20120623_JD
Source: BBC2: The Daily Politics
URL: N/A
Date: 23/06/2012
Event: James Delingpole appears on BBC2's The Daily Politics
Credit: BBC2
People:
- Nick Clegg: UK Deputy Prime Minister
- James Delingpole: Sceptical writer and journalist
- Peter Hitchens: Daily Mail columnist
- Andrew Neil: Journalist and broadcaster
- Andrew Pendleton: Head of Campaigns, Friends of the Earth
- Mary Ann Sieghart: Chair of the Social Market Foundation
- Charles Windsor: Prince of Wales
Andrew Neil: Now, the first Earth Summit in 20 years has been taking place in Rio this week, and ends today. The aim of the summit is to agree to sustainable development goals, with targets for consumption and production. Earlier in the week, the Prince of Wales warned the gathering, via the internet - he didn't go himself - of the danger of inaction on climate change.
[Footage of the Prince of Wales on the Royal Channel.]
Prince of Wales: We are facing challenges that are increasing, rather than diminishing, in their severity and urgency. Now I have watched in despair at how slow progress has sometimes been, and how the outright sceptical reluctance by some to engage with the critical issues of our day have often slowed that progress to a standstill.
[Footage of Nick Clegg wandering through the jungle.]
Andrew Neil: Now the Prime Minister despatches Liberal Democrat deputy to the diplomatic jungle. There he is, wandering through it, looking for Michael Gove. He was pessimistic about the chances of success.
Nick Clegg: When you're dealing with over 190 countries around the negotiating table, you've got a problem, which is to get everyone to agree. You end up diluting things, so that everybody agrees, and the end result is more insipid than you'd like.
Andrew Neil: So, has the impetus to tackle climate change been lost in the misery of global economic downturn? Andrew
Pendleton is head of campaigns at Friends of the Earth. James Delingpole is the author of a book called Watermelons: How Environmentalists are Killing the Earth [sic]. So I think we know where he stands. Right, let me turn to Friends of the Earth, first. I mean, isn't the harsh reality, the undeniable truth is that apart from Prince Charles, in an age of austerity and uncertainty, people just care less about the environment and more about where the jobs are coming from?
Andrew Pendleton: I don't think that's true. I mean, it won't surprise me - to surprise you to hear me say that. But I don't think that's the case. I think poll after poll shows that in the centre ground of politics, there's still a lot of concern, almost as much as there was. It's waned a little bit, but it's still as much of it as -
Andrew Neil: Mr Obama and Mr Cameron couldn't be bothered to go to Rio - they only sent Mr Clegg.
Andrew Pendleton: I think the problem for Mr Cameron, in particular, is that there's a drag out to the right and the Conservative Party, which is where this debate's getting caught up at the moment. And that means it's going to be difficult for him, because actually this is an important issue in the centre ground, and yet if he's pulled out to the right on the issue by fears of losing voters to UKIP, for instance, then that will help by degrees to make it less -
Andrew Neil: - Mr Obama didn't go, he's running for election. If he thought this mattered in the November election, he would have gone. He clearly didn't. He didn't go.
Andrew Pendleton: It's very polarised in the U.S. In the UK, the really fascinating thing is that while our economy, broadly, has flatlined, the green sectors within that economy - including energy but also recycling, waste disposal and so forth - have all grown by round about 5%. So they are trend-bucking sectors of the economy.
Andrew Neil: So, just because the economy's doing badly is not a reason to turn our backs on saving the planet, is it?
James Delingpole: Well, I'm very sorry that you had to invoke the dread subject of green jobs, because what green jobs do is kill jobs in the real economy. Green jobs only exist because of taxpayer subsidy. We see this in the windfarm industry, which are - onshore windfarms operate on a 100% subsidy from the taxpayer. Offshore windfarms operate on a 200% subsidy. These are not real jobs. It's all a fantasy. And I think that it is time that we judged the environmental movement on what it has actually achieved. And what it has done to the world is really quite serious harm. We've seen rain forests chopped down to grow palm oil to create biofuels. We've had agricultural land being diverted to biofuels, again causing starvation and poverty in the Third World. We've got windfarms blighting the landscape, chopping up birds, killing bats. The environmental movement has also damaged the global economy with its insane quest for renewables.
