According to the Telegraph’s Tim Stanley:
The Online Right is going wrong, eschewing compassion or charm, talking itself into corners of angry irrelevance. The evidence is stacking up – we only have to look out of our windows.
Take climate change. This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.
As with so many of his ilk, Stanley confuses weather with climate. Take the latest fires in France.
Yes, the wildfires are running above average this summer in Europe, but there have been other years as bad and worse. But much more importantly, the data since 1980 show that wildfires around the Mediterranean have not been getting worse:
Stanley cannot even get his facts right, claiming that in past times France endured roughly 15 fires each year. The true figure is around 100.
Stanley then claims that Europe is thought to have lost around 10 million tons of forecast grain production last month. Annual output is around 500 million tonnes on average, making that loss just 2%. The historical record shows that annual output regularly rises and falls by much bigger amounts than this.
He then quotes a British farmer:
“Last year it was really dry,” a farmer from Merseyside told the BBC: “2024 was really wet. There’s no clear pattern other than extremes. … We might as well not bother growing things and leave the farms empty.”
It is, of course, called weather!
Last year was a long way from being the driest on record – there have been 26 drier summers in England. Nor was the previous summer particularly wet.
It is a fact that, when it comes to rainfall in England, “extremes” are the norm! But there are no trends towards either wetter or drier summers.
He dismisses the Right’s criticism of Net Zero that the UK cannot make a jot of difference as we only produce 1% of the world’s CO2 by saying we should think about the Third World. According to Stanley:
In reality, if anything, poor countries are more worried about climate change than we are – for the simple, horrible reason that they are more vulnerable to its effects.
Every year, an average of 110,000 people are displaced by natural catastrophe in Bangladesh alone. This is a country where more than half the population works in farming, yet one-third of its agricultural GDP is expected to vanish by 2050.
Bangladesh has always been prone to natural disasters. But this is where his whole argument falls flat on its face.
Far from the picture he paints, Bangladesh’s agricultural sector is thriving. Cereal production, which includes rice, hit new highs in 2023 and 2024 and has doubled since the 1990s. Agricultural GDP has tripled in that time as well.
A half of the country’s population was in extreme poverty in the 1980s, according to the World Bank. That proportion is now just 5%. GDP per capita is four times higher than it was just 30 years ago.
Life expectancy is much higher and child mortality has plummeted. By all measures, the people of Bangladesh are unimaginably better off than they were just a generation ago.
The same, of course, applies to pretty much the whole of the developing world, with the exception of war-torn countries such as Sudan and Somalia.
None of this would have happened without fossil fuels.
Without fertilisers and mechanisation, all made possible by the fossil fuels he demonises, millions of Bangladeshis would literally starve to death.
Is that what Tim Stanley wants? What right does the West have to dictate to the Third World how its people must live their lives?
He claims that rolling out renewables in the UK will bring lower prices and energy security. I don’t know what planet he is on, but the current push to Net Zero is having the very opposite effect.
Right-wingers have always been pragmatic types. If renewable energy really offered all these benefits, the market would automatically embrace them. They would not need the unaffordable subsidies, carbon taxes and mandates we have now, which are wrecking the economy and leaving us perilously exposed to blackouts.
Renewable energy is fine under the right circumstances. Solar panels in the Gobi Desert, for instance, or hydro power in Norway. But here in the UK, we only really have wind power – and we cannot rely on it when the wind stops blowing for weeks on end in winter.
Until somebody comes up with a better idea, we will still need fossil fuels, whether Tim Stanley likes it or not.
Discussion
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Tim Stanley is a Guardian journalist working for the Telegraph. They should quietly oust him. He also called Restore Britain’s young policy wonks ‘nazis’. The man (is he?) is a cuckoo in the right thinking nest. He is, like so many leftists totally wrong.
He is also not very bright: weather is not climate you scientifically illiterate fool.
“… we just have to look out of our windows…” – something I hear from every other dimwit in the street, at the till in Morrisons, at the bus stop… If ‘looking out of the window’ is the way Tim Stanley assesses the state of the world, I certainly won’t be reading his columns any time soon. What a pillock.
Stanley’s a good, humorous writer.
I assumed this column was an attempt at humour … which failed.
I am in Greece at present. Taxi driver was saying, this weather is every 50 years, this happen s
I then recalled 1976 .
