Infinite Regress

In a recent post, we looked at some of Green MEP Caroline Lucas's arguments for action on climate change. One of them has stuck with us as especially absurd, and merits further attention:

this planet has finite resources. You cannot go on growing indefinitely on a finite planet.

This appeal to 'physics' pops up frequently in environmental debates. Interestingly, it's a tactic also popular with Creationists and their ilk, who cite Newton's second law of thermodynamics to suggest that evolution contradicts fundamental physical truths. In each case, a woolly argument about how the world should be is patched up with sciency-sounding facts, figures and laws. This is not the tactic of groups confident about their political position; it is a sign of the desperation of groups that are failing to capture the imagination of the world's population.

In Lucas's world, the appeal to physics is used as an argument against economic growth and technological development. It is principally a criticism of capitalism, which requires growth and is, therefore, inherently environmentally destructive. It is worth repeating a point we made at the time. The objection to capitalism on the grounds that it contradicts physical laws is a departure from prior objections to capitalism from the Left and is not a criticism of the kind that we would expect the Left to produce. Instead of offering a description of social problems - for example poverty - arising from the social relations produced by capitalism, Lucas seeks to explain social phenomena in terms of geological and biological processes. This is similar to James Garvey's claims in The Ethics of Climate Change, which appeals to scientific authority to make a case for environmental determinism. In Lucas's argument, there is a causal chain, from capitalism, via the natural world, to social problems such as poverty, which can be described ‘scientifically’.

Lucas might argue that she could hold both positions simultaneously. But if that were the case, why would it be necessary to emphasise the environmental aspect, let alone mention it at all, given that the social, human-centric perspective is a lot more powerful? The major reason is that the two perspectives are irreconcilable. One looks at social problems as the product of social relations, the other looks at social problems as the consequence of exceeding 'natural' limits - 'unsustainability'. They are further contradictory because we can conceive of non-capitalist growth which is, in the green lexicon, ‘environmentally unfriendly’, but which produces a social good - we could build dams, relocate cities away from coasts, reclaim coasts, create ways for the developing world to have much cheaper access to energy and industrialise agricultural production, and so on. We can also conceive of capitalist growth that is environmentally destructive and yet produces a social good. After all, it’s not as if cars and labour-saving devices and all that stuff have no utility and have been foisted upon people against their will. And it’s not as if economic and technological growth has occurred against a backdrop of lower living standards and declining indicators of social progress. On the contrary, things have got better and better. Lucas - who is unable to make the argument that things are worse in order to challenge capitalism - needs to make the argument that things are about to get worse, and that development of any kind is necessarily environmentally destructive, and so creates a haunting spectre of 'unsustainability' and imminent social, ecological and economic collapse.

In this respect, Lucas does not offer us a principled objection to capitalism – she claims that it is wrong in the same way that arguments against gravity would be wrong. Whatever your thoughts about capitalism happen to be, and even if you still believe that environmentalism is a continuation of socialism, it is worth recognising environmentalism’s distance from the traditional Left. It highlights the Left’s political exhaustion, and the environmental movement’s intellectual bankruptcy.

On a similar note, it is not true that notions of sustainable development are antithetical to the economic Right or capitalism. After all Malthus, on whose ideas Lucas's are based, was a classical economist, whose ideas were debunked by Marx himself. More contemporary conservatives have also embraced the rhetoric of 'sustainability:

The Government espouses the concept of sustainable economic development. Stable prosperity can be achieved throughout the world provided the environment is nurtured and safeguarded. Protecting this balance of nature is therefore one of the great challenges of the late Twentieth Century

The second problem with Lucas's argument is that her conception of 'resources' is itself flawed. Malthusians - especially environmentalists - misconceive resources as ‘substance’. In a finite universe, never mind a finite world, all substances are of course finite. If our 'dependence' on Earth's resources are 'unsustainable' because they are finite, then so too would our much more real dependence on solar, wind and tidal power, be ultimately unsustainable. They are not merely unsustainable in the sense that one day the sun - which drives all renewable sources - will collapse, they are also unsustainable because continued and increasing dependence on this form of energy itself cannot be sustained against growing numbers of people - there is only a limited amount of recoverable energy entering the system at any time. According to environmentalists, this is why we must therefore limit the number of people and ration the amount of energy they are entitled to. We are in favour of some of the large projects which have been conceived of as part of a 'post-carbon economy' for their own sake, particularly the idea of large, solar energy collecting arrays. Covering the uninhabited land of the Sahara with solar panels, for example, might provide 50 times the power used currently across the globe. But such projects, including hydro-electric, are met by environmentalists with anxiety about the environmental destruction that large scale developments necessarily cause. And, as we have seen, Environmentalists are against environmental destruction, even where it produces a social benefit.

And anyway, development itself is not intrinsically bad for nature. First, as economies develop, they are inclined to pay increasing attention to the environmental effects of development as wealth allows. Compare the once filthy development in the West to the comparatively cleaner industries of today. Even the destructive process of open-cast mining reinstates wilderness. Indeed, yesterday's open cast mines are today's nature reserves. They are clean ecological slates on which Mother Nature can work her magic of colonisation and succession, and are often home to rare, specialist species that are not found elsewhere. Similarly, landfill sites are recovered and repopulated with trees, and what's more, nobody would want to develop on top of them, whereas nature hardly cares. Second, technological development allows for the possibility of moving away from a dependence on natural processes, resulting in a reduced industrial footprint as both science and economics permit. It would not require a leap of imagination to consider the shifting away from rural agriculture, to an indoor process, under perfect conditions. The reason for not doing that now is that 'solar power' makes using fields for crop production far cheaper. But a more abundant form of power would render such forms of production obsolete and inefficient. Of course, organic food faddists would baulk at the idea of lentils grown indoors. But such a step would create the possibility of safer, healthier, more plentiful food, protected from pests and other natural problems, and, of course, would be environmentally non-destructive. This would be a 'green revolution' second to none, as agricultural land would be freed up for other uses, including, if we so wished, nature conservation. What environmentalists should be calling for is a world-wide push for new ways of producing more and more energy, and more wealth, not arguing that it should be rationed and limited. Rationing is a guaranteed way to cause environmental problems. That they don't reinforces the idea that Environmentalism is less about saving the planet per se and more to do with a discomfort with human aspirations.

Access to substance and its existence in sufficient quantities are only part of what constitutes a resource. The remainder is intellectual. Lucas herself must recognise this to some extent, because, as she knows only too well, methods such as domestic solar panels are not currently economically viable alternatives to centralised, fossil-fuel power generation. She argues that huge investments and massive infrastructural changes are needed to develop technology, and for the economics to be adjusted to make alternatives viable. So in this respect, solar energy and other renewables are not yet the ‘resources’ that she hopes them to become. So Lucas’s argument for renewable resources to be exploited in place of fossil fuels is predicated on a transformed relationship with a substance, and the development of the technology to make that exploitation possible. She cannot deny, then, that politics - as much as physics - are what determines which substances are resources.