Andrew Neil [to Andrew Pendleton]: I'll let you come back -
Andrew Pendleton: Well, globally, over the last three years, more investment money has gone into renewable technologies than into conventional energy sources, so I don't think a lot of investors share your view, James, and I think that -
Andrew Neil: But all of that's government money, or subsidised money -
Andrew Pendleton: No, no, a lot of that's from the private sector, so there is -
Andrew Neil: Yes, but it's subsidised -
Andrew Pendleton: There's a subsidy in the system for most of the renewable technologies. That's coming down quite dramatically. As costs, for instance, in solar globally fall by 75% in the past 5 years. So there really is promise, and investors whole-heartedly disagree. The tragedy of the current situation in the UK is that blowing hot and cold, flip-flopping on green, which is what the coalition is doing, is killing investor confidence. And that means people will not put money into our economy.
Andrew Neil: But our - I mean, a few years ago, David Cameron, he was pictured with huskies, he was talking about starting a wind turbine at Downing Street - that, of course, never happened.
Mary Ann Sieghart: The greenest government ever -
Andrew Neil: Now, he doesn't even go to the Rio summit. It cannot be denied that priorities have changed.
Mary Ann Sieghart: - yeah, you're right -
Andrew Neil: He could have gone, he was in Mexico.
Mary Ann Sieghart: But that's pretty bad scheduling. He was actually at the G - they were clashing, weren't they?
Andrew Neil: Well, they overlapped only a little bit, he could still have been there. Mr Clegg's still there, this Mexican summit's over.
Mary Ann Sieghart: Yeah. Now, I don't think he's made - correct me if I'm wrong - I don't think he's made a speech on the environment since he's become Prime Minister, and I do think they have a feeling that being green is a luxury that you can afford during good times, and it's something that people can't afford during bad times. I think that's what voters feel.
Andrew Neil: I mean, Nick Clegg goes halfway around the world to this summit, but he's only quoted on his reaction to Michael Gove's plans for O-Levels.
Peter Hitchens: Yes, what was interesting about this summit was how little time the BBC - which has been taken over by warmist fanatics - has devoted -
James Delingpole: Hear, hear!
Peter Hitchens: - has devoted to it. Well, it's observably true - the BBC doesn't even believe it has any business to be impartial on the subject.
Andrew Neil: That's why we have James on, I guess...
Peter Hitchens: And it says -
Mary Ann Sieghart: Now why do you think that -
James Delingpole: I'm the exception that proves the rule.
Peter Hitchens: Having people on -
Mary Ann Sieghart [pointing to Peter Hitchens]: And you, for that matter.
Andrew Neil [to Peter Hitchens]: We've got you on, too!
Peter Hitchens: Having people on, as I'm evidence, is not the same as having a general bias in favour of certain things, which is what the BBC - the BBC hasn't bothered with this because the cult is visibly dying.
Andrew Neil: Well, I -
Peter Hitchens: Fewer and fewer people believe in the science of man-made global warming. And it's how they're going to get out of it is what amuses me. When it eventually becomes so obvious that the thing was a cult and a scam in the first place.
Andrew Neil: There's a -
Peter Hitchens: How will they actually get out of all this -
Andrew Neil: There's a fact here that -
Peter Hitchens: - James Lovelock can always reverse himself -
Andrew Neil: If you would shut up for a minute -
Peter Hitchens: Oh, hang on a minute! [Laughter.] Can't tell me to keep quiet.
Andrew Neil: Well, you have, for the next two minutes.
Peter Hitchens: Right.
