The Green Blob Fights Back

I have avoided politics in my blog as much as I can over the last 10 years. So you can tell I'm pretty upset to break this cardinal rule. For the point of record, I'm one of the two thirds of people who feel that neither of the main parties represents my views. I'm that apparently currently invisible voter, a moderate. I'm a fan of various MPs from various parties. I admire the energy, honesty and bravery of people like Caroline Lucas, Sarah Wollaston, and Mary Creagh.

I have to spend a certain amount of time for work on social media, God help me. Apart from promoting the business, I also try and communicate good science and best practice to people. Sometimes a bit of a struggle, tbh! This also means keeping up with environmental policy. As it happens, this is an area where things might be looking up.

I was suspicious of Michael Gove when he was appointed as DEFRA minister. What we've seen from him so far has been enormously encouraging, however. This week he has hired Tony Juniper - not a natural bedfellow politically - as head of Natural England. To an objective observer, this is a great appointment. He was the outstanding candidate for this currently besieged but potentially critical nonpolitical organisation. This is typical of Michael Gove's approach; he seems to have taken on board a range of interesting ideas in a completely non-doctrinal way. Some I disagree with, many I don't. Massive questions remain, but he's coming up with some interesting stuff. I applaud him. It's a far cry from Owen Paterson's tirade against "the green blob".

This started off as "the mutually supportive network of environmental pressure groups, renewable energy companies and some public officials who keep each other well supplied with lavish funds, scare stories and green tape". In certain quarters the green blob has come to include, apparently, the entire environmental lobby.

Interestingly, Michael Gove's rapprochement with the extended blob has significantly irked some of his erstwhile allies.

I was moved to anger - and to write this - by a wildly intemperate and nonsensical article I stumbled across on Twitter: Michael Gove Has Sold Out Britain to the Green Blob. It was written by James Delingpole about Tony Juniper's appointment.

Who is James Delingpole? He's a kind of clever right wing shock jock of now depressingly familiar type, who drove me to cancel my subscription to The Spectator. He still writes for them, which irritatingly gives him a degree of credibility and - oddly - means he shares column inches with nice nature people Simon Barnes and Isabel Hardman. James is now editor of Breitbart in the UK, which is where the green blob article appeared. Occasionally you'll see him on TV, where he performs with the kind of chutzpah you would imagine from a man who has raised £21,000 through a gofundme page to cure his Lyme disease, then sort his teeth out and buy his wife a holiday with anything left over.

I'm sorry about his illness*. Ironically, Lyme disease is on the rise because of global warming. "Ironically", because James made his reputation as a "bad boy" climate change denier. He still has it in for renewables. The green blob.

Some of what he says I do have sympathy with. I have seen the solar industry up close, and there's no doubt that it has had its fair share of charlatans and chancers. My business lost a lot of money from a horrendous bankruptcy in the U.S. involving criminal fraud. The subsidy system the government used here to catapult the UK into one of the world's leading countries for renewable power was always going to be clunky, abused and inefficient. Government subsidies usually are. But it was a demonstrably effective means to an end.

James also dislikes the look of wind turbines, with which, again, I have some sympathy. It doesn't exactly seem to be a big issue in the scheme of things but I imagine goes down well with his readers. He complains about birds and bats being chopped up. The green blob is actually destroying nature. In actual fact, perhaps counter-intuitively, the short term net gain to biodiversity from renewables has been significant. We have helped seed hundreds of acres of solar farms with wildflower meadows, planted with hedges and copses, etc. etc..

I really, really don't agree at all with much else of what else he has to say, particularly in this Breitbart article. Nor the way he says it, which is patronising and offensive. I know it's a living for him. I know it's written to provoke and I shouldn't get upset by it. But I do. It really poisons discourse in an area which should transcend dogma.

I don't think James has much grasp of his subject matter generally. He has - a familiar bugbear - conflated climate change and other green issues. Tackling biodiversity loss, for example, while related, is a very different beast, requiring completely different responses from the green blob.

No matter.

What really gets me going is this kind of nonsense:

"Like most if not all Conservatives, I understand better than anyone the importance of conservation. Unfortunately, the cause of real environmentalism has long since been hijacked by hair-shirt ideologues in thrall to the religion of Gaia-worship, obsessed with (environmentally damaging) renewables, antipathetical to free markets or freedoms of any kind because essentially they’re all Malthusian misanthropes who want to bomb Western Industrial Civilisation back to the dark ages."

Where to even start?

It has always been easy to label environmentalists as misanthropic and "antipathetical to free markets." Is it any wonder that they have been in the past? I absolutely believe now that it's possible to align our business customers' commercial and ecological interests. We also work hard to get consumers to understand the actual costs and benefits of making the purchases they do. It's a struggle but it's possible with education. We'll get there in the end, but this is relatively new ground and new thinking, of the kind Michael Gove seems to be promoting too.

No-one has a monopoly on wanting to conserve the planet. This isn't an issue of competing ideologies. Nature isn't just another political battleground. Conservatives no more understand the importance of conservation than Labour supporters.

I simply don't accept the description of environmentalists as "hardcore left activists using environmentalism as a cloak for their ongoing mission to dismantle the capitalist system". Yes, there are some, of course. My guess is there were more in the sixties. There are some left leaning campaign groups I'm wary of. And yes, of course there are "Gaia types" - more or less knowledgeable, but absolutely genuine.

Like the rest of the population, people interested in nature have their own political views. There are "watermelons", as James would derisively describe them, and turquoise Tories. The overwhelming majority of environmental professionals I have met in the course of the last ten years have, however, been professional, objective, scientific.

As for "Eco charities which depend for their income on ramping up green hysteria" - this is laughable nonsense. The charities I work with spend a lot of their time doing the opposite. I've even objected in the past to phrases like "ecological apocalypse"; fundamentally true but presentationally unhelpful.

It would be really helpful if James switched to receive rather than broadcast mode for a bit, and moderated his language. Perhaps he could take up gardening. He can't just characterise people who disagree with him as corrupt, feeble minded, lunatic or fanatical. Many of us are sensible, moderate and pretty well informed. Many of us feel deeply concerned about what we see going on around us. Many of us are trying in our own ways to do something about it.

We all share the same planet, and we all need to sit down like grownups to understand how best to conserve it. Not just how to make a few quid by shouting in the playground.

 

*If indeed he has it, which seems in doubt. Yes, the NHS does treat Lyme disease.