Back to Lucas's blind faith in the laws of physics... 500 years ago, oil was not a resource. Neither was uranium. People around at the time didn’t know how to use them. Things that weren’t resources became resources. Our ability to use new resources made old resources obsolete. Now, no home in the UK needs to burn wood for heat, for example. Or, as Bjørn Lomborg has put it, the Stone Age didn't come to an end because we ran out of stones. What Malthusians forget is that development begats development. After all, you don't make a jump from rubbing twigs together to atomic energy. Critics of this perspective on this site suggest that this represents some form of contemporary Lysenkoism - that blind faith in science's ability to rescue us from future resource depletion is a dangerous, politically-motivated folly. They argue that science will not be able to continually provide 'techno-fixes' to the problems which emerge from our ways of life. We must come up against some ceiling sooner or later, the logic goes.

But anxiety about 'growing indefinitely on a finite planet' forgets that our abilities to make use of the finite space and finite resources increases the effective space and amount of resources that are available. And there is a colossal amount of space, and an abundance of resources out there. For example, we hear a lot about the looming 'water wars' that are to be fought because of apparent shortages. A quick look at any map will reveal that the Earth isn't running out of it any time soon. The problem is simply technological. Instead of concerning themselves with how to provide for a growing population by coming up with desalination, distribution and irrigation schemes, the environmental movement instead uses the prospect of conflict to arm its arguments in favour of restricting development and of rationing what water comes our way through natural processes. What better way could there be of guaranteeing a 'natural' disaster than limiting the supply of resources - super abundant resources, never mind oil - to human populations? Environmentalists simultaneously warn of shortages, yet stand in the way of developing any alternatives that might not last 'indefinitely'. There is only one way out of the resource-depletion scenario that is presented, they say, reduce the number of people, and the amount of resources they are entitled to.

What environmentalists refuse to consider is what a resource- and energy-abundant society might be like. What if stuff in the world just got cheaper? What if access to water and energy wasn't an issue for anyone in the world? Perhaps, just perhaps, it is this very democratisation of resource use that the environmental movement is a response to. The possibilities that are opened up by technological development for our way of life and our politics are the real locus of anxieties about the future.

Environmentalists demand an impossibly high standard. Nothing the human race has ever done to improve its conditions has been 'sustainable'. As technologies have changed our lives, and created new problems, so too have new politics arisen out of these changing conditions. If this process had been stalled during any era on the basis that it was unsustainable, we would still be living in stone-age conditions, with stone-age politics - at least, that is, until we really did run out of stones.

Environmentalism According to Lucas

Environmentalism According to Lucas

Over the last year, we have looked at some of the words and ideas coming from the environmental movement through the Green Party's MEP for SE England, Caroline Lucas. With her breathless, urgent catastrophism, Lucas epitomises Environmentalism and its hollow vision, shallow intellect, and deep misanthropy. In these respects, Lucas never disappoints us.

However, we are never very successful at getting Lucas or her press office to account for anything she has said. Luckily, she was on BBC TV's Question Time last week, and has been appearing at a number of public events of late. So here is another opportunity to subject Lucas's political ideas to some scrutiny.

The Question Time panel were asked if the Labour Party were suffering from a leadership crisis, to which Caroline Lucas replied that Labour's problem is that it lacks values, that it no longer knows what it stands for, that it has abandoned its traditional values such as equality, and that Gordon Brown is a man who doesn't know what he wants.



We agree with Lucas that the Labour Party is in crisis because it doesn't know what it stands for. As we say in our first ever post, "Environmental concerns are serving to provide direction for directionless politics". That is why Blair and Brown were keen to be seen to be acting on climate change, and that is why, in response to that action, the Tories committed themselves to a policy of an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050, against Labour's 60%. And that is why, not to be out-done, the Liberal Democrats upped their bidding to a 100% reduction by 2050. But are Lucas and the Green Party offering anything so different?

As we have also pointed out, Environmentalism thrives in this atmosphere of political vapidity, not because it represents an alternative, but because it captures the nervousness caused by a lack of political direction. Environmentalism nurtures a general sense of doom with ideas about societal and ecological collapse. Without that sense of doom, environmentalism would be nothing.

As political movements across the political spectrum have increasingly found it difficult to generate ideas through which to connect to the public, so they have had to turn to other ways to achieve their legitimacy and authority. As Lucas points out, the Labour Party is suffering from a 'crisis of direction'. But Lucas and the Greens have not found a direction by locating a new political vision to steer towards, but a nightmare to claim to be steering away from. Lucas attacks Brown for having no values, yet her arguments for social and economic change are not formed out of her principled objections to the way in which people relate to one another through social and economic structures. Instead, Lucas's philosophy depends on a conception of humanity's relationship with nature. She is, in terms of values, as poverty-stricken as any of those she attacks. Lucas doesn't have some great store of values, with which she can create a positive view of how the world could be. Here is Lucas, speaking at a recent debate held by the World Development Movement, setting out her case for carbon rationing, trading and 'equality' and selling her argument for 'equality' in such (pseudo) scientific terms.



Notice that, in that speech, Lucas is using the word 'resources', not in the sense of stuff that we have, but in terms of the biosphere's ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere.

It seems that, in order to make a case for equality, Lucas needs there to be a finite world, as if, were there no such limits (to the absorption of CO2 by natural processes), there would be no case for equality. This prevents her from conceiving of a world in which equality is achieved, not by rationing and people having less, but by people having more, and having their expectations raised. Lucas doesn't have 'values', and hides the fact behind science. 'Science' is being used in place of values. 'Science' is Environmentalism's fig leaf. It is being used to create the idea of limits, so that Environmentalism doesn't have to commit itself to providing anything more than less and less. And just as science is used instead of values, doom is a stand in for political vision. If we don't do as 'science' (environmentalism) says, then catastrophe awaits. Here, for example, Lucas tells us that unless we put up with high fuel prices and tax, we wont adjust our behaviour, and society will collapse.



It is an 'interesting' argument that says we need to artificially keep oil prices high because... err... the days of cheap oil are over because... err... of peak oil. For someone who lectures us about 'science', the logic of the causal world seems to have escaped Lucas's understanding. Scarcity would do Lucas's work for her. Obviously, what is at issue is not rescuing humanity from a looming catastrophe, but the legitimacy of a political movement bent on creating a behavioural and cultural change for its own benefit, on the premise that only it can save us from the terrible chaos that awaits us.



As much as Lucas tries to make her ideas sound positive, they are underscored and sold by a vision of catastrophe. She may talk of progressive ideas such as 'equality', 'justice', and 'liberty', but all of these ideas are mediated by, and through the environment. Our freedom is limited, not guaranteed by the environment. Equality is measured in environmental, pseudo-scientific terms of resource distribution. Social justice, according to Lucas, is equivalent to 'environmental justice'. But what a pale imitation of justice that is; it doesn't right any wrongs, or create the possibility of a better standard of living. And where Lucas promises that there will be less unemployment under a Green Government, it is because a 'zero carbon economy' is far more labour-intensive than its fully-powered counterpart. In such an economy, the job that oil did will be done by people. Fancy a job as a serf? How about a career as a treadmill operative? This will be the 'equality' and the 'social justice' that Lucas has designed for us.

The use of science to limit political possibilities, and lower our horizons by constructing plausible catastrophic scenarios is the everyday language of environmentalism. But, surprisingly, the failure of this unremittingly negative view of the world hasn't escaped Lucas' attention.



