Why Being Green Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry
by James
Delingpole Recently by James Delingpole: 'Biodiversity': The New Big Lie
One of the stories from the Bible I’ve never quite understood is the parable of the Prodigal Son. So this utterly useless git prematurely grabs his share of his inheritance, goes out into the world, blows it on being stupid, loses everything, then comes back to his father with his tail between his legs and what happens? Why his father, sap that he is, decides to reward him for being wrong and stupid and useless by greeting him, well, like a prodigal son and killing the fatted calf. No wonder the Other Son – the sensible, intelligent one who was right all along – feels so mightily peeved. If people don’t get their just deserts in life, what’s the point even bothering to do the right thing in the first place? Anyway, watching Channel 4’s What The Green Movement Got Wrong last night I felt very much like the Other Son. The documentary was a celebration of the fact that two notable green campaigners – Mark Lynas and Stewart Brand (creator of the Whole Earth Catalog) had finally come round to appreciating that some of the key tenets of their Green religion were flawed and had in fact done more harm than good. GM crops such as “golden rice” and vitamin-enhanced millet, they cheerily conceded, were not evil “Frankenfoods” after all but a vital way of averting malnutrition in the Third World. Nuclear power, they agreed, was way more efficient at producing clean energy than the coal alternative. Furthermore, the fuss about Chernobyl had been horribly overdone. The near global ban on DDT – inspired by Rachel Carson’s junk science bestseller Silent Spring – had caused millions to die of malaria.
And so on. Well bully for Lynas and Brand. But why, pray, do they deserve any credit for reaching conclusions that those of us who aren’t blinkered eco-zealots reached years ago? What about the hundreds – perhaps thousands – of starving Zambians who died in the 2002 famine when, thanks to the misinformed campaigning of green activists like Lynas, the Zambian government refused to distribute US foreign aid packages of GM food? What about all the honest, decent scientists and agricultural engineers and nuclear workers whose career path was stymied as a result of green hysteria? What about the brown-outs and power shortages and energy insecurity this country is going to suffer as a direct result of the Greenie anti-nuclear hysteria which prevented us replacing our old nuclear power stations? What ABOUT those millions and millions that Rachel Carson inadvertently massacred with her entirely unfounded claims about the effects of DDT on birdlife? November 6, 2010 Copyright © 2010 The Telegraph
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