Andrew Neil: There is evidence that people don't worry about it so much - I'm talking about global warming. They don't worry about it so much. They don't think it's as important. They think a lot of scare stories were told. Now, one of the "facts" [he makes speech marks signs with his hands] - put it like that, to find out if it was true - is that people like James say that actually temperatures haven't risen in this century. And so we're right not to be worried about it so much. What say you? [To Andrew Pendleton.]
Andrew Pendleton: 1998 is the base year for that statement. 1998 is, statistically, an outlier year. It was just a huge bulge, and if you look at the trend, which any serious statistician will do, over time, it's consistently up. Some of the warmest years on record have been in the last decade.
Andrew Neil: Have temperatures continued to rise in this century?
Andrew Pendleton: Yes. In fact NASA puts 2005, in its data, [James Delingpole is shrugging and smiling] above 1998 - consistent -
Andrew Neil: James?
James Delingpole: Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit - you could not get more warmist than that man - has said there has been no statistically significant warming trend since 1995. If it has increased at all, it's so tiny as to make no difference.
Andrew Pendleton: I'll send you -
James Delingpole: It's interesting -
Andrew Pendleton: I'll send you the graph -
Andrew Neil: It's this fact that matters, doesn't it. If people feel that temperatures are not rising, they're not likely to follow the green agenda, when it comes to global warming.
Andrew Pendleton: Do you know, I saw a very interesting poll, yesterday, which was conducted by Ipsos MORI, a reputable institution, earlier this year. And do you know who people trust most on this issue? They trust the scientists - 66% of people trust the scientists. Only 9% trust journalists on the issue.
James Delingpole: What, scientists like Richard Lindzen, for example, Professor of Atmospheric Physics at M.I.T., real scientists. Or Fred Singer.
Andrew Neil: But do you know, most of the people who talk on this subject, on both sides, are not scientists. Even on the global warming side, they're mostly lobbyists, they're not scientists.
Andrew Pendleton: The vast majority of -
Andrew Neil: Are you a scientist?
Andrew Pendleton: I'm not a scientist. The vast majority of -
Andrew Neil: The case rests. [Laughter.]
Andrew Pendleton: If I can finish -
Andrew Neil: Of course.
Andrew Pendleton - the vast majority of physicists, proper atmospheric scientists, not only say that global warming is happening and that it's related to human activity, but that it's getting - it's accelerating -
Mary Ann Sieghart: But surely, even if global warming isn't happening - and I'm not a scientist, and therefore I'm not going to opine on it - surely it makes sense to use more sources of energy that aren't going to run out and fewer sources of energy that are going to run out? And oil and coal will eventually run out, the Sun isn't going to stop shining, so I don't really see what the problem is, about using more renewables.
Peter Hitchens: One small point about scientists - scientific questions are not decided by majorities. They're decided by experiment, a blend of successful prediction and things like that. The majority can usually be wrong, among scientists. So to cite that is meaningless in scientific terms, as you ought to know. But secondly, there is a very major energy crisis in this country. In a few years' time, thanks to European Union regulation, I think it is, we simply will not have enough electricity to run the sort of economy we have, particularly the very heavy electronics-dependent economy we've become. We're doing nothing about it. There's an urgent need to provide reliable power - and wind power, and solar power will not, cannot do it. And one of the things - sometimes one can laugh at the warmist movement, but on this matter, you can't laugh at it.
Mary Ann Sieghart: [Inaudible.]
Peter Hitchens: It's very serious indeed, they're preventing serious consideration -
James Delingpole: We do have shale gas. We have loads of shale gas.
Andrew Neil: Okay, and we will do another debate on shale. We've run out of time. I'd just like to say, before you go - [to James Delingpole and Andrew Pendleton] if you could both blog on this issue, of what's been happening to temperatures over the past 15 years, if we could take your blogs and put them then on the Daily Politics website. Let's get a debate going in trying to establish it, because I do think it's one of the key issues that is determining people's attitudes. [Both are nodding.]
Andrew Pendleton: I'd be delighted to.
Andrew Neil: Thank you, both.