What? Caroline Lucas is against climate alarmism? The same Caroline Lucas who, in July last year, compared climate scepticism to holocaust denial? The same Caroline Lucas who said in July last year that,

... if you look at the implications of climate change, of runaway climate change, we are literally talking about millions and millions of people dying, we are literally talking about famines, and flooding, and migration and disease on an unprecedented scale. And so yes, I know these are sensitive words that I've used, but I feel so strongly that we urgently need to wake people up and stop this march towards catastrophe that I very much feel that we're on.

Is the Caroline Lucas who is now against catastrophism the same Caroline Lucas who said in November,

... when you hear scientists say that we have about eight years left in order to really tackle climate change, I don't think what the public actually want is cautiousness, what they want is real leadership, and that is what the EU is promising to give, and yet that's what we're failing to do here.

Is it the same Caroline Lucas who said in February,

Around 75 per cent of all cancers are caused by environmental factors, mainly chemicals...

Is the Caroline Lucas who doesn't believe that alarmism works, the same Caroline Lucas in this video?



Lucas appears to be very confused about what she is selling, and how she is selling it. She claims that we must change the way we live, to expect less, and to make do and mend, but that, somehow, this will make us all happier. She claims that she doesn't depend on catastrophic visions to connect with the public, yet without it, there is no imperative to give her ideas a second thought. She claims to be part of a democratic movement, yet demands that the state regulate our behaviour. She claims to speak on behalf of the poor, yet would deprive the poor of the material means to change their lives; cheap goods, fuel, and mobility. She claims to have science on her side, yet she campaigns against the benefits of science; she is against animal research, and against evidence based medicine, favouring instead 'alternative' therapies; she campaigns against the use of agricultural and industrial chemicals; and she campaigns against anything which might have the charge of 'unsustainable' thrown at it. She claims to be against the coercive influence of big business, but in its place, she would put an authoritarian government that would regulate your freedom to travel, to buy things, and coerce you into observing an 'environmentally friendly' lifestyle.

A loss of values in politics is a bad thing. But the Green Party is far far worse. Give us disorientation over deeply confused misanthropy, any day.

Something old, something blue, something borrowed, something green

Bernard Ingham, former press secretary to Margaret Thatcher, asks in the Yorkshire Post (H/T Benny Peiser):

In the election for London's Mayor, the Greens got just over three per cent of the vote. Leaving aside such misguided places as Norwich, where the Green Party gained three seats, they struggled elsewhere to poll anywhere near that. [...] Yet Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Nationalists dance slavishly to the Green tune. [...] Why do we put up with this "green" extortion to so little purpose? That's the real mystery.

We have asked this question before. Environmentalism is a political ideology, yet its influence on policy decisions is not challenged politically in this country, and barely anywhere else. How come?

The closest thing to a challenge are the scientific discussions offered by 'sceptics', 'deniers', 'realists' or whatever you want to call them. Of course, these challenges are waved away by many as 'politically-motivated' - as if Environmentalism was above that sort of thing. And there's the rub. 'Politics' has become a dirty word, and Environmentalism fills the void, because, with 'scientists' backing it, it is presented as a 'value free' set of imperatives that we must all respond to. Environmentalists will tell you that it's not a question of political values, it's a matter of material fact, scientifically established by the IPCC. But the truth is that the unchallengeable measurements that the movement depends on do not exist. Instead, science only lends Environmentalism credibility through the 'precautionary principle'; it is superficially plausible that anthropogenic CO2 will cause global catastrophe (given a substantial number of mainly political assumptions), therefore it is worth treating the possibility of a nightmare as a certainty, according to this doctrine.

From here, Environmentalism easily becomes a religious world view: we start to see disobedient countries through this prism (Burma and its missing mangrove swamps being the latest example); we start to judge the actions of others through green-tinted spectacles; and we start to do the things that are demanded of us, 'for the sake of the planet' - not for a genuine conception of a 'greater good', but just the mitigation of a worse bad.

Back to Ingham's question: the Tories (as any party would) will explain their recent success at the polls as a consequence of their taking green issues more seriously. For example, last Friday, on BBC Radio 4's Any Questions, Chairman of the Conservative Party, Caroline Spellman, said of the successes her party had enjoyed the previous night,

Our council candidates campaigned very simply on following policies that would deliver a cleaner, greener, safer country, one that is more family friendly, and one that gives tax payers better value for money. That is a very simple message, it's one that the electorate like, that is why they have returned conservative governments - in local government - because they like what they see.

Spellman's words offer no political vision whatsoever; just a promise of better management of public (and, most likely, private) life than the Labour Party - which is exactly the basis on which Blair took power from Major in 1997. The vote did not reflect an ideological shift among the public, nor Blair's resonance with the electorate. But contrast Spellman's words to those of Sir Bernard's former boss. Whether you agreed with her or not, Thatcher's aim was a political transformation of the UK, if not the world. She went Green as that vision was running out of steam, in spite of its success (and she closed far more coal mines than any environmental protest could wish for).

Surely, if anyone knows how that played out, and consequently, why the world seems to have gone green, Ingham does?

Disagreeing that politics is dominated by a green consensus is the Independent's Andrew Grice, who complains that "nobody is talking about climate change" anymore.

We might just look back on May Day 2008 as the moment when the power of green politics peaked and went into reverse. I hope I'm wrong, but I doubt it. The reaction of the two main parties to the elections was instructive. Desperate to prop up his own position after Labour's rout, Mr Brown needed to toss a few bones to the voters and jittery Labour backbenchers. So it suddenly emerged that he was about to dump the so-called "bin tax" – allowing councils to charge householders who do not recycle their rubbish. Downing Street didn't confirm it, and five token pilot schemes will go ahead, but it's clear the bin tax has been binned.

A temporary halt to the progress of a law demanding that people recycle, or face punishing fines means that climate is off the agenda, apparently.

Grice goes on to complain about the possibility that a 2 pence rise in petrol/diesel tax will be scrapped - even though the current high price of fuel makes these entirely unnecessary, as the Inland Revenue already takes VAT (17.5%) of the sale price (~£1.108) on top of ~£0.50 a litre of petrol. A genuinely 'anti green' policy would surely make fuel cheaper, rather than allow it to get much more expensive. Grice continues:

Mr Brown was not alone in relegating the environment to the back burner. David Cameron, the wind in his sails after the elections, held a prime ministerial press conference in which he set out his priorities for government. Significantly, the words "environment" and "climate change" did not appear in his 1,200-word statement.

It is indeed a rare thing when David Cameron utters 1200 words, none of which are green. These seem to be the ones Grice is referring to. Here is another speech Cameron made shortly before that one:



If Cameron has indeed abandoned the environmental cause, he has done it very suddenly. But there's nothing in the later speech which contradicts it, in spite of Grice's claims.

Of course, 1200 is a small number of words. If, perhaps, green was ommitted from Cameron's speech, it was because the cause has been fully embraced by all of the parties. Why mention it? Likewise, does the fact that we can find 1200 words uttered recently by Caroline Lucas that include no reference to the environment mean that our favourite Green Party MEP has also turned her back on Mother Nature? As is the case with most shrill environmentalists, Grice confuses omission with opposition. It is what Cameron didn't say which upsets him. A bit like a failure to say Amen after a prayer, or to say grace before a meal; it offends religious sensibilities. So Grice treats it as a statement that the Tories have dropped all green policies, and are to stand against them in the future.

