Having told the BBC that world leaders would be “cursed” if they failed to make a deal to curb emissions at the Glasgow UN climate conference, Cop26, and that this would lead to a “genocide on an infinitely greater scale” than the Holocaust, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, apologised “for the offence caused to Jews” — though only after being criticised by the editor of this newspaper, among others.
Welcome as this was, it leaves a troubling question: how on earth did Welby come to use such language in the first place? He wasn’t the only one. On Tuesday, the Met Office warned of “Lucifer summers” every year by 2100 if emissions are unchecked. Boris Johnson claimed the world was at “one minute to midnight”, leaving delegates with the job of defusing a “doomsday machine”. Sir David Attenborough evoked almost biblical imagery, saying that after witnessing a “terrible decline” in his lifetime, those coming after must be given the means to see “a wonderful recovery”.
As an event, Cop26 seems unlikely to amount to much. The intransigent refusal of China to bring forward the date when it will stop increasing its coal output and building more coal-fired power stations from 2030 has seen to that. But after several years of intensification, it has seen climate rhetoric reach new extremes. Climate change has been replaced by “climate catastrophe” and “climate emergency” — and to suggest otherwise is to invite the Twitter mob to accuse one of being a “denier”. The result is that humanity — which overall is richer, better-fed, longer-lived, better-educated and blessed with more opportunities than at any previous time — is being urged to hate itself, and contemplate its progress though a prism of terror and guilt. The more prosperous we are, the more we must beat ourselves up.
Climate change, in other words, is now cast as an impending apocalypse. In this, there are drawbacks. The first is an increase in “climate anxiety”, especially among the young; and a growing campaign against having kids — something that must delight Sir David, a patron of the neo-Malthusian group Population Matters, who has said it is “barmy” to send famine victims “bags of flour”. This is especially unfortunate given that many demographers consider world population is likely to peak at less than 9 billion in about 30 years, and then decline.
The second is that by constantly stressing, as Greta Thunberg once put it, our need to “panic”, the careful debate we need isn’t being held. Many greens abhor anything to do with fossil fuel, so carbon capture and storage, which can be made to work at scale, is reviled; the same goes for nuclear, the cleanest, safest and most reliable low-carbon energy source invented so far.
Amid the panic, politicians make decisions that really are barmy — for example, throwing money at heat pumps, which barely work and cost a fortune, and Mr Johnson’s notion that since wind turbines don’t generate power when the wind isn’t blowing, we need to quadruple the amount of offshore wind installations, at a cost of billions.
Meanwhile, much of the “panic” rests on a misconception. Yes, climate change is a problem and emissions must be cut. But most of the apocalyptic visions projected in scientific papers and eagerly disseminated by journalists depend on a future emissions scenario known in the trade as “Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) 8.5”. After years of debate, most scientists agree that this does not, as is often claimed, represent “business as usual”: it posits an increase in world population to 12 billion by 2100, and a sevenfold rise in the use of coal — neither of which is conceivable. Yet when you read about parts of the planet becoming “uninhabitable”, this is almost always the assumption on which such claims rest.
The apocalyptic rhetoric adopted by Archbishop Welby has a predecessor, in the “end of days” religious cults of the Middle Ages. Faced with imminent catastrophes like the Black Death, their impulse was to blame a familiar target: the Jews.
I don’t suspect for a moment that Welby harbours any antisemitic prejudice. Yet to equate the possible future damage caused by unmitigated emissions to a deliberate programme of selective racial murder — the Holocaust — is grotesque.
Other green campaigners are less fastidious. Last month, the Washington DC branch of the Sunrise Movement, America’s biggest green youth campaign, pulled out of a rally because it included three Jewish organisations it claimed were “in support of Zionism and the State of Israel”. Who were these rabid demons? They included the Reform synagogue and the National Council of Jewish Women.
Words matter. They can lead to deeds. Cop26 may not lead to meaningful action. But whatever else, it is time to cool the rhetoric.
ENDS
