Climate change

Heathrow’s nine runways When was a third runway for Heathrow first proposed? Heathrow was always planned to have multiple runways. On 10 April 1946, before the airport was even open, the Minister for Civil Aviation, Lord Winster, announced that the then London Airport was to have nine runways. Six would be in a Star of David pattern on the present site of Heathrow; the other three would form a triangle to the north of Bath Road, where the current proposal for a third runway is based. This was supposed to allow 160 aircraft movements per hour in good weather and 120 in bad weather. When Winster made his speech, three

My parents told me that their wartime childhoods were punctuated by the expression: ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ It was used as an excuse for not attending to something urgent. The modern equivalent is the phrase ‘climate emergency’ (leading to ‘extreme weather events’). This emergency is supposedly so great that billions have to be spent on it annually, leaving little time and money for actual emergencies, e.g. floods. The stupidity of XR digging up the lawn outside the gate of Trinity College, Cambridge, needs no further comment. The event does bring home our cultural change. Shortly before I went up to Trinity in the mid-1970s, a few young

‘Four beef burgers is the same as flying to New York and back! FOUR BURGERS!’ When I arrived at the Extinction Rebellion demo, the first person I met was a woman activist, clad from head to foot in ocean-polluting, synthetic fibres, talking absolute nonsense. And because I’m a beef farmer, I felt I should set her straight. I explained that no, my grass-fed beef does not harm the planet, and asked her what on earth she expected the farmers of Britain to do if they couldn’t keep cows. ‘Ah,’ she says, folding her arms, ‘they should just grow trees.’ Trees are fast becoming the answer to everything. Worried about floods?

‘I wouldn’t be here if you were a climate denier’. This was William Skeaping, spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion (ER), talking to Toby Young on The Spectator podcast. That statement tells us much about the environmental pressure group’s tactics and strategy. It also reveals that, in the battle behind the climate war, Extinction Rebellion has already won. ‘Deny’ these ‘truths’ and we will simply refuse to talk to you. You will be nothing to us. That’s the message from ER. Skeaping’s words were a neat framing of his movement’s preconditions for engaging in debate. The terms would seem to be these: agree that the future of life on the planet is in

I was five years old when the world first ended. That was in 2000, the year that a United Nations official predicted 11 years before that entire nations would be wiped out by rising sea levels. Since then, I have survived the Arctic melting on at least six separate occasions (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2018), to say nothing of the geopolitical chaos that followed the oil shortages of 2015. As of last year, my troubles have been worsened by the complete submersion of the Maldives, which has narrowed my holiday options. This week, as I ventured into London to shop for a woolly jumper and flippers ahead of

This year’s Nobel Prize for the silliest piece of scientific research must go to something called the Climate Accountability Institute, for revealing to the world that 35 per cent of all global carbon and methane emissions since 1965 can be traced to just 20 global companies. This week they were named and shamed in the Guardian and revealed to be, er, 17 oil companies and three coal mining companies. Scandalously, they have been pumping all this carbon into the air for their own self-enrichment while the rest of us suffer. As Professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University – the fellow behind the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph – puts it:

I share Extinction Rebellion’s environmental concerns and I’ve previously joined their protests. My friends and colleagues fill their ranks. I even have a man-bun. But I can’t get behind their latest efforts to coax students to quit the classroom. Pre-empting this week’s disruption in London, Extinction Rebellion released a video recounting why student drop-outs, including marine biologists, gave up university for the movement. ‘I left university because someone told me the truth about what was happening and I realised that I had a responsibility to act,’ explains one former student. ‘(I left) because I am scared so many people I love are going to die and a masters won’t stop that’,

It is often said that Western culture worships youth. Yet this cult of youth worship has started to mutate into something a bit weirder, as it increasingly seems that ours is a society that now worships children. This year, for instance, has seen the rise to global ascendency of the 16-year-old Swede, Greta Thunberg. She has become the child-saint icon of the environmental movement, whose apocalyptic scorn is fawned over by liberal politicians and woke-conscious big business. Her teenage acolytes bunk school, with the blessing of their teachers, to raise awareness as to the plight of climate change. Elsewhere, we are told that it is imperative to hold a second