No such luck. And, as is clear from the past, the Conservatives have been key to establishing environmental orthodoxy in the UK.

The reason there is no challenge to Environmentalism is that there is nothing to challenge Environmentalism with. Instead, Environmentalism, and the senses of crisis and urgency it generates, are useful vehicles for policies for the sake of policies, and for the purfunctory policy initiatives that masquerade as 'progress'. Historically, for example, it has been sufficient to announce programs to build new homes on the basis that places for people to live are a good thing. New towns, however they turned out, were planned on the premise that it would make life better, and society more rewarding. Now, homes themselves are problematic. The very idea of housing developments upsets people. They use up resources and roads. They change the view. They are the manifestation of the idea that 'hell is other people'. Environmentalism is on hand to furnish ways in and out of that problem. For those wishing to resist new developments, instead of making selfish objections to the planning process, they can appeal to the 'greater good', and claim that the principle of environmental 'sustainability' has not been given due attention. Developers, in reply, can greenwash their proposal, to claim that the greater good is being served. Never mind that homes are supposed to be all about people.

Politics today, whether it be Cameron's or Grice's, needs crises - real, or imagined - in order to maintain their relevance to an increasingly disengaged public. These appeals to catastrophe are wrapped up in the language of political change. But claims to be about radical change for the sake of "SAVING THE PLANET" belie an exhausted political perspective on the world that increasingly fails to connect with the public in any other way than through high drama, and struggles to distance itself from its opposition.

The current success of the Conservative Party follows the descent of the Labour party, whose 1997 success followed the descent of the Tories, who had enjoyed, since 1978, success at the polls after Labour's problems in the 1970s. It seems that rather than winning elections, parties loose them. We punish their embarassing yet inevitable failure to connect with the public and reward their increasing mediocrity. This is the environment that Environmentalism has thrived in.

Critics of Environmentalism from the right claim that it is the reincarnation of failed socialism. Clearly, that criticism is incomplete. Critics of Tory policy, such as Grice, claim that 'vote blue, go Green' rhetoric is nothing more than spin; empty gestures to convince the public that it is responding to their fears. This too misses the point that that is also the very nature of the environmental movement, which has, like conservative ideologies of the past, used such fear to stand in the way of progress and harked back to traditional ways of life and natural social orders, lest unintended consequences of change cause upheaval.

Challenging environmental orthodoxy will take more than not mentioning it. That is not because Environmentalism is a powerful political idea, but because it exists as a consequence of the inability of political perspectives - Left and Right - to reflect on their own collapse.

'Science' - Environmentalism's Fig Leaf

On The Nation blog, David Roberts of Gristmill (another blog) writes:

Long-time greens are painfully aware that the arguments of global warming skeptics are like zombies in a '70s B movie. They get shot, stabbed, and crushed, over and over again, but they just keep lurching to their feet and staggering forward. That's because -- news flash! -- climate skepticism is an ideological, not a scientific, position, and as such it bears only a tenuous relationship to scientific rules of evidence and inference.

Let us put him straight. Climate scepticism (or skepticism) is not an ideological position. Climate scepticism is not an ideology. Climate scepticism does not offer a perspective on the world from which follow moral imperatives, and climate scepticism is not a doctrine, around which climate sceptics wish to organise society. There is no “world view” of climate scepticism.

Environmentalism,on the other hand, is an ideology. It does create moral imperatives. It does wish to organise society around its principles. It is a world view.

Of course, climate orthodoxy and environmentalism can be challenged from political or ideological perspectives. But there is no consistent “climate sceptic” position. There doesn’t need to be; It’s not an argument for a course of action, and its objections to environmentalism are varied. There have been criticisms of climate politics from the left, and from the centre (or center), and from the right. But these perspectives are not unique to climate scepticism.

To make his point, Roberts links back to a March ’07 post of his on Gristmill, where he makes the claim that,

The scientific contest -- at least as it relates to the basic facts of global warming -- is over.

If the science is settled, he reasons, then the idea that “The contest between climate advocates and their critics is primarily a scientific contest -- a debate over who has the best science” is false. By elimination, the argument with no science must be political. Of course, both of Roberts’s premises are false. The scientific debate is not over – it’s never over, and can never be over. That is itself an unscientific statement.

Environmentalists hide their moral and political arguments behind science. If you challenge them, they will tell you that “the consensus” science is settled. There ensues a scientific debate about whether or not something “is happening”, not whether or not it follows from “something happening” that the appropriate course of action is the one which the environmentalist has proposed. But rarely is it the case that the political statement actually tallies with the science on the matter. What drives the political argument of environmentalists is catastrophism and images of polar bears clinging to ice floes. We have highlighted many times on this blog cases where the political language bears no resemblance to the scientific research on an issue. Our various posts looking at Caroline Lucas's statements, for example, reveal that in most cases, she has simply made the science up. The "science is settled" argument is used as leverage in political arguments to diminish unqualified opinion, but even scientific authorities overstate the strength of research.

The claim that science has shown that "climate change is real and is happening" leads to an array of political arguments from environmentalists, as though all that need be shown to legitimise drastic action (the more drastic the better) is that mankind has influenced the climate. But ask any number of environmentalists what "climate change is real and is happening" actually means, and you will get as many different answers back. The "science" of the matter is portable, in that it is used to arm any number of arguments. But what is happening is not that the science of the argument is being used to illuminate the discussion. Instead the fact of the consensus is being used to avoid the argument being challenged. The moral and political argument is deferred to a "scientific fact", which is neither. On Gristmill, Roberts continues:

Remember: the goal of political debate is not to establish scientific truth, or even to establish which side is closer to it, but to triumph in the realm of public opinion and public policy. No matter how much some people wish that having science on their side is an automatic trump card, it just isn't. The relationship between accuracy and political advantage is tenuous at best.The most vociferous critics of global warming advocates -- far-right conservatives -- understand this viscerally, instinctively, if not consciously.

It is revealing that the issue on which Roberts choses to confront the "far right" is climate change. Environmentalism has thrived in an atmosphere of political exhaustion and cynicism. It therefore appeals to "science" to make it look like it isn't political. It is. Nonetheless, Roberts is unable to challenge the "far right" - whoever he imagines them to be - on either any political basis, or any substantiated scientific basis. And in any case, it's not as if there aren't any far-right green perspectives. Environmentalism is not incompatible with some very nasty views about the human race.

Environmentalism has a lot to hide, and uses science as a fig leaf. Sceptics (and skeptics), in whatever political colours (or colors) they wear should not be afraid of bringing political perspectives to the discussion. It's not about science.

Vote For Me - Or Get Cancer

Dr. Caroline Lucas - Green Member of the European Parliament for Southeast England - continues to peddle scare stories to generate political legitimacy. From a press release carrying the dramatic headline "CANCER 'CAUSED BY POLLUTION', MEP LUCAS TO TELL BRIGHTON WOMEN":

CANCER is often caused by environmental factors including toxic chemicals added to household goods, pesticides and poor air quality, local Green Party MEP Caroline Lucas will tell a Brighton cancer-prevention day this Saturday, February 9th.

