I am no doubt fortunate to live in a part of the world as yet barely discovered by Extinction Rebellion. I have yet to see orange paint on the grey granite walls of Aberdeen nor have I been hindered in my journey to work by people obstructing the road. Some rather scruffy people did occupy the building where I work, which involved them taking turns at speaking into a megaphone, but fortunately I was unable to make out more than the noise of their voices rather than their words. I understood that they were angry, but not a single one of these people looked capable of holding down a job let alone saving the world.
This is a problem with the green movement in general. Let’s
assume that there is a problem with using fossil fuels. Let’s further assume
that the world is getting warmer and that something needs to be done to prevent
this. Who do we turn to for solutions? Greta Thunberg is possibly the most famous
green campaigner. She’s also just as angry as the Extinction Rebellion people,
but with fewer qualifications. I don’t wish to be nasty about Thunberg, but she
doesn’t have any expertise in physics or chemistry and is just repeating what
she has been told or read in popular science books. Her conclusion is that we
need to overthrow capitalism. OK let’s have world revolution, but the countries
that went through such revolutions in the 20th century, for example, China and
the Soviet Union polluted more than we did.
In Scotland we have lots of windmills, but the SNP and
Green coalition continue to tilt at them in thinking that these are enough to
keep the lights on. Scottish nationalists think that if only we were independent,
we would right now have no energy problems whatsoever. Our bills unlike anyone
else in Europe would not have risen and instead we would be charging the
English vast amounts to use our excess power.
Renewable energy is wonderful stuff even if you
exaggerate how much of it Scotland has. But the cost of solar panels still
makes me wonder if it is worth putting them on my roof rather than keeping the
money invested elsewhere and the problem windmills is not merely that they are
a murder of crows, but that on a freezing cold still January day, they don’t keep
you warm. You need an alternative source of energy either gas, or oil or coal
or nuclear.
This is our problem. The SNP Greens think that all of these
sources of power are bad (although we might just base our case for independence
oil if the price rises enough). So, if Scotland has only windmills and wave
power and solar panels where do we get our power on that cold January day? Obviously,
we have to buy it from somewhere else, but that somewhere else has to be
connected to us by cables or pipes. But unfortunately, these go all go to
somewhere called England. So, who will depend on whom to keep the lights on?
Just as I wouldn’t ask a nineteen year old girl with
no qualifications to solve our energy problems so too I would not ask Patrick
Harvie or Lorna Slater. Both think that Thunberg not merely has all the answers
about climate change, but also all the answers about economics. They agree with
Extinction Rebellion that the solution to traffic congestion is for people to
obstruct the roads and the best way to save the planet is for us to abolish
cars (except ministerial ones) abolish planes (unless needed to go to Cop 27)
and for Scotland to pay reparations to Panama for the Darien scheme.
Reparations remind me of an Old Testament theology that
I thought we had dispensed with. Why should I be punished because my ancestor
invented the spinning jenny and the steam engine? Why should I be punished
because my ancestors owned slaves? Some of my ancestors were no doubt also
slaves if you go back far enough.
It is true that the industrial revolution eventually caused
us to burn fossil fuels, drive cars and develop power stations that have caused
the world to warm, but any country demanding reparations must ask itself if it would
prefer to go back to the preindustrial age without planes, advanced medicine,
computers and telephones. If you condemn us for industrialisation, you cannot
very well continue to use what came about only because of industrialisation.
Lorna Slater’s solution to the problem of climate
change is to increase recycling. Soon every bottle or can that we buy containing
more than 50 millilitres will cost 20 pence more in Scotland. We will then have
to gather our bottles and cans and drive them somewhere to get our money back. But
each of the manufacturers of these bottles and cans will have to relabel them
just for us Scots. The cost will be passed on to the consumer. Alternatively,
some firms will decide that it isn’t worth it and stop selling in Scotland.
A firm outside Scotland that makes bottles and fills
them is not going to take back all of the bottles that Slater’s scheme gathers
in Scotland. So, these bottles are not going to be reused. They will either be
smashed and recycled like they are now or they will be put in landfill or they
will be sent to the third world. But what’s the point of charging me 20 pence do
something we do now anyway? Not least because it will involve vast numbers of
unnecessary car journeys to reclaim the deposits.
Deposits only make sense if the bottle will be reused
like milk bottles. But no one is going to reuse coke cans or bottles of wine
from France. The cost of sending them back would be prohibitive even if the
French wanted them.
I can see the point of trying to minimise the use of
fossil fuels, not least because we don’t want to be dependent on places like
Russia and Saudi Arabia, but we are not going to save the world by recycling,
because it is simply not cost effective. It is cheaper to make bottles and cans
from scratch rather than attempt to reuse them.
Extinction Rebellion, the Greens and the SNP are the
same in that all they do is disrupt our lives and make day to day life less
pleasant while doing nothing to address the solution to global warming.
Scotland already produces almost no greenhouse gasses. Even if we went back to driving
horses and carts it would make almost no contribution to climate change. The
idea that paying 20 pence more for a can of Coke will reduce average world
temperatures is preposterous.
The solution if there is one is technological and will
be arrived at neither by the SNP nor the Greens. The only way to persuade China,
India and developing countries that are desperate to industrialise still
further is to provide them with a form of energy that meets all of their needs
more cheaply than burning fossil fuels. Renewables have a part to play in this,
but the long-term solution is going to be either safe fission power or else
fusion power or something that none of us have dreamed of yet.
The people who discover these forms of power will not
be in Extinction Rebellion, nor will they be uneducated screaming Swedes shouting
“how dare you”, nor will they be Greens nor Scottish nationalists who despise
business and dream of socialism. They will be capitalists trying to make money
just like the capitalists who invented the steam engine and the spinning jenny.
You don’t solve any problems by making products more
expensive, e.g., cans of coke. The solution is to make them cheaper.
