Downside of the Green movement

This is an extract from an article by Paul Johnson in The Spectator 20th August 2008.


It is an indictment of our society that, despite huge scientific advances in the last century, particularly in the production of food, millions of people, perhaps hundreds of millions, do not get enough to eat. The principal culprit is the Green movement, in its many species or fanaticisms. The Prince of Wales, who might be described as the most prominent Green man, has recently drawn attention to the destructive power of his ideology by attacking the growing of genetically modified crops, perhaps the largest step forward ever taken by mankind to reduce the cost of basic foodstuffs, and to increase their production and worldwide availability. I imagine if the Greens had lived in the 18th century they would have attacked the innovators who launched the agricultural revolution in England, which preceded the industrial one later in the century, and prevented mass starvation and chronic famine when the population rose sharply at the same time.
I can just see Green polemicists, for whom their blind faith is a substitute for genuine religion, going for Jethro Tull, author of Horse-Hoeing Husbandry, Thomas Coke and his sheep-shearings, Andrew Meikle, who introduced the threshing machine, Salmon of Woburn and his hay-tossing, and the clay drainage pipes of Thomas Scruggy (what splendid names they had in those days). It is the Greens, with their successful opposition to nuclear power plants in the 1960s, who are responsible for the devastating rise in the cost of fuel, and the Greens again, by bullying governments into giving subsidies for biofuels (the most inefficient way of producing power ever conceived), are responsible for the present food shortage. The rise in fuel and food prices has hit the very poorest groups all over the world. Undernourishment and starvation have followed. If the Greens get their way on their fantasy of man-made global warming, which will mean wrecking the most efficient industrial economies, then the consequences for the poor will be even more horrific. The Green road leads directly to a Malthusian catastrophe. On 10 August this year I witnessed a hailstorm in West Somerset. What price global warming? Actually, hail in August is a not uncommon English event. In 1816, ‘the year without a summer’, Byron was staying on Lake Geneva with, among others, the 18-year-old Mary Shelley. The torrential rain they witnessed, and the electric storm raging over the Alps across the lake, gave her the idea for her novel Frankenstein, the man-made monster galvanised into life by lightning. Byron used to say: ‘An English summer begins on 31 July and ends on 1 August.’ He added: ‘This year the Swiss have gone even further, and eliminated summer altogether.’