This rather conjures up images of people deliberately lacing household goods with carcinogens out of sheer spite, doesn't it? No mention of the usefulness of chemicals, nor even their effect on reducing diseases, and extending human longevity. Nor the countless improvements they have made to our lives in other areas, such as improving the quality and shelf-life of food, leading to lower prices, and better diets, and therefore longer lives. Nope. Chemicals... are bad.

An increasing number of scientists are pointing to the link between toxic chemicals - especially so-called gender-bending hormone-disruptors - and breast cancer, which kills more than 10,000 people each year in the UK alone.

We phoned Caroline Lucas's press office (again) to find out who these 'increasing number of scientists' actually are, and what they are actually saying, and what research actually supports it. They said they'd get back to us. It seems highly unlikely that anyone is deliberately putting carcinogenic compounds into your breakfast, just for fun, nor even just for profit, as our Caroline goes on to suggest:

Similarly links are being found between pesticide use and cancers. Yet these technologies are all growing apace - the Government and EU simply must exercise caution, and put human health above the profits of their friends in the companies that manufacture them.

Ah, it's the Government and their mates again! A chemical conspiracy. Profit standing in the way of a cancer-free population. On this point, Caroline Lucas's press officer told us that the statement that implies a conspiracy reflects her experience in working towards the EU's REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemical substances) regulations. Dr. Lucas apparently believes that a deal between European Conservatives and Socialists to reduce the extent of the regulations was the result of industry lobbying; not the result of debate and discussion. She didn't like the result, so, of course, there's a conspiracy... The conceit of the self-righteous. In a press release from 2005, Lucas said of the compromise...

Around 75 per cent of all cancers are caused by environmental factors, mainly chemicals, and each year more than 30,000 die in the EU due to occupational exposure to substances which are carcinogenic. This directive was designed to require manufacturers to ensure their products don't contain the chemicals responsible, at least where safer alternatives are available.

Is there any scientific basis for the claim that 75% of cancers are caused by environmental factors to imply that industrial chemicals are 'mainly' responsible? The claim that 75% of cancers have environmental causes is the corollary to the theory that 25% of cancers have genetic causes. It means nothing. Cancers take years to develop, and their causes are too many to attribute to one category of risk. The complexity of many factors interacting with one another make it virtually impossible to evaluate such a hypothesis scientifically, let alone in lay terms. It is pure speculation. If the true extent of the effect of environmental cancer-causing factors were known, it would imply that all of the factors had been identified. They simply haven't. Not in synthetic compounds, and not in naturally occurring substances. Nature is made of chemicals too, you know. And in just the same way, we've barely begun to understand the role of genetics in cancer. About all one can say with any certainty is 100% of cancers are the result of a complex interaction between genetic and environmental factors. And why stop at chemicals? Perhaps Lucas should be going the whole hog and banning the environment. After all, it's not just cancer you can catch off it. Just walking through happy organic mother nature friendly fields exposes you to risk. And then again, so does locking yourself up behind your front-door, terrified that cancer is waiting for you at the top of the road. Lucas's statistic - almost certainly bogus - is meaningless when wielded so inexpertly, and is terrifying to anyone who happens to take what she says at face value.

Lucas takes weak and controversial scientific theories out of context and uses them as scientific fact to use them to create legitimacy for her political campaign. Whether she does this consciously, or whether she is oblivious to the fragility of her argument is not our concern. The effect is the same, and she does not appear to be taking any steps to treat her words with caution, let alone get the measure of just how controversial they are. And she seems happy to terrify people to give her political cause some momentum. Her words are used to effect the same thing as the Labour Government's claims of WMDs in Iraq being mobilised, launched and landing in the UK in 45 minutes. It is the politics of fear. Without that fear, and 'sexed up' scientific 'evidence', Caroline Lucas has absolutely nothing, nothing, nothing to offer her constituents.

The problem for Lucas is that one moment science is bad, because it makes nasty chemicals, the next it's great, because it tells us that we're all going to die. But what Caroline wants is not for science to develop safe chemicals which better our lives at all. She wants no chemicals, and she wants society to be organised in a specific way. She uses the science which is convenient to give that vision authority, and the fear it generates is used to create political legitimacy. The remaining science is immoral science; the result of conspiracies which dazzle us with false promises to satiate lusts for consumer lifestyles, but actually poison us. There is no middle ground coming from the Lucas Press office. Check it out for yourself.

The irony is that in making people sick with worry, she is likely to have a more deleterious effect on people's health than industrial substances in the environment. First, because of the direct effect of such terror about getting cancer any minute now. Second, because of the distrust it breeds about useful technologies. Third, because it may have the consequence of generating policies which actually throw the chemical baby out with the toxic bathwater. Lucas wants a chemical free society. But part of the reason that cancers appear to be on the rise is that people are living longer, not dying from other diseases - thanks in part, to the chemicals Lucas is intent on banning. But also, thanks in part to the kind of medical research that Lucas wants to outlaw. Her press office still haven't got back to us about exactly where she got the idea that 'increasing numbers of scientists' are pointing to the link between toxic chemicals and breast cancer, or that 75% of cancers are caused by environmental factors (or what that even means). What they did say was that Europeans for Medical Advancement have something to do with it. Europeans for Medical Advancement, like Europeans for Medical Progress - of which Caroline Lucas is a patron - campaigns against the use of animals in medical research.

WGIII – But is it Science?

Following our breakdown of the expertise comprising the IPCC's WGII, we've now done the same for WGIII, “Mitigation of Climate Change”.

First, the numbers: Of 270 contributors, 66 were from the USA and UK. We haven’t been able to establish the expertise and discipline of 12 of those – yet. 14 contributors had expertise in physics, chemistry or engineering. 4 from other engineering disciplines. 2 were bio/geochemists. 5 were from forestry ecology, or soil science. 2 had expertise in law. There were 7 social scientists, and a whopping 20 economists.

There were no obvious instances of administrative assistants or web designers being included on the list, unlike WGII. However, the 12 contributors we couldn’t locate don’t appear to possess a great deal of the academic credibility Andrew Dessler demands, and work for business or the US EPA – no surprises there. There appear to be fewer PhD candidates, and among the contributors who did not work in the private sector, most had academic positions. The best in the world though? It didn’t seem likely.

The presence of 27 economists/social scientists again gives the lie to the claim that the IPCC is an institution made up entirely of climate scientists. WGIII explains their function as follows:

In the first two volumes of the “Climate Change 2007” Assessment Report, the IPCC analyses the physical science basis of climate change and the expected consequences for natural and human systems. The third volume of the report presents an analysis of costs, policies and technologies that could be used to limit and/or prevent emissions of greenhouse gases, along with a range of activities to remove these gases from the atmosphere. It recognizes that a portfolio of adaptation and mitigation actions is required to reduce the risks of climate change. It also has broadened the assessment to include the relationship between sustainable development and climate change mitigation.

Winston Churchill once quipped:

If you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of then is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three.

Somehow, the IPCC has managed to stuff more than 20 economists in a room, and achieved a “consensus”. Remarkable.

