Can’t you leftists understand? Mass death is good for you. Reject the woke love of life! Welcome civilisational collapse! Watch it all burn, then dance in the ashes! This, roughly speaking, is how the dismissal of climate action is now being justified: the argument has shifted from science denial to outright nihilism.
The new incendiary spirit is exemplified by that serial arsonist Allister Heath, editor of the Sunday Telegraph. In a column in the Daily Telegraph last week, originally titled “Britain can’t stop climate change. Scrap net zero and embrace Mediterranean life”, he argued that “climate change is real” but “the war against global warming has been lost”.
This is a classic progression among those who seek to prevent a shift away from fossil fuels: first deny the problem, as the Daily and Sunday Telegraph have done for many years, then accept the problem but claim it’s now too late to act. If it is too late, it’ll be in no small part because of the deniers. So, Heath continued, we in Britain should “ditch the despicable con that is net zero, and learn to cope with … a warmer, drier, more volatile Mediterranean climate, if that is indeed to be our fate”.
Seeking to cut our emissions, he argued, shows that we suffer from an “advanced case of suicidal empathy”. I’m not qualified to diagnose people, but as a general rule, a lack of empathy, alongside callousness and an absence of guilt, is a strong indicator of a psychopath. Yes, he continued, “there will be plenty of losers, but it is pointless seeking to prevent the inevitable … Many in Britain would enjoy the kind of warmer climate predicted by modellers”.
His timing was impeccable: extolling a Mediterranean climate just as the Mediterranean region goes up in flames. Amid general derision on social media, the editors changed the headline.
Heath’s column also happened to land on the day drought was declared across half of England. Nevertheless, he argued, we need universal irrigation and should construct more swimming pools. Where will the water come from? Oh, don’t get all empirical with me. He maintained we should “trust that the free market will deliver the goods on clean energy and zero-carbon transportation, but only when they are better and cheaper than existing alternatives”. But renewables are already cheaper, and better for us, than fossil fuels in almost all situations. It is only through resistance to the “free market”, led by the Trump administration – which has spent billions trying to kill clean energy and sustain coal burning – that fossil fuels retain such a share of consumption. As a result of the plunging price of renewables, far from having lost the climate war, we could be about to witness a rapid turnaround. So quick, give up now, just in case we win.
He dismissed cutting carbon emissions in the UK as a “moral act, an ethical imperative”, by which he appears to mean unhinged: “Down that road lies madness.” Yes, cutting our own emissions is a moral act and an ethical imperative. It is also pragmatic. Global action on climate breakdown depends on mutual trust. If some countries refuse to play, others are also likely to refuse, and an effective global response collapses in a circle of finger-pointing. This risk is all the greater when rich nations, which tend to have the biggest fossil fuel legacies, seek to behave as free riders. If we don’t step up, why should anyone else?
As for the “warmer climate predicted by modellers”, it could go quite the other way, as rising temperatures, some models suggest, could cause the Atlantic current system to stall, plunging Britain into extreme cold. Well, you’ll just have to learn to adapt to that instead.
Heath’s defiance of reality is so well established that it has spawned an “Allister Heath headline generator”, which pumps out bonkers statements not easily distinguishable from the originals. In a close field, I think he takes the prize for being more wrong more often than anyone else in British journalism. This, after all, is the man who described Kwasi Kwarteng’s fiscal catastrophe as “the best budget I have ever heard a British chancellor deliver, by a massive margin”. It’s a reliable rule: if Heath believes something, the opposite is likely to be true.
But it’s not just him, and it’s not just journalism. The radical right moves as a pack, and Heath is just one of many now insisting that climate catastrophe is something we should simply suck up. Those grammar deniers Reform UK, for example, insist: “We are better to adapt to warming, rather than pretend we can stop it.” Of course the same political tendency also defends austerity and privatisation, both of which severely hamper our ability to adapt.
To their credit, two Telegraph columnists, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and Tim Stanley, last week broke the nihilist consensus, arguing we should rise to the challenge of climate breakdown. But they now belong to a minority, in the Telegraph and across the rightwing press.
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Why? Because most of the media, most of the time, provides a platform for people who say things that have the effect of serving capital, whether or not they are true, whether or not they are coherent, whether or not they may hasten disaster. While renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels in nearly all circumstances, fossil fuels are more profitable, because useful reserves are limited and can each be monopolised by a single corporation, while prices can suddenly take flight in times of war or chaos. Almost all the very rich are heavily invested in them. The result is that any attempt to restrict the use of fossil fuels is perceived as class war. Nonsensical justifications for the status quo then follow as automatically as the Allister Heath headline generator.
So “embrace Mediterranean life”. But without the wine, which, as another Telegraph column laments, is becoming “smoke tainted” by all those fires triggered by some unmentioned and mysterious force. And without the food, whose production, thanks to the drought and heatwaves, is at grave risk in southern Europe, as it is here. And without your lovely gite, which might have been incinerated. Or the lush green landscape, also lost to the flames. Or the balmy summer temperatures, now replaced by murderous heat. Oh go on then, you know what I really mean: embrace death.
