Why you shouldn’t believe the green attacks on Ben Fogle

Just because the environmentalists have been proved so epically wrong about global warming doesn’t mean they’re right about everything else. Ocean acidification, overpopulation, species loss… you’re going to hear a lot about dire and urgent threats like these in the coming months as the greenies establish a fallback position after the collapse of their climate change scam. But it’s the same old toxic mix of misanthropy, religious dogma, control freakery and anti-capitalism, repackaged with different labels.

Let me give you another example. A couple of months ago, you may have noticed the amiable TV presenter Ben Fogle being monstered in the lefty press for environmental crimes he’d apparently committed on a trip to Sarawak (the Malaysian side of Borneo).

Had he eaten a baby orang-utan? No. Had he pulled the wings off a particularly lovely tropical butterfly? Well, you’d think so from the newspaper’s hectoring tone. But no, what he’d done wrong, apparently, was to give publicity to one of the most wicked, corrupt, environmentally destructive regimes on the whole planet. Sarawak, claimed the article, is ‘controversial’ because ‘vast amounts of industrial logging have left only 5 per cent of forests that have not been either logged or converted to palm oil plantations’.

Well, not being a Malaysian politics expert, I concede it’s theoretically possible that Sarawak really is the new North Korea. But two things about these claims set my alarm bells ringing. The first was the personal nature of attack on Fogle — a classic Alinskyite technique much used by lefties and greenies to make up for their lack of decent arguments. And the second was that weasel boo-phrase ‘industrial logging’.