From The Daily Sceptic

By Paul Homewood

The wildfires in Europe have prompted Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley to claim that the “angry Online Right” needs to accept Net Zero. But all his ‘facts’ are wrong, says Paul Homewood.

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.