Quotulatiousness

February 27, 2012

Matt Ridley reviews Watermelons by James Delingpole

In short, he likes it and thinks it deserves your attention:

With each passing year it becomes clearer that the cure for global warming is worse than the disease. While wind power and biofuels devastate ecosystems and economies, temperatures and sea levels rise ever more slowly, just as the greenhouse theory — minus feedbacks — predicts. As James Delingpole acutely observes, the true believers are left with a version of Pascal’s wager embodying a ‘dismally feeble grasp of cost-benefit analysis’: that, however unlikely it is, the potential cost of global warming is so high that anything is justified.

[. . .]

In keeping with that tradition, sometimes he goes too far. Before 2009, I had more sympathy for his targets. But the leaked emails of ‘Climategate’ — a word that Delingpole popularised — and the official whitewashes of that episode leave no doubt about the tactics that have been used by the climate orthodoxy to bully doubters and suppress dissent, while raking in money from carbon indulgences. This church deserves a rude Luther.

[. . .]

To Delingpole’s surprise as well as the reader’s, this book is not really about climate change after all. As he digs deeper into the writings of the Club of Rome and their ambitious disciples (such as John Holdren, science adviser to Barack Obama, and Maurice Strong, first director of the UN Environmental Programme, godfather of both the Rio Conference of 1992 and the Kyoto treaty of 1997, and deviser of the Earth Charter to replace the Ten Commandments — who moved to China at the moment that he was implicated in the Iraqi ‘oil for food’ scandal), Delingpole finds he cannot avoid an uncomfortable conclusion:

    Look, when I began researching this book, I thought it was going to be about Climategate and global warming — not some massive international plot to destroy Western Civilisation and replace it with some grisly New World Order based on rationed resources, enforced equality and the return of the barter system. Unfortunately, though, the weight of evidence was against me. So brazenly open are the leading ideologues of the green movement about their plans for New World Order, I’m not even sure the word ‘conspiracy’ properly applies.

The grand green faith has two commandments: that humanity is the problem not the solution; and that international central planning is the solution, not the problem.

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