Lord Donoughue: Labour Must Ditch Its Climate Change Obsession
DECEMBER 7, 2016
In 2008, I was one of the many members of both houses who unquestioningly voted for Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Act, with its legal commitments to rapidly decarbonise the British economy. The measure was not properly costed (now forecast at upwards of £360bn by 2050). I had not studied the Bill. This seemed a noble, if eye-wateringly ambitious, project: to ‘save the planet’. Who could object to that?
I decided to study climate change. The more I explored it, the more I began to question what was being claimed by the evangelical climate change movement, and especially how the Labour party was responding. I was also intrigued by the growth of the ‘save the planet’ movement, in a period when Marxism and Christianity were falling further into discredit.
People on the liberal left of politics often now lacked a motivating belief. Climate change offered to fill that faith void. It was an easy political ‘good’, providing policy objectives linked to fashionable green environmentalism around which ‘well intentioned’ people, reading the Guardian and listening to the BBC, can unite...
*** Observational evidence so far gives no answers to those questions which justify the alarmist predictions. Factually, our global temperature has increased by only some 0.8°C since proper official records began nearly 140 years ago – and has seen virtually no further warming at all this century. Alarmists proclaim that 2016 is our ‘hottest year’ (implying ‘ever’). But those 140 years of a warming cycle are a mere drop in the ocean of climate history.
