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from Daily Mirror Comment
Mirror.co.uk
THIS week a man knocked on my door and asked me if I might like to discuss my "motivation towards recycling".
I was, frankly, rather surprised. I didn't know I was supposed to have any "motivation towards recycling".
I could have lied and told him I run my car on panda blood and dine only in restaurants that serve endangered species. But on the basis that life's too short to irritate super-annuated council waste disposal officers I explained that I didn't feel the urge to discuss my pivotal role in saving the planet today, or any other.
I suppose I'm now marked down as a subversive and soon, I predict, the refuse Gestapo will be round to inspect my bins. I hope every householder in my street politely told the berk with a clipboard where to stuff his rubbish survey. But I doubt it.
There's an orthodoxy about the "green issue" which means anyone daring to question it becomes a pariah. In the same way that, until recent spectacular U-turns, anyone who stepped out of line to condemn the government's multicultural policy was branded a racist.
Green is the new religion and we're all meant to be cowed by the propaganda preached by evangelical MPs who've taken to howling the message like zealots at a prayer meeting. Speaking after apocalyptic reports of impending doom were released in the Stern Review of global warming, the PM told us sagely that the consequences for the planet are "literally disastrous".
Well, don't you worry about scaring the children, Mr Blair. Meanwhile the Environment Secretary, half-man, half-android David Miliband, has rushed in to announce he'll save us all from a disaster greater than two World Wars by taxing us to kingdom come.
Just a minute, sunshine. The British public can be extraordinarily gullible but we know when the green wool is being pulled over our eyes. While we're asked to pay an "eco tax" on electricity, petrol, energy-inefficient electrical appliances and holiday flights, the Chinese plan to open more than 500 coal-fired power stations.
In other words even if we sat in the dark for two years, every power saving made would be wiped out by China's growth. Surely Miliband realised that once global warming became top of the political agenda the genie would be out of the bottle?
Britain uses just two per cent of the world's energy. More to the point, if carbon emissions mean global suicide why is this government hell bent on another terminal at Heathrow Airport?
Shouldn't we be told, since we're being encouraged to fuel our cars with melted chip fat, what plans are afoot to trade in the fleet of ministerial gas-guzzling Jags and Range Rovers in favour of electric ones?
And where will the windfall from all this green tax go - on armies of recycling motivation specialists? The unpleasant whiff of "do as I say, not do as I do" has just become more pungent.
Happily, out of all this ideology comes some sanity from scientists prepared to stick their heads over the parapet and tell us carbon emissions may have little to do with climate change.
Perish the thought, but perhaps it's time we stopped swallowing the melting ice-cap theories and put it all down to natural cycles as Orlando Whistle-croft, who chronicled country life in the 19th century, did.
I leave you with observations from his book, The Climate of England, in which he wrote how the "fabulous weather" of 1846 saw kitchen gardens continuing to grow through the winter. "Overcoats were superfluous, fires quite disagreeable and walking in the moonlight was preferable to sitting in the chimney corner."
In March, Whistlecroft noted that young people in his village were gathering cowslips. A drought set in till November "which made us feel we had two long summers in one year".
No blame attached then to people driving 4X4s or flying off on easyJet to Majorca. Something to remember before you start bottling the chip fat.
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