the bill, I was privileged to work with Lord Judge, convener of the crossbenchers, Lord Young, a former member of the Conservative Cabinet, and Lord Wallace from the Liberal Democrats, among other active peers.
While it was possible to make some progress by getting the government to acknowledge that there were several ways people might be able to prove their identity when voting, there was complete intransigence in failing to understand that government control of the policy and strategy of the Electoral Commission substantially undermined its independence. At any other time, there would have been outrage across the British media. Sadly, there was virtual silence.
Despite deleting the offending clauses, and then seeking what any rational individual would have considered to be reasonable amendments, we were eventually defeated by 21 votes. This, on the final evening prior to prorogation before the Queen’s Speech in May, and after a very clever filibuster by the government which took us late into the evening.
But clever parliamentary tactics can’t hide the fact that, as with so much of this government’s behaviour, there has been a belief that it is invincible, all-powerful and entitled to interpret democracy in whatever way it sees fit. This trait may not disappear with Johnson’s departure. It can be seen, over and over again, in respect of appointments—not just to public bodies but anywhere over which the government has even the most tenuous influence, in what Antonio Gramsci described, all those years ago, as hegemony.
Apparently, democracy is something to be espoused for others battling for freedom in the rest of the world, while respect for the rule of law and a pluralistic and diverse democracy at home has gradually become a distant memory.
David Blunkett is a Labour peer and a former home secretary
Class capture
Rupert Christiansen does not seem to understand the relationship of the major public schools to Oxbridge. Their purpose is indeed not to produce “crassly entitled, brutally right-wing” oafs, though these are an occasional byproduct. Their real function is to take a group of children who are genuinely quite bright and make them look exceptional. This is obvious on reflection. Nobody is going to pay thousands of pounds a year for six or seven years to have their child come out looking exactly as able as they actually are.
The schools are directly engaged in social engineering. Their job is to move moderately talented children from wealthy families up the pecking order in the competition for places at the best universities. The admissions systems at Oxford and Cambridge are belatedly grasping that their job is to move them back down again to where they belong. Obviously this is unpopular with parents, who see their investments devalued. It also appears unpopular with insiders like Christiansen, who seem to believe that all that glisters actually is gold, and that if it doesn’t, it isn’t.
Rory O’Kelly, Kent
I would argue that one factor in this lack of social class diversity in the media is the decline of local newspapers.
Back in 2017, Press Gazette was bemoaning the collapse of local newspapers in London with the prospective closure of the Kensington and Chelsea News, which had gone from having 10 dedicated journalists covering stories in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in 1990 to none in 2017. In my own borough, one of the two newspapers that we had in the 1990s has closed, while the other now has a very limited (free) circulation.
Those local papers provided a route for the national newspapers to pick up local events that they could not afford to send a reporter to on the off-chance of a story, and for journalists to move on to the national papers and from there to the wider media.
Laurence Cox, via the website
God’s green earth
Karen Armstrong’s piece rightly calls for a richer encounter between human beings and nature as a response to the climate crisis: “We must change not only our lifestyle but our belief system.”
She is not the first to trace the roots of a radical distinction—between insiders and “the other,” humankind and nature, and the divine and “the world”—to the principles of monotheism. But in the Christian tradition, to which the west is so indebted, the picture is more nuanced than she allows for.
The Bible itself, particularly the Psalms and writings such as Job, evoke the mystery of the created order as a channel for awe before God. The instruction in Genesis 1:28 which she cites—to “be masters” or “exercise dominion”—has provoked a range of interpretations, not least in light of the behaviour expected elsewhere in scripture of those exercising dominion. It was only in the early modern period, alongside the rise of modern science, that it came to be read in terms of anthropocentric control and even then this often led to challenges to reckless exploitation rather than its justification.
Recent decades have seen active explorations—sometimes under the uninviting label “eco-theology”—of how the foundational texts of our belief systems may themselves be agents of the change for which Armstrong calls.
This is not intended as an apologetic on behalf of the Christian tradition, for our news media are replete with contemporary appeals to religious beliefs and to “the Bible” in order to justify all manner of practices that are life-denying rather than life-affirming. It is rather to extend the invitation to others, whether of settled religious beliefs or of none, to join a conversation which is surely one of the most important we can have.
Judith M Lieu, Lady Margaret’s professor of divinity emerita, Cambridge and author of “Marcion and the Making of a Heretic”
Terminal Tories
Dominic Grieve does a good job of describing the amoral abyss into which his old party sank as Johnson fought for survival. But it was evident from before Johnson became prime minister that he was a disaster in any responsible office. His turn as foreign secretary was an international embarrassment. He was an amusing journalist, and the Spectator under his editorship had a joie de vivre it now lacks. His conduct from the moment he became PM—and indeed an MP—was entirely self-centred: he (with the connivance of so many other Tory MPs) expelled any Conservative MP who did not toe his line, however wrong his line might have been.
The sooner the Conservatives are in opposition, the better. They desperately need a period of quiet reflection, as well as a grown-up new leader. Alas, Labour is still probably some years off being electable.
Simon Cockshutt, via the website
Flagging standards
The graphic above the excellent item “Buses faring badly” has the Union flag upside down. (The wider diagonal white line of St Andrew’s Cross should be “dominant,” above the thin red diagonal in the upper quadrant nearer the flagstaff.) To sailors (and others) this is a signal of distress.
But then I thought “how clever!”, since the article relates distress at the state of UK buses and their fares. A good graphic after all.
David Miller, Lymington
Keeping control
There’s a difference between being hostile to immigrants and refugees, and believing—for a whole range of possible reasons (economic, environmental, housing-related)—that overall net migration should be controlled.
The latter is not a symptom of “authoritarian attitudes” but an arguable policy position.
Ruth Davis, Basingstoke
Genius overlooked
In Peter Forbes’s review of Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death he refers to “James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of DNA’s structure” but does not mention the work of Rosalind Franklin, without which the two Nobel laureates might not have made their monumentally important discovery. Franklin’s contribution is often overlooked—to the benefit of Watson and Crick.
Charles Maggs, London N16
In fact
The Lake District is England’s most dangerous tourist spot, with an average of 17 deaths per year.
Daily Express, 9th July 2022
In 2019, an estimated 15.8 per cent of American adults took prescription pills for mental health. Now, almost a quarter do.
New York Times, 9th July 2022
The total value of broadcast rights to Indian Premier League cricket is $6.2bn. The mean value of each IPL match is thus $15m, second only to the implied per game value of the US National Football League ($35m) and ahead of English Premier League football ($11m).
Variety, 14th June 2022
Once Boris Johnson leaves office there will be—for the first time in British history—six living former prime ministers.
@AmIRightSir, 7th July 2022
Out of all the world’s cities of more than 10m people, big cats live wild in only Mumbai (leopards) and Los Angeles (mountain lions).
AP News, 30th June 2022
Twitter can ask users to reconsider offensive tweets before publication. Out of every 100 tweets receiving this prompt, 69 were sent, nine were cancelled and 22 were revised—one of which was made more offensive.
blog.twitter.com, 9th June 2022
Since January, the worldwide price of wheat has risen 37 per cent and corn 27 per cent; but the price of rice is down 17 per cent.
Wall Street Journal, 29th June 2022
The Queen owns most of the seabed around the UK, out to 12 nautical miles from shore.
National Geographic, 7th June 2022
During the Second World War, George Orwell worked for the BBC. His job was to rally support, but he regarded the work as propaganda. Room 101 (the torture chamber in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four) was the name of the room in which he attended compulsory committee meetings.
“The Free World” by Louis Menand