Tim Stanley is irritating he could have been made by Waitrose he is so woke
Tim Stanley has no science training. He has been a journalist from university to the present day.
For journalists, the timescale of interest is the news cycle, so it is little wonder that Tim Stanley’s source of information on human induced climate change is what he can see out of his window.
Dear Paul Homewood – can you get onto the Daily T podcast with Tim and Camilla and introduce him to his misconceptions?
With all due respect to the lad, I doubt if we should unilaterally go back to the middle ages, just because he shat it over a few weeks of hot weather in the summer. We are not ‘setting an example for the world’, well not the right one at any rate.
I am reminded of Carl Sagans quote about living in a world more reliant on science and technology than ever, but that we are fundamentally ignorant of science and technology.
Satellite data shows a declining trend in the area burnt by wildfires globally, down from almost 2.5% of land in 2003 to 1.5% last year. Historical reconstructions estimate that almost 4% of land burnt each year in the 1,900s. Wildfires will be like temperature, rainfall and other natural phenomena, regionally they’ll be large variations from year to year so climate alarmists will always have extremes they can cherry pick in order to try and push their agenda.
To be fair this summer France has experienced hot weather for the first time since last summer.
Who’s starting fire, arsonists or the big match in the sky?
In France and other regions with hot Summers like Spain and Portugal, it was usual for farmers or land owners to carry out controlled burns each year to prevent build up of vegetation that would provide fuel for wildfires, and also to provide fire- breaks. In fact this used to happen in certain parts of the UK too.
Wet Winters increase plant growth, and this provides more to burn in subsequent hot Summers when the vegetation dries out.
But environmentalism says habitat must not be destroyed and more “wilding” is needed to create yet more. This provides more dense plant growth to fuel wildfires howsoever caused.
The natural events which cause wildfires are electric storms and lightening strikes.
Where we work, the instruction is to leave the ‘brash’ where it falls as we fell… it leaves a tangled mess of branches and leaves which make it difficult to navigate safely, and it provides perfect tinder to fuel fires.
Forestry workers tend to hate it, from both points of view, but the environmentalists and the invertebrates love it, it seems.
People also miss the role that grass plays in allowing fires to spread. It looks less harmful than a pile of dry brash but it can allow a fire to spread across a ride assumed to act as a firebreak.
Where I used to live, heath fires were a common occurrence. Mostly, they seemed to be started by discarded cigarettes or broken bottles… I don’t recall ever hearing that they had been started deliberately back then.
The French authorities are complaining about arson – no mention of that here.
More intelligent DT readers are blaming forest managemnet failures over past years (decades?)
Yes indeed. A couple of years ago driving into Argostoli on Kefalonia the dead branches piled up on the ground amongst the pine trees seemed almost like a deliberate attempt to invite disaster.
Private residents in parts of Argentina were reporting forest fires were down to arson last year. Again no reporting of this in the MSM
He works for the Telegraph but is a raging, smug, lefty.
Why “but”? That seems to suit the majority of the DT. Only Allister Heath and a couple of journos meet the standard of objective quality journalism.
Poor Tim, he writes such good parliamentary sketches but his think pieces are useless. This one was the worst yet! (As about 8000 DT readers told him)
Whatever it is called, it would be wise to invest in measures that would mitigate the effect of severe events that are natural weather events. Such as the odd heatwave,lack of rain, or too much rain at the “wrong” time of year etc. That would include farming, forestry, water management etc. However, in lots of cases, money says no. Look at the state Thames Water is in, e.g. Lots of ideas on the shelf, like a new reservoir, and a mega pipeline to transfer from the Severn to the Thames via Sapperton tunnel etc, but no finance for them (yet).
These upgrades are usually needed to serve the ever increasing population. That alone has reduced the level of redundancy in all the infrastructure services. There is no use looking to the new comers to fund this additional capacity as they usually arrive with no money or other assets, no relevant skills and often minimal education. Very many never work.
The idea that unlimited immigration is good for the country has long since been seen as hollow but the MSM (DT included) stay silent.
I invite you to consider – research it if you must – “cost/benefit analysis”. Does the benefit of doing X justify the cost of doing it?
“… it would be wise to invest in measures that would mitigate the effect of severe events that are natural weather events. Such as the odd heatwave,lack of rain, or too much rain at the “wrong” time of year etc“
Wise, or stupid? Let’s run a test.
If you have a car do you have a set of snow tyres and replace your normal ones each year as Winter approaches to “mitigate the effect” of the “odd” heavy snowfall and conditions.