Once upon a time, economics was a matter of politics. Now, it seems, economics is as much a matter of rock-solid objective fact as physics. The problem is, though, that environmental economic orthodoxy cannot be challenged politically - especially in the UK - because all politicians hide behind the "scientific consensus", even though it is formed by a large number of economists and social scientists.

And in case anyone is in doubt that the whole '2500 scientists of the IPCC' thing isn't common currency in political debate about the state of the planet...

Drawn up by more than 2,500 of the world's top scientists and their governments, and agreed last week by representatives of all its national governments, the report also predicts that nearly a third of the world's species could be driven to extinction as the world warms up, and that harvests will be cut dramatically across the world.

writes The Independent this very month. Or

For the first time in six years, more than 2,000 of the world's top scientists reviewed and synthesized all of the scientific knowledge about global warming. The Fourth Assessment Report makes clear that the accelerating emissions of human-generated heat-trapping gases has brought the planet close to crossing a threshold that will lead to irreversible catastrophe. Yet like Cassandra's warning about the Trojan horse, the IPCC report has fallen on deaf ears, especially those of conservative politicians, even as its findings are the most grave to date.

writes Salon. And then there's Kofi Annan, no less:

We must also be ready to take decisive measures to address climate change. It is no longer so hard to imagine what might happen from the rising sea levels that the world's top scientists are telling us will accompany global warming. Who can claim that we are doing enough?

For any (ahem) sceptics out there, note that this is firmly within the territory of WGII and WGIII, in that it is about predictions, and not scientific evidence for climate change and its causes to date.

In November, we ran a post about Green MEP Caroline Lucas' comments about there being just 8 years left to create policies to save the planet.

Well, when you hear scientists say that we have about eight years left in order to really tackle climate change, I don't think what the public actually want is cautiousness…

When we rang them, Lucas’s press office cited WGIII AR4 as the basis for her comments. As a result of her campaining – in part – the EU passed legislation to cap emmissions from aircraft on that same day. The same arguments, based on the same 'consensus' created by WGII and WGIII are being made by the major UK political parties, who, as we have also reported, are promising 60, 80 and 100% carbon reductions by 2050.

Science or politics - wodjafink?

Lucas and the Majority of Some Scientists

In a conversation about EU policy on restricting CO2 emissions from aircraft, on BBC Radio 4's Today program, this morning, Caroline Lucas, Green MEP for the Southeast region said

Well, when you hear scientists say that we have about eight years left in order to really tackle climate change, I don't think what the public actually want is cautiousness, what they want is real leadership, and that is what the EU is promising to give, and yet that's what we're failing to do here.

More often than not, what green politicians mean by "what scientists say" is actually "what green politicians say". So this morning, we rang Caroline Lucas's office to ask her which scientists are telling her that we've only got eight years left. We've never heard them say it, and we listen out for them saying it. They said they'd get back to us...

Meanwhile... this is not Lucas's first comment of this nature. Back in July, we picked up on her comments on climate change scepticism being the equivalent of holocaust denial.

What's prompted me is real concern that a recent opinion poll showed that half the population still don't think that there's scientific certainty about climate change; they still think there's a real debate to be had there. And it worries me enormously because if we don't have a population that really understands that 99.999% of international scientists do believe that climate change is happening and do believe that it's human caused, if people don't understand that then they're not going to put the pressure on the politicians that is so desperately needed and so urgently needed because we’re being told we've literally got between five and ten years in which to put in place a proper policy framework to address climate change. And unless people are really convinced that it's a problem they're not going to act to change it.

Dr Lucas's comments this morning seem equally confused. On the one hand, she appears to be claiming that people are terrified into demanding action because they've heard scientists say we've only got eight years left to save the world. On the other, she's demanding that air travel is restricted. But if people really are as concerned about what Lucas says scientists say as Lucas says they are, then there would be no need to respond to their fear with new EU legislation, people simply wouldn't fly. But, as she points out, aviation is a growing industry.

So if Lucas isn't talking on behalf of the frightened public, (the ones who manage to find their way to the airport in spite of their fear) is Lucas speaking for science at least?

It turns out not, because in answer to our question, Lucas's press office emailed us back with a bunch of links, saying,

The quote in question - that which contains the estimated 'deadline' of 8 years for the world's government to act seriously on climate change - has been used generically for some time now, and is taken from a consensus view among a number of scientists.

"The consensus of a number of scientists". Would that be the same as "the majority of some of the population"? We read the links to find out. They consisted of:

* Guardian Environment Correspondent David Adam's interpretation of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report - "Governments are running out of time to address climate change and to avoid the worst effects of rising temperatures, an influential UN panel warned yesterday". (The influencial UN panel don't actually seem to say that).

* A BBC Online article claiming that "The world may have little more than a decade to avert catastrophic climate change, politicians and scientists say". But what they mean is a scientist, not scientists, because, all that "The taskforce's scientific adviser is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change" says is "I think in the last few years the increase in emissions does cause concern. It gives you the feeling we might end up in the middle of that temperature range [1.5 and 5.5C], and if we do that wouldn't make very good news." Note that Pachauri isn't a climate scientist, but has doctorates in industrial engineering and economics. Also note that Pachauri isn't exactly what you'd call "balanced" about the politics of climate change, previously asking "What is the difference between Lomborg's view of humanity and Hitler's?... If you were to accept Lomborgs way of thinking, then maybe what Hitler did was the right thing".

* An article from the Socialist Workers Website. Enough said.

* A link to the IPCC's website.

We pointed out to Lucas's press officer that these links leave a bit to be desired. We've been reading the IPCC website for years, and hadn't noticed a statement about 8 year windows, and the articles she linked to were subject to the interpretations and prejudices of their authors. And asking David Adam for an objective view of climate science is like asking Bin Laden for a balanced view of the USA. Who were these scientists? Where do they say "we've only got 8 years left"?

The press office again pointed us to the IPCC, emphasising that Pachauri is the "highly respected chair of the IPCC and is quoted as a spokesperson on climate change across all levels of the media". (But does he speak 'for scientists'?) They then referred us to the IPCC's Working Group III Fourth Assessment Report, Summary for Policymakers which, according to the press offcier "focused on economic changes that need to be made, pointing out that emissions must start declining by the year 2015 to prevent the world's temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrialized temperatures".

So we were now faced with an economic argument, rather than a scientific one. Even so, we read it. There is indeed a reference to 2015. But only one. It is the "peaking year" for CO2 emissions in one of several categories of scenarios, where CO2 is stabilised at various concentrations or less, thereby stabilising average global temperature at an amount above the "preindustrial average". But all that is said in the report about the six categories of 177 scenarios assessed by the 33 authors is

In order to stabilize the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere, emissions would need to peak and decline thereafter. The lower the stabilization level, the more quickly this peak and decline would need to occur. Mitigation efforts over the next two to three decades will have a large impact on opportunities to achieve lower stabilization levels (see Table SPM.5, and Figure SPM. 8)

There is no mention of impending catastrophe. There is no mention of deadlines. There is no mention of this being a consensus amongst scientists that we have to meet the 2015 deadline, nor any deadline over another. In spite of the fact that neither Lucas nor her press officer can produce anything which supports her claim that "scientists say we have about eight years left in order to really tackle climate change", they continue to make it. The press officer finally told us that,

Both the UN and the IPCC subscribe to the figure of eight years, and many in the scientific community have also supported the need to drastically reduce emissions by 2015. Caroline has primarily relied upon both the UN conclusions and the IPCC report, and as a busy MEP without the scientific resources to physically perform independent large-scale research on climate change, working across a vast range of issues in her South East constituency and in the European Parliament on a daily basis, Caroline trusts that the IPCC and the UN provide accurate and well-researched reports.

