If you only read one book this year then this should be it.
On 16 October 2008 to combat something called "climate change", Ed Miliband, the Labour government's Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, announced that by 2050 Britain - uniquely in the world - would be required to reduce its CO2 emissions by 80%. He did this because, we are told, there is a 'consensus' among scientists that man-made CO2 emissions are causing global warming and global warming is going to destroy the world. The cost of meeting Miliband's target is estimated to be over £18 billion every year for the next forty years. At a total cost of over £700 billion it is the most costly piece of legislation ever enacted in Britain and it is people like you and me who are going to have to find the money to pay for it. Higher household energy bills, higher petrol taxes, increased vehicle duties, higher holiday taxes and numerous other green taxes are on the way. In fact, as energy costs feed into the price of almost everything we buy, our cost of living is set to soar as firms are forced to pass the multi-billion pound cost of complying with Labour's legislation on to us consumers. It also threatens to drive many industries overseas taking hundreds of thousands of jobs with them. Labour's Climate Change Act 2008 has been described as an economic suicide note.
Before we spend all this money though and destroy our economy in the process, are we absolutely certain that man-made CO2 emissions are what is causing climate change? James Delingpole certainly isn't and this well-argued, meticulously researched and often funny book is his attempt to counter the kind of non-stop, 24/7 'man-made-CO2-emissions-are-destroying-the-world' propaganda being pumped out by Western governments, their friends in the MSM and some of the most powerful, well-funded NGOs in the world such as Greenpeace, WWF and Friends of the Earth.
Delingpole takes as his starting point the so-called "Climategate" scandal when thousands of e-mails which had been sent to and from leading figures in the global warming scam were made public. What these e-mails showed was that for years the 'experts' had been lying, cheating, twisting the evidence, abusing scientific process, altering data and falsifying information to 'prove' that climate change was been caused by man-made CO2 emissions. They also showed how these same people had tried to destroy the careers and reputations of any scientist who dared to disagree with them or challenge the rationale behind their quack theories. As Delingpole points out, this kind of irrational behaviour is not science at all but something more akin to political activism. That's because the people pushing this scam are what he describes as "Watermelons", political ideologues who are green on the outside and red on the inside. People determined to force their neo-Marxist worldview on the rest of us at any cost. Backed by hundreds of billions of pounds, dollars and euros, these people are using the excuse of climate change to impose the kind of misanthropic, anti-growth policies which will make us all much poorer and a lot less free. Their long-term aim is to deindustrialise and depopulate the world. Politicians of left and right are only too happy to go along with this because it is yet another excuse to put up our taxes and control our behaviour under the guise of saving the world - and who could possibly argue with having their household budgets dipped for a couple of extra thousand pounds a year to save the world? Big corporations like the scam because their smaller competitors won't be able to afford to comply with all the extra environmental legislation and so will be driven out of business leaving the market to the big boys.
Unfortunately for the Watermelons though there hasn't actually been any global warming since 1997 and more and more people and increasing numbers of scientists are beginning top question the idea of man-made global warming. Yes we know that temperatures could start rising again tomorrow. Yes there may be a connection between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and the greenhouse effect. Yes human activity could be impacting on climate. Delingpole doesn't discount any of these possibilities but asks only that we consider there may be alternative explanations for climate change [some of which, such as increased/decreased sun spot activity, we can do absolutely nothing about anyway] and we should openly consider and debate them before we set about returning our economy to the Stone Age and impoverish ourselves while simultaneously enriching the Watermelon elite.
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