Would you be wise to buy a set of snow tyres and swap them at the start of each Winter, just in case?
But Germans, Austrians, and people in some areas of North America do, because the events are not “odd” they are routine and predictable.
I live in Mid-Wales, off the beaten track so, yes, I fit snow tyres every winter.
To the casual observer, ie. me, the main problem that Thames Water seems to have is that those who bought it had no intention of running it as a water company.
Rather, they stripped its assets and loaded it with debt whilst, of course, giving themselves huge bonuses…
Quite what OfWat were doing while all this was going on, is a mystery.
If they’re not actually complicit, they must be hugely incompetent, it’s hard not to conclude, when a gatekeeper fails quite so comprehensively, miserably to uphold the standards, that money or favours might have been exchanged to ensure they looked the other way.
In effect you are correct. Thames Water was a money-making opportunity.
It was bought by a private equity fund. These attract investors by promising fast, significant returns on investments. They look for asset rich companies in poor financial state, unable to attract investors.
Once they acquire the enterprise they borrow money using the assets as collateral. Some of this money they use to pay dividends, but they do also spend on improving the company operations.
Thames Water, for example, built that huge ring-main under London – very costly.
However in order to continue to pay the promised dividends, more money is borrowed, the debt piles up, revenues then have to service an increasing debt load, and fund development/maintenance of the infrastructure.
Ofwat price capping due the restricts revenues, having to comply with the tangle of red-tape inherited from the EU takes up money that otherwise could be used to build infrastructure.
But you ask what was Ofwat doing? Ofwat is a bunch of bureaucrats with no business experience or any experience outside bureaucracy. And of course they report to that other bunch of economic illiterates, the politicians.
As a result they did not properly vet… Read more »
Actually the purchase of Thames Water by the Germans of RWE in 2001 is where the mistake was made under the Blair government when so much damage was done to this country. At this point you and I were no longer able to own a stake in the company as it was de-listed. RWE flogged it to Macquarie in 2006 and then the current multi-national owners took over in 2017. Less than 30% is UK owned – pension schemes for BT and university staff. Canada, China, UAE, Australia and the Netherlands own the rest.
An excellent, succinct summary of this unholy mess (and many other likewise).
When Private Equity funds started playing around with the Isle of Wight ferry service they ended up with a company owing almost £450M but having annual revenues of only around £60M. Needless to say, it went spectacularly bust.
The government didn’t lift a finger to protect the lifeline service – no votes worth having in the IoW…
Spot on.
Thames Water has the one of the highest leakage rates, one of the highest pollution rates, the absolute highest serious pollution rate and an EPA score of 1, the worst possible rating. The projected pipeline is costed at just over £4 billion, according to Thames Water. Since privatisation it has paid out over £10 billion (inflation adjusted at 2023 rates) in dividends.
One can often detect truths from little things and not the main argument. Paul casually makes everyone who recognises the advantages of resource allocation and prices through the market mechanism as “right wing”.
That happened when the Tories abandoned their last vestiges of market economics at the beginning of their infamous 14 years. Their adoption of Blairite socialism was a quiet but total submission to the left. They are still there.
Like so many journalists at the DT Stanley has been with the fairies for a long time. Few journalists there are worth reading. On the Daily T it is notable that Stanley puts the knife into “Farage” at every opportunity.
He is generally on the Daily T podcast with Camilla Tominey. Of the two he frequently seems to have markedly less grip on daily reality.
Yes Tomminey is an old fashioned feminist man hater in disguise.
Absolutely. I stopped subscribing years ago and don’t regret it.
I find it worth under £30 just for the laughs from all the unrepentent haters who infest the comment columns, who seem to wish everybody they disagree with unpleasant deaths.
Agreed. £30 for an hour or so of entertainment every day is worth it. I pay for the Comments, not the “news.”
I told them I was going to leave and they offered me a subscription of £69 for a year (down from £300+) so a win, I think.
It provides the least sick-making view of what the normie press is saying about things. The other leftist, communiat press is garbage.
He’s as dripping wet at Rory Stewart. But he sometimes writes some very amusing columns.
I read his article ad read a firporion of the readers’ comments that followed. The vast majority ridiculed his arguments cting many of the reasons in this article. There is a similar article in today’s Telegraph by Ambose Evans Pritchard. Readers again disagree with him.