Letter From the UK

Why I am so rude to Warmists

James Delingpole
From The Telegraph

[James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books, including his most recent work Watermelons: How the Environmentalists are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future, also available in the US, and in Australia as Killing the Earth to Save It. His website is www.jamesdelingpole.com.]

Sharing a car back from the BBC Big Question debate in Cardiff on Sunday I had a tremendous bust-up with one of my fellow panellists which I think many of you would have enjoyed hugely. (Our driver could barely keep a straight face.)

It was prompted when I very vocally expressed my disgust at one of the standard phrases trotted out by Warmists and other eco-loons in these debates (as, of course, inevitably, they did again on Sunday): the one about "preserving the planet for future generations".

The reason this cant phrase makes me want to throw up every time I hear it is that it's such a grotesque inversion of reality.
It's not people on my side of the debate who want to ravage the countryside with wind farms (with no provision for decommissioning them), rein in economic growth, introduce wartime-style rationing, raise taxes, destroy farmland and rainforests to create biofuels, and base heinously expensive public policy on hysteria and junk science. It's not people on my side of the debate who are condemning those "future generations" to a lower standard of living and an uglier environment in order to deal with a problem that doesn't exist. So how dare they have the gall to try to take the moral high ground?

Warming to my theme, I noted that there are now sufficient reserves of shale gas to power the US economy for the next five hundred years (at current consumption levels) and that after that we've got at least another five hundred years worth of viable energy from the clathrates (concentrated methane deposits) on the ocean floor. So that's panic over for the next millennium at any rate.

Does anyone imagine that back in 1012 they were all agonising about how the children of the future might cope in 2012, what with all the scarce resources being used up at an alarming rate to make ships and spears and light warning beacons for the next Viking raid? Somehow I don't think so. Yet this is precisely the kind of unutterable boll***s you hear being advanced almost every day by people like this liberal-leftie media type with whom I had my big row.

After I'd gone on in this vein for some time, the liberal-lefty media luvvie turned round and snapped at me: "Do you have any manners?"

"What's that got to do with it?" I said.

"You have just been exceptionally rude. You've repeated what I said in the debate and are accusing me of talking unutterable boll***s!"

"Yeah. Well. You ARE talking unutterable boll***s"

"You're a very rude man, do you know that?"

"What's that ****ing got to do with anything? The issue is whether or not you were talking boll***s and unless you can advance a sensible argument that proves me wrong, I maintain that you were talking boll***s."

"Don't you swear at me!"

"Why can't I swear, you're not my Dad. Anyway, you're changing the subject. All I'm asking is that you do what any half-way decent journalist would do and defend your position using facts. If you're incapable of that then, I'm sorry, but boll***s is what you were talking. So, can you advance any facts or arguments to defend your position?"

"I'm not going to because you're so rude."

"You're not going to because you HAVE no arguments, that's your real problem mate."

All right. I admit it: I was quite rude. But I have no regrets about this whatsoever. Especially not given that my antagonist was here deploying yet another of the disingenuous techniques exploited by the liberal-left on these occasions: the evasion of argument by turning the debate into an issue of style and character.