A Deafening Silence

As Much Future As a Snowflake in a Kettle

We wonder whether we are beginning to see the end of Greenism as we have known it.  Greenists are now heard lamenting the disappearance of Greenist rhetoric and posturing by political leaders.  It may well be because Leftism and Greenism have been kissing cousins for decades.  

As Leftism is losing political support, so Greenism suffers.  Ordinary folk just don't get the increasingly radical Left; they don't get Greenism either.  Maybe, just maybe, all the doomster warnings about the end of the planet have started to wane along with Leftist ideology.

A columnist writing in The Guardian has lamented the disappearance of Global Warming from political stages around the world.

The word climate does not appear once in the letter triggering the UK’s departure from Europe. Despite the world experiencing a second, successive, record annual rise in carbon dioxide concentrations, on one level the omission is hardly surprising.

When the environment minister, George Eustice, revealed that the government had commissioned no research at all on the likely impact of Brexit on environmental policy it reflected how low green issues had fallen on the political agenda. Just how far is revealed by the fact that more than 1,100 EU environmental safeguards will need translating into UK law.

Running very fast to stand still on climate change in the UK will be the best we can hope for. Up to 13 various bills need to be passed just to allow Brexit to happen, squeezing almost everything else out of Parliament’s agenda. Closing the vast gap between current climate plans and meeting the new international targets agreed in Paris in December 2015 has as much chance as a snowflake in a Westminster canteen kettle.

But the same ennui over global warming is evident throughout Europe.  In the current French elections, climate change and global warming have barely got a mention.  The same was true in Holland. Germany shows no signs of trumpeting the threats of climate change in its upcoming elections either.  Throughout Europe it's all about the "Three 'i's": immigration, integration and Islam.  In the US, climate change has been front and centre with the Trump Administration, but not as one might expect.  Once President Obama pronounced global warming as the biggest existential threat faced by the United States and the rest of mankind.  Candidate Clinton made similar claims.  Now, under Trump, climate change is being called out as "nonsense" and a job-killer.

The allegedly stupendous Paris Accord, agreed in 2015, is quietly gathering dust in bottom drawers in virtually every signatory nation, it would seem.  This, we believe, is a wonderful outcome.  It's sufficient to lift the spirits on a rain-sodden mid-week morning.