Climate change

It’s tempting to laugh at Extinction Rebellion. I do it myself frequently. Those yoga sessions on Westminster Bridge. The amateur dramatics of wandering around in naff crimson-red outfits to symbolise ‘the common blood we share with all species’. That lame rave-style dancing they do as some bloke in an overlong beard plays the drums while his parents in the Home Counties wonder when he’s going to come to his senses and join his dad’s law firm. It’s all so ridiculous. They fancy themselves as revolutionaries but really this is just Hampstead and Homerton, the posh and the hip, descending on Westminster for a few days to wail about how howwible

On the face of it, the Labour party conference commitment to bring forward Britain’s net zero greenhouse gas emission target to 2030 is nothing short of reckless. ‘We need zero emissions,’ the economist Paul Johnson and member of the Committee on Climate Change tweeted. ‘Getting there by 2050 is tough and expensive but feasible and consistent with avoiding most damaging climate change. Aiming for zero emissions by 2030 is almost certainly impossible, hugely disruptive and risks undermining consensus.’ The GMB, the union representing what remains of Britain’s industrial workers, warned that it could lead to widespread job losses. The GMB is right. Accelerated decarbonisation is a formula for rapid de-industrialisation.

Students went on strike today worldwide to protest against climate change. Luckily, the London protest took place only a stone’s throw away from the Spectator office so Steerpike went down to Parliament Square to see what action the eco-protesters want taken as a country. Only, with signs ranging from ‘F–k Boris’ to ‘Defy Tory Rule’, and Palestinian and communist flags flying, the event could easily have been mistaken as a pre-party for Labour’s conference this weekend. Jeremy Corbyn and a slightly hoarse Owen Jones showed up to lend their support. It turns out that if you want to make a point on the environment, it’s best to use plenty of expletives

There’s a lot of anger about — and it’s not pleasant. But at least it means people are engaged as well as enraged. What’s more worrying and increasingly irritating is the negativity, the drip-drip of despondency that’s been allowed to seep into so much of daily life. Everything is broken! All is lost! The end is nigh! Which is fine if you’re a Jehovah’s Witness or believe that the eschatological prophecies of the Bible have pretty much all come to pass. Every day we are told repeatedly that ‘catastrophe’ awaits. It will be ‘-catastrophic’ if we leave the EU without a deal, ‘catastrophic’ if America withdraws from the Paris Agreement

Why are MPs so pathetically in thrall to Extinction Rebellion? This morning, while the world was focused on the Conservative leadership campaign six Commons select committees (Treasury, BEIS, Environmental Audit, Housing, Communities and Local Government, Science and Technology, and Transport) jointly launched a ‘Citizens’ Assembly’ on climate change. If you think you have heard that term before, it was one of the central demands of the climate change activists who occupied Oxford Circus for two weeks in April. One by one, they seem to be having their demands met as if they were a conquering army as opposed to a ragbag of anti-capitalist protesters. They demanded that Parliament declare a

In a last-ditch effort to find a domestic legacy, Theresa May has set her sights on the hot topic of the day: climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions in Britain will be cut to zero by 2050, the PM has pledged. May’s promise is a response to the Extinction Rebellion protests that ground the capital to a halt back in April. It is also an answer to pig-tailed climate change activist Greta Thunberg who captured the imaginations of politicians from Michael Gove to Jeremy Corbyn earlier this year. The pledge is certainly ambitious. In May, the Climate Change Committee said that with an awful lot of cash and political will, Britain can become

A festival of inertia at PMQs today. A party without a leader, a Government without a purpose and a Parliament without a programme. Theresa May, in Portsmouth for the D-Day commemorations, was understudied by David Lidington who looks like a maths professor but performs like a comedian. His waggish streak is undermined by his gentlemanly dislike of mocking women. He blushed and giggled as he pointed out that Jeremy Corbyn’s regular deputy, Emily Thornberry, had been ‘despatched to internal exile somewhere’. Her crime, he teased, was to ‘outshine the Dear Leader’ at PMQs. In Corbyn’s place stood Rebecca Long-Bailey. Lidington warned that she too risked being ‘airbrushed out of Politburo

When John Glenn was asked what went through his mind as he became the first American in space, he said it was the nerve-wracking thought that ‘every part of this rocket was supplied by the lowest bidder.’ It’s a revealing insight. Perhaps even more so than the ‘Blue Marble’ photograph of Earth taken by Apollo 17 astronauts, which inspired early environmentalists. Glenn was acknowledging that market economics made it possible for a government to achieve Herculean feats. True, the Soviets were in the race too, but then their system collapsed completely. Capitalism has staying power – and that’s what we need now in the fight against climate change. The UK’s