I’ve been radicalised by Just Stop Oil

Last month I went to Lord Frost’s superb lecture for the Global Warming Policy Foundation about the harm net zero will do to the British economy. He pointed out that the government is completely unrealistic about the economic cost of the policy, which former energy minister Chris Skidmore claimed last year could boost GDP by up to 2 per cent, thanks in part to cheaper household energy bills. (As Frost said: ‘Good luck with that.’) This is even more Pollyannaish than Labour’s energy review in 2003, which at least acknowledged that achieving a 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 would cost 2 per cent of GDP. When ministers are pressed on how the economy will cope with problems such as the intermittency of wind and solar power and the mind-boggling expense of creating adequate battery storage, they are reduced to muttering that ‘something will turn up’.

Let’s start by daubing red paint on the homes of the billionaire backers of these ‘anti-capitalists’

The fact that our political masters have embarked on such a ruinous course would have seen them turfed out of office in decades gone by, Frost said. But the problem today is that the intellectual climate is highly collectivist. Vast swaths of the electorate believe the purpose of policy-making is to tame markets, not liberate them, and are convinced that the 2008 crash was caused by the free enterprise system rather than bad regulation and poor central bank decision–making. In the mainstream media, anyone expressing scepticism about the impact of anthropogenic global warming is viewed with intense suspicion.

During the Q&A that followed the lecture, I asked Lord Frost if we should take a leaf out of our opponents’ book and set up a militant anti-green-activist group. The eco-protestors say their reason for disrupting major sporting events and holding up traffic is to stop people ignoring the ‘climate emergency’, a rationale I’ve always found baffling, since the professional-managerial class talk about nothing else and the public is bombarded with environmentalist propaganda 24/7.