[Falling demand impacts on price, but the quantity remains unchanged: after SilverStar, reproduced under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version]

We hear a great deal about ‘dangerous climate change’ from the likes of Al Gore and Nicholas Stern. By contrast, I wish to speak about dangerous ‘Green’ economics.

We forget at our peril that a significant portion of the ‘Green’ movement has striven for over 40 years to undermine the whole of our economic system, and to replace it with a ‘Green’ autocracy that can rule all our lives and decisions. Unfortunately, until the present economic crisis, too many of our bien pensant classes, along with their preferred media, such as the BBC and the New York Times, have been happy to play along with this trope, paying lip service to it intellectually and at dinner parties, if not much in practice. The trope has been reinforced by a legion of sloppy-minded university products from far too many ill-conceived MAs and MScs in development studies and environmental studies.

These forces have worked hard to undermine the economic world by adopting three quite deliberate tactics.

Impossible Externalities

First, they have tried to usurp economic decision-making by inserting a zero, or an infinity, in cost benefits. In other words, they have raised the importance of non-market, often unmeasurable, externalities to the point where you are forced to ignore, or to destroy, market decisions. In doing this, they aim to remove the ability to choose anything other than their ‘Green’ choices.

As The Observer unwittingly illustrates so well today [‘Recycled waste could be stored on MoD bases. Sites are desperately being sought to house the UK’s unwanted mountain of recyclable rubbish’, The Observer, November 15,  News, p. 5], a fine example of this is recycling in the UK. There has never been a real market for many ‘recycled’ items, so that much of the process has been driven by ‘moral’ fiat, but, even more significantly, by bureaucratic EU edict. Now that economic realities are biting hard, with collapsing demand for virtually all waste, recyclable or not, the unreality of all this is brutally exposed. As The Observer is forced to report:

“Huge waste mountains could be sited on military bases under emergency plans to protect Britain’s recycling revolution from the economic downturn.

Local authorities have requested government permission to site rubbish dumps on Ministry of Defence land in order to stockpile growing amounts of recyclable waste for which there is no use and no market.”

A moment’s analysis of this comment illustrates the bien pensant - and The Observer is the quintessential bien pensant newspaper - rubbish behind such ‘Green’ economics. The article admits that there is “no use” and “no market” for the waste, but we must still continue the “revolution”, whatever the costs. How can something be “recyclable” if it has no use and no market?

Other noteworthy examples of impossible externalities include a long list of highly dubious ‘ecosystem services’ (nearly always, of course, including trees).

Moreover, the artificiality of carbon trading is palpable, while, in the present economics of crisis, the price of carbon has inevitably plummeted.

The 1984 Syndrome

The second tactic has been to try to manufacture, in the style of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1947), an all-encompassing external threat against which there must be perpetual war. The prime example of this is ‘global warming’, which has been likened in gravity to the Great World Wars.

Such a perpetual threat demands the downplaying of democracy, the legitimising of ‘Green’ totalitarianism, the destruction of markets, and the establishment of Ministries of Truth. The last are increasingly serviced by a regiment of civil servants who are locked into the current belief system. I find it not only amusing, but also a tad terrifying, that, in the UK, we have actually created a Climate Department [Newspeak: Miniclim?] to maintain the perpetual war.

It is worth recalling that Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, an Outer Party member, was set the task of rewriting historical documents to match the party line, the orthodoxy of which could change weekly. This process included destroying evidence [cf. “There was no Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age”], amending newspaper articles [“Cooling is Warming”], and deleting the existence of people identified as “unpersons” [“Global Warming Denial is a Thought Crime”]. Interestingly, one of our finest novelists e-mailed me recently to inveigh against her local council’s creation of precisely such a Winston Smith post, namely a Climate Change Officer on a large salary paid for by us good citizens out of an ever-increasing Council Tax.

The ‘Greens’ are especially happy to follow the climate-change orthodoxy because it gives them enormous political power. As a minor party or influence, they can hold the balance of power, and the major parties dare not offend them.

‘Green’ Bureaucratic Language

The third approach, as in ‘London’, the chief city of ‘Airstrip One’, a province of Orwell’s ‘Oceania’, has been to try to control the official language on economics and the environment, and to build up a cadre of officials and employees with vested interests in maintaining the myths of Envirosoc [our equivalent to Orwell’s ‘Ingsoc’?] through the use of this metalanguage - hence that meaningless, but stunning, example of Newspeak, namely ‘sustainability’. As I wrote as far back as 2002 [‘“Sustainable development” is just dangerous nonsense’, The Daily Telegraph, August 16, 2002]:

“Sustainable development was defined in 1987 as ‘development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs’. This was a good motherhood and apple pie sentiment, but how has it worked out?

Today, sustainable development is a ubiquitous, politically compliant phrase, a pleasant-sounding palliative to inexorable and inevitable change. It is dished up as a placebo to eco-chondriacs the world over. Ecological and economic change are the norm, not the exception. Equilibrium solutions are impossible; we inhabit a disturbing, non-equilibrium world, in which volcanoes erupt, earthquakes quake, seas rise and fall, and climate changes, whether under human influence or not.

Sustainable development lurks everywhere - for business, it is a neat PC word: all PR and ethical investment, but signifying little; for scientists, it means: ‘Give me funds for research’; for politicians: ‘Give me your nice Green vote’.

The biggest problem arises when authoritarian environmentalists hijack the phrase. Then sustainable development becomes either no growth at all or limited growth of a type approved by an elite few - wind farms, yes: nuclear power no; organics, yes: GM no. This is why, so often, environmental organisations try to portray business as the arch-enemy of sustainable development. Like biodiversity, another key word from Rio, sustainability is thrown into the argument to block development and growth, to conjure up a return to an imagined, usually rural, Utopia.”

The Paradox

Just so. Yet, paradoxically, it is the genuine crisis in world economics that could well put paid to the dangerous trope of ‘Green’ economics. We can no longer tolerate the bien pensant fantasies and utopias of Prince Charles and the middle classes.

I have little fear of climate change, so long as we can maintain strong, flexible economies, and support the less rich countries of the world. By contrast, naive, utopian ‘Green’ economics both frighten me and anger me, as they heap unwonted costs and taxes onto both the poor and the economy in general.

Except for the well-heeled few, dangerous ‘Green’ economics have always been an indulgence too far; in the present state of affairs, they are suicidal.