The Guardian has been speculating whether the BBC’s committment to reporting climate change is lessening. And earlier in the week, as I noted here, the Daily Telegraph suggested that new BBC editorial guidelines would force more balanced coverage of the topic. I have news for them both. Nothing has changed, and if anything the climate alarmist fervour is getting worse. The evidence? Yesterday, a reporter called