It should be mentioned more often than it is that the guy who wants the rest of us to refrigerate our homes with ‘heat’ pumps, or half-fill the kettle – Ed Miliband – has two kitchens in his own house, presumably in case he loses one. It’s a relevant point, isn’t it, that the people in charge of environmental policy get to do so with such fashionable North London hypocrisy?
The immiserating effects of the Government’s Net Zero obsession are well documented. Additionally, in fact worse, climate alarmism is generating more and more excuses for state incursions into what used to be the private space, orchestrated by people financially and culturally insulated from the whole madness.
It shouldn’t be like this. The end-of-rainbow quest for renewable energy is unnecessary. We have what we need right under our feet. To import it anyway, via supply chains which amplify the end-use cost, is frankly ridiculous.
It is hard to think of an analogy which does justice to the combination of incompetence and malice driving this wretchedness. The closest I can get is to suggest that Miliband has turned the UK into a thief who robs £10 to buy £5 even though he knows, along with the rest of us, that he has a crumpled wad of £20 notes in his back pocket.
The Government has swallowed a secular “nature religion” in which the planet exists for us in two arguably incompatible ways – we’re supposed to worship it while we experiment on it. It is perverse eschatology, a ghastly modern paganism.
Such wisdom as there is in the environmentalist cause will not survive the fetishistic attentions of the Net Zero maniacs, many of whom seem to be imposing their mid-life crises on the rest of us.
In Green Philosophy, Roger Scruton applies a general criticism of utilitarian ethics against its contemporary iteration as Leftist environmental activism. Utilitarianism makes the avoidance of harm central to morality but is never persuasive about what ‘harm’ actually is. It has nothing to say about human moral psychology.
The utilitarian mind lives in the present, is uninterested in the past and gets confused when thinking about the future. Hence the tendency of lanyard environmentalism to announce – correctly – that, for the sake of future generations, we have duties of care to the planet, without being able to articulate the nature of those obligations and, therefore, how they are to be translated into actual realistic – which is to say affordable – policy.
Scruton wrote that book as part of his attempt to reclaim environmentalism from the sharp-elbowed activists of the Left, who have seized and repurposed it to their own ends. Like transgenderism, Hamas fanboyism and anti-racism, it has become another fungible strand in a general, ubiquitous ideology of grievance.
The point of conservatism is to conserve. The contemporary green activist is like the religious convert who insists on evicting the steadfast regular attendees from the front pews so that he can take notes on how to modernise the liturgy. His intention is not conservation so much as revolution.
Green politics should be conservative politics because the traditional language of conservatism is best suited to explain our relationship to the planet and the duties to those yet-to-be-born which arise from it. Edmund Burke put it like this:
The purpose of politics… is not to rearrange society in the interests of some overarching vision or ideal, such as equality, liberty or fraternity. It is to maintain a vigilant resistance to the entropic forces that erode our social and ecological inheritance. The goal is to pass on to future generations, and if possible to enhance, the order and equilibrium of which we are the temporary trustees.
The language of faithful, historical conservatism makes use of these concepts – stewardship, inheritance, intergenerational obligation – and it is from these that a new liturgy of ‘Right-wing’ environmentalism is begging to be formed. Were it to take up this work, the Conservative Party might remind itself of its younger and wiser self. It might even survive.
All this brings us (though you might not have realised it) to the issue of farming, and the current war against agricultural exceptionalism. If conservatism is to be revived then this will not happen in Davos, Westminster or even in the ARC conferences currently favoured by the Celebrity Right. It will happen in Wiltshire, Kent and Lancashire. It will happen when conservative thinkers follow Scruton’s example and become working farmers.
The tradition and practices of farming are examples of active environmentalism because they encourage the “vigilant resistance” Burke recommends. The farmer knows that the climate speaks to the soil, and he is therefore well-placed to hear what it has to say.
When you are alert to the demands of seasonality you develop a different sense of time, one in which the idea that we have obligations of an intergenerational sort seems both obvious and urgent.
The current climate activism is unattractive because for its high priests it is the activism, not the climate, that is the main point. If starting a farm is too big an ask, then conservatives should at least take time to reacquaint themselves with their intellectual legacy. Like the prodigal son, the environmental cause fell into bad company. Conservatives must get ready to welcome it back home.
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