“Vote Blue, Go Green”
was the slogan when
Young Dave and the Tories pretended that they really cared about the
environment and climate change. Six years of howling denunciation later, the
Coalition is only kept from lurching ever further away from renewable and other
low carbon energy by the restraining influence of the Lib Dems. Tory policy
today is not even in the Greenwash category.
This was demonstrated recently when a
Greenpeace sting showed that clueless Tory MP Chris Heaton Harris was
trying to move his party against wind power, and
had even encouraged the phony candidacy of James “saviour of Western civilisation” Delingpole in the Corby by-election.
There are plenty more in the party who are now on “wind equals rubbish” autopilot.
The stance is bolstered by a uniformly hostile stance from
the right leaning part of the Fourth Estate: the Maily Telegraph, Daily Mail
and Sun all routinely ridicule wind
farms, and push the idea that they are somehow ineffectual and expensive. That
the electricity they provide is in effect free – apart from maintenance and
transmission – is not allowed to enter.
Part of the reinforcement of this stance is to cast anyone
who argues in favour of wind power as intolerant, corrupt or stupid, and here
the Tel’s pundits are in their
element, as typified by Cristina Odone, who tells readers that “A
fanatical and self-righteous green religion stalks Britain”, so nothing
like the religion that looks to the church of Rome for its teaching, then.
Ms Odone pretends to be concerned about climate change,
talking of “cautious experts” before
predictably saying of the evidence “much
of it [is] contradictory”, which
the consensual position of the scientific mainstream suggests it is not, as
Paul Nurse pointed out to Delingpole, which has caused Del Boy to unleash a
more or less constant torrent of abuse in return ever since.
And Delingpole, that “interpreter
of interpretations”, is also in the mood for a religious metaphor as he warns
about “How
the Green Taliban spreads its poison gospel”. Here, Del Boy says that a
report suggesting that wind power may be a better bet than gas must be the
result of corruption and stupidity, because of course he’s incredibly clever
and it disagrees with his view of the world.
In support of his contention he cites Richard North, pal of
Christopher Booker and a party to the article that caused the Tel to
pay out libel damages and costs to Rajendra Pachauri, and then spins in
favour of shale gas, while managing not to tell of the environmental costs, or
the worsening finances of that industry in the USA, where it is supposed to
be part of some kind of cheap energy miracle.
But the readers get to believe the anti-renewables line, so that’s all right, then.
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