“I think supporting new oil and gas licences in the North Sea is an extremist position”, explained the New Statesman‘s “Executive Editor (Digital)” Oli Dugmore in a provocative social media clip. And here we are indeed provoked. Typically, we should ignore such tantrums. But the claim and its supporting argument are irresistibly illuminating of a section of the British Left, whose worldview is best explained as a developmental disorder. Founded by socialist intellectuals Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and its pages filled by such lights as George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes and Christopher Hitchens, the progressive intellectual’s weekly now both eschews thought and rouses the lowest possible denominator to its causes. But perhaps its current staff have confused their own organ’s decline with the degeneration of the atmosphere.
Dugmore’s account of his position is, you will not be surprised to discover, not grounded in a deep understanding of the subject. It is, in its entirety, something that resembles an Extinction Rebellion media training crib sheet. It begins as follows:
The International Energy Agency has been really clear that new oil and gas extraction and consumption is not compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees. 1.5 degrees is the limit we agreed at the Paris climate accords, and the reason for that is because past 1.5 degrees, what happens? It’s the acidification of our oceans, so that’s the collapse of marine ecosystems, the fish that we eat and rely on
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to the Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
So an ignorant leftie twat thinks I am an ‘extremist’ – like I care because the alternative would be to be as thick as he is.
I note the coincidental anagram of the editor’s name but actually in yesterday’s The Times there was a piece about the growth of coral, reefs, and reading between the lines I detected a glimpse of doubt emerging on the official climate change narrative. That said, I wrote a polite rebuttal of a piece in our local online paper and had my head bitten off by a zealot. There’s a long way to go.
I suppose Norway is full of extremists then.
Rich ones – with functioning public services.
I don’t disagree with a word of what Ben says, except for the measure of success being the income of the publication. Firstly, it doesn’t allow for those consuming online (if there is a free option for the magazine) nor for secondary consumption, where one copy is purchased but many read it. I would also not condemn the magazine for having investors with deep pockets, because without that we would not still have GBnews, due to the ongoing advertising boycott. I would rather that such ridiculous articles are available for all to read and mock with others able to counter the argument. It is for this reason I continue to read the Daily Mirror to see what others are saying but also to enjoy the comments sections which are nearly always totally opposed to the message in the article. We need to avoid being consumers in echo chambers and ensure we know what they are thinking.
I notice Oki dugmore is sn anagram of dug more oil!
Oli Dugmore or “dug more oil”?
Sorry, couldn’t resist…
Everything around him and on him depends total on hydrocarbons! Clothes, microphone, desk ,shelves… etc etc… what a dumb brained Dick ed!
No seems to get the fact that without fossil fuels we are in the Middle Ages going to work on a horse and dying young of back breaking labour and preventable disease.
What Dugmore says is of such low quality that I do wonder whether it might indeed have been better to ignore him. The word ‘extremist’ is one of a number of words and phrases that are just insults, others being populist, hard right, and fascist. When used it is almost always by someone who doesn’t want to or can’t be bothered to reason against the view the person disagrees with. Here Dugmore supports his use of ‘extremist’ simply by spouting a series of alarmist cliches This is feeble when even a man as shallow as Burnham acknowledges that the UK will be using fossil fuels for decades to come and that the question is where we get them from
Never argue with fools. They’ll drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.
The great service that the “climate emergency” provides to the authoritarian Left is that it’s a social-control project which gives ideological reinforcement to the tyranny that lies at the heart of the Left (the madleft, as I call it). This tyranny is rooted in the ideas that the “lower orders” (us) don’t really know what’s good for them, and that there exists in the world a group of people who are so excellent, knowledgeable and morally superior that they have a right to micro-manage everyone else’s lives. And this is why the denizens of the madleft are so welcoming of authoritarian and anti-democratic social-control projects like the fake climate emergency.
Yet we are so collectively dumb that we keep voting for these eco colonialist parasites.
85% of the worlds energy comes from fossil fuels. So this silly leftist publication absurdly thinks that 85% of the worlds energy use is EXTREMIST. Have you ever heard such ideologically motivated DRIVEL—–We are self flagellating our way to energy poverty with the highest electricity prices in the world and the destruction of our Industrial Base and it is the phoney planet savers that are the EXTREMISTS forcing low energy density wind and sun on us.
Is it going to take the power to go off during a big football match or the silly Saturday Night Dancing Show for people to wake up to the fact they are being manipulated, brainwashed and played by the REAL EXTREMISTS—Western Governments and the bought and paid for Corporate Media.
If Dugmore actually listened to Kathryn Porter speaking on the lunacy of Net Zero, I think his head would explode.