Lucas's press office don't seem to want to continue the conversation, so we have had to look for statements by IPCC scientists for ourselves. You don't need your own pocket-sized IPCC to evaluate claims made about climate science... We found two pertinent quotes on this very site.

Prof Mike Hulme of the UK's Tyndall Centre tells us that,

The language of catastrophe is not the language of science. It will not be visible in next year's global assessment from the world authority of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)[Note: AR4]. To state that climate change will be "catastrophic" hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which do not emerge from empirical or theoretical science. Is any amount of climate change catastrophic? Catastrophic for whom, for where, and by when? What index is being used to measure the catastrophe? The language of fear and terror operates as an ever-weakening vehicle for effective communication or inducement for behavioural change.

And of the projections in WGII, which Lucas's press office seem to think amount to a "scientific consensus", Kevin Trenberth tells us that,

In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers “what if” projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios. There are a number of assumptions that go into these emissions scenarios. They are intended to cover a range of possible self consistent “story lines” that then provide decision makers with information about which paths might be more desirable. But they do not consider many things like the recovery of the ozone layer, for instance, or observed trends in forcing agents. There is no estimate, even probabilistically, as to the likelihood of any emissions scenario and no best guess.Even if there were, the projections are based on model results that provide differences of the future climate relative to that today. None of the models used by IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate.

There is no escaping the fact that Caroline Lucas has made up what "the scientists" are telling us. However busy she is, given that 'climate science' is the basis of her entire political agenda, there is no excuse for not knowing what she's talking about. Lucas neither accurately nor honestly reflects scientific opinion, yet attempts to use it to win moral arguments. Worse still is the fact that whilst she claims to be representing people who are frightened by scientific reports and reflecting the views of scientists, she is in fact doing the frightening by misrepresenting the scientists.

Just how deep does Lucas's love of science really run? That depends on whether the science in question promises to make life better, or legitimises her alarmism. In the case of science making our lives better, ban it. "Nanotechnology will revolutionise our lives - it should be regulated" she writes in a 2003 Guardian article called "We must not be blinded by science". Oh, sweet, sweet irony.

More on Lucas

We are surprised that the media has paid such little attention to Caroline Lucas’s statements likening climate change scepticism to holocaust denial. Her comments expose much of what is rotten about the environmental movement: its lack of proportion, its religiosity, its inability to cope with change and challenge, its misanthropy, its failure to capture the public’s imagination and the fantasy it constructs to explain that failure.

What's prompted me is real concern that a recent opinion poll showed that half the population still don't think that there's scientific certainty about climate change; they still think there's a real debate to be had there. And it worries me enormously because if we don't have a population that really understands that 99.999% of international scientists do believe that climate change is happening and do believe that it's human caused, if people don't understand that then they're not going to put the pressure on the politicians that is so desperately needed and so urgently needed because we’re being told we've literally got between five and ten years in which to put in place a proper policy framework to address climate change. And unless people are really convinced that it's a problem they're not going to act to change it.

Lucas speaks as though a consensus on climate-change allows her to say whatever she likes about the future. Her 99.999% figure is, of course, entirely made up. If it were true, it would mean that 1 in 100,000 climate scientists were sceptical, and we can think of enough sceptics to put the number of climate scientists in the world well into the tens of millions. Lucas has absolutely no idea what proportion of climate scientists constitutes the consensus position because no poll of scientists has been taken.

IPCC reports are not a license for Caroline Lucas to say whatever she wants to say about science. They are hundreds and hundreds of pages long, and cannot be reduced to alarmist statements without losing all of their meaning.

Most scientists do believe that humans are influencing the climate. But ask them how much we are influencing it and you'll get many different answers. And it certainly does not follow that they would agree with Lucas’s plans to mitigate change. Neither does it follow that they believe that climate change would be catastrophic. In fact, many leading climate scientists who represent the ‘consensus’ position can be found directly contradicting what Lucas says, in particular that ‘we've literally got between five and ten years…’

Professor Mike Hulme, for example - no climate sceptic by any stretch of the imagination - wrote last year in an article for the BBC website called Chaotic World of Climate Truth that ‘a new environmental phenomenon has been constructed in this country - the phenomenon of "catastrophic" climate change’, and explicitly cautions against Lucas’s form of language.

It seems that it is we, the professional climate scientists, who are now the (catastrophe) sceptics. How the wheel turns.

Some recent examples of the catastrophists include Tony Blair, who a few weeks back warned in an open letter to EU head of states: "We have a window of only 10-15 years to take the steps we need to avoid crossing a catastrophic tipping point."

There is no way that Lucas cannot be aware of Hulme's comments about alarmism. Yet she has to maintain her version of scientific certainty because if the public realises that there is a debate about how to respond to climate change, and a debate about how reliable forecasts are, her political manifesto simply has no currency.

The Green Party has invested all of its political capital in a nightmare from which there is only one escape: to vote for them. Anyone who questions these self-appointed saviours of the planet is as bad as a holocaust denier: a Nazi, essentially. And arguments don't come much cheaper than that. Dr Lucas is engaged in a programme of terrifying people into voting for her, and making statements about the morality of people who disagree. This is the worst kind of politics.

Lucas understands that her election depends on there being a public who are terrified into voting for her:

[M]y intention is to try to wake people up a bit about the catastrophe which I genuinely believe we are sleep-walking towards. What I'm saying here is that the way in which the media always insists on having somebody to deny climate change at the same time as they have someone talking about how climate change is real. That is neutralising the debate, it's stifling the potential to move forward on this politically in just the same way as it would be if you had somebody who was constantly denying the holocaust every time someone spoke about the Second World War. Now the media doesn't do that, and quite right too, but my point is they shouldn't be giving so much airtime to the climate deniers either because although it may seem a dramatic comparison to make, in reality if you look at the implications of climate change, of runaway climate change, we are literally talking about millions and millions of people dying, we are literally talking about famines, and flooding, and migration and disease on an unprecedented scale. And so yes, I know these are sensitive words that I've used, but I feel so strongly that we urgently need to wake people up and stop this march towards catastrophe that I very much feel that we're on.

Without fear, panic, and alarm about catastrophe - floods, epidemics, famines, and droughts - Lucas has no vision of the future to sell to the public. She is free to 'genuinely believe' whatever she likes, but what she is doing here is inventing a false scientific position in order to make her apocalyptic beliefs sound plausible. She is constructing a terrifying crisis which only she is capable of saving us from, but her valiant efforts to save mankind are thwarted by evil (fascist) sceptics, and the sheer stupidity of the gullible public, who believe what they say.

Where Lucas claims that scepticism is diminishing the potential for political progress and neutralising debate, what she is actually voicing is a tantrum that she is not winning. So she escalates the rhetoric. But Lucas’s claims about millions of deaths are not supported by scientific research.

