Booker Joins The Recycling Movement

Today brings good news for the Green movement from the most unlikely quarter, that being arch Europhobe and Climate Change Denialist par excellence Christopher Booker, who has now yielded to the inevitable and joined those of us for whom recycling is now part of our way of life. It is a most welcome move. So what kind of recycling will The Great Man be doing?

Booker's cutting down on needless haircuts, too

Well, Booker’s first foray is to recycle his columns. No more of this wasteful and carbon intensive originality for him: today brings a lead item that he has used several times recently already. The subject – the Climate Change Act – enables him to trot out the same litany of dubiously sourced facts and figures, re-work the same arguments, while still getting paid for his witterings.

Booker trotted out his assertion that the Act would cost “up to” £18 billion a year back in April 2010, reinforcing his ignorance of climate science by sneering “with Northern Britain under piles of global warming”. On this occasion, it was all part of kicking the rotten lefties in the run up to that year’s General Election, safe in the knowledge that a Cameron Government would bin the legislation.

Except that isn’t how it panned out, and so the story has been regularly recycled since. Last year, the attack was broadened to assert that the Act would involve closing down industry, and Booker introduced a “magisterial” paper by a former Cabinet Secretary who had no scientific background, something that compares with his nit picking at those who have.

So last month he returned to the Act, asserting that MPs had no idea how to meet the carbon reduction targets in it. Scores of Parliamentarians were declared not to have the faintest understanding of what was involved. The judgment as to their competence had been made not by a scientist, but by The Great Man and such readers as were deemed to be of sufficiently like mind.

And so we come to today’s Booker offering in the Telegraph, which looks suspiciously like last month’s offering. MPs are yet again asserted not to have any idea about the Climate Change Act, the same figures for cost and Chinese carbon emissions are wheeled out – but nothing about China’s massive investments in wind power – and Booker passes his own judgment yet again.

So similar are the last two Booker Climate Change Act offerings that one might think the editors at the Telegraph would have noticed. And why the paper employs him at all, given the litany of howlers, is mystifying. From claiming that the Gestapo used a building in den Haag that only opened last year, to being openly rebuked in a child court, to landing his paper with a six figure legal bill, Booker keeps getting it wrong.

But it’s good to see him embracing recycling so enthusiastically.