What kills humans is not climate change, but inability to cope with climate. People survive and prosper in a vast range of climatic conditions, even where climate has also always been a problem for people, occasionally killing thousands of people in a stroke. But as society has developed, natural disasters have been mitigated by ingenuity. We have the means to cope with adverse conditions, and to adapt to new ones, opening up many new possibilities for better lives. Floods and drought and disease kill people in regions which are too poor to afford to adapt. Tsunamis and storms kill people because there is insufficient coastal development. Famines and drought kill people because conflict prevents settlement, development, and the transport of aid. There is no such thing as a 'natural disaster' - these problems always have political or economic causes. For humans, Nature is a disaster... Drought, famine, and disease are all 'natural', after all.

But Lucas rejects the idea that society's relationship to the climate is defined by human development in favour of a kind of environmental determinism. In the past, ideas about development and infrastructure were realised because it was understood that that it would be a moral good to organise society to defend itself against the elements, and better the circumstances of even the poorest people. Now, doctrines like Lucas's offer the poor the bogus promise of not making things worse for them, rather than bettering their lot. The technology that allows society to develop and prosper is exactly what Lucas seeks to deprive the world of. The kind of lifestyle that Lucas would celebrate as 'sustainable' in fact increases people's susceptibility to climate. It puts them in the path of hurricanes, in areas prone to flooding, drought, and famine, because the idea that people should live within natural limits necessarily means that people will suffer the fluctuations of climate.

I'm not for a moment suggesting that there's any reality behind holocaust denial, on the contrary, I'm saying that holocaust deniers are as outrageous as climate change deniers; both of them are outrageous, so it was very much a point I was trying to make in order to say that you know, both are completely unacceptable.

Lucas does not seem to understand the difference between the historical fact of the deliberate and systematic murder of millions of people, and a quasi-scientific theory that changes in climate might turn into human tragedy. She can invent any figure she likes to claim as deaths which make equivalents of genocide and climate change, but they are not equivalents, because the holocaust was an act of barbarism executed by people against people; people who suffer from the effects of climate are not acted against.

We reviewed Josie Appleton's critique of Mark Lynas's book Six Degrees a while ago, in which Appleton describes the way environmentalism explains the relationships between people:

Carbon dioxide becomes the nexus between individuals, the thing that connects us to other people and to the future of the planet

It is within this degraded moral framework that Lucas's calculations take place. Her unsophisticated chain of reasoning posits that because Nazis killed millions of people and some scientists have speculated that climate change could kill millions of people, scepticism of climate change theory is the equivalent of denying the holocaust. Lucas finds it outrageous that anyone might question her view of the world because challenging it undermines it. It is not a view which is expanded or improved by being challenged, but is exposed as vapid posturing.

All the more ironic that Lucas should have been given the title 'Politician of the Year' at the Observer Ethical Awards. (What better indication of morally uncertain times could there be than a pageant in which people contest to prove their stainless character?)

I'm not saying we should somehow stifle debate, but I think at the moment we've got into a rather absurd way in which every time almost you have someone talking about the latest scientific facts on climate change it's almost a knee-jerk reaction to have somebody from the other side to automatically deny it. And I've lost count of the number of debates I've done for example, where someone like BjornLomborg or Richard North are dragged out these two or three names of the people that continually deny that there's any risk from climate change. And it just really does just stop the debate moving forward and stopping action happening more than anything. And it really does seem to me that we are on the edge of an abyss here, and you know, for anybody that's really looked at some of the very measured language coming from the intergovernmental panel on climate change from NASA, and others, it's measured language, but what they're talking about here really is apocalyptic, so I really hope that I don't cause offence with this, but what I do do is to wake up people a little bit and make them think that actually what we're talking about here is something that is desperately serious.

Only a worldview as hollow as Lucas's needs to defend itself by claiming that public debate is dangerous because the public are not sophisticated enough to make up their own minds about what they hear, and that exposure to counter arguments risks sending the human race to their doom. If Lucas really deserved the title of 'politician of the year' - that is to say, if she really had a positive and coherent political and 'ethical' perspective - she would welcome and encourage debate and criticism, not seek to reduce it in this way. She lacks the courage of her convictions, and hides the fact behind the horrors of the holocaust - a cowardly act which reduces any possibility of genuine debate to bogus claims about what percentage cut of CO2 emissions would put the most distance between a political party's policies and fascism.

There is a real debate to be had. There’s a debate to be had about the science, there’s a debate to be had about the best way to approach the problem of climate change and how big that problem is, in the light of - but not as a consequence of - the best scientific information available. Most importantly, there is also a debate to be had about why it is that politics has sunk to the point where politicians have to use science fiction fantasy to convince us of their importance.

Caroline Lucas's Radio Gaga

Caroline Lucas was on BBC Radio Oxford's Bill Heine show last night to explain why she thinks climate change scepticism is the same as holocaust denial.

There is so much wrong with this that it's going to take us a little while to list it all. We'll get back to you soon(ish) about that. Meanwhile, here's the audio of the interview for your enjoyment.

56% of You are Fascist B***ards

We mentioned yesterday that Ipsos MORI regard the majority of the UK population as ignorant sheep who can't come to an informed decision even if it's handed to them on a plate. Well, next to what Caroline Lucas, Green Party MEP for the UK South East region, thinks of them, that all sounds almost complimentary. According to eGov, she prefers to compare the climate scepticism revealed by Ipsos MORI's poll to holocaust denial.

The media’s attempt to seem balanced is in fact distorting the public’s understanding of perhaps the most pressing issue facing us all today – and it’s tragic. It doesn’t make any sense: would the media insist on having a holocaust-denier to balance any report about the second word war? Of course not - but by insisting on giving so much airtime to climate change deniers, it is doing exactly the same thing.

We're glad that Lucas has finally admitted that she's against a "balanced media". We are less impressed with her attempts to make moral equivalents of healthy scientific scepticism and the most morally reprehensible acts she can think of. But she is not alone. We reported on Sunday how Lord May resorted to accusing Martin Durkin of making films denying the link between HIV and AIDS, and previously the Royal Society's statements about how scepticism of claims about the climate are comparable in some way to denying the link between smoking and lung cancer.

Anybody who cannot tell the difference between scientific scepticism and fascism lacks a moral compass. (And to think that Lucas has just been awarded Politician of the Year at the Observer Ethical Awards.) Environmentalism's moral disorientation means that in order to make a moral argument (or to explain their own failures), environmentalists have to draw on absolutes from elsewhere - whether they be absolute wrongs from the darkest periods of history, or absolute scientific certainties that don't even exist.

We don't need anything to compare Nazi atrocities with - they were horrors that spoke for themselves. But the morality of emitting CO2, which possibly raises global temperatures and might change the climate (in an unpredictable and unspecified way) isn't such an easy thing to measure. That needs science - really thorough, deep and tested science. We don't have that, yet. And we won't ever have it if we deny scientists the opportunity to pursue a value free investigation of the material world without calling them denialists.

Given that 56% of the public, according to the MORI poll, come under Lucas's definition of denialists, it's pretty obvious she doesn't have much regard for the intelligence of those she represents. If the public are so easily lead like sheep, can she say that her election victory wasn't due to 'media distortions'? Funny how people like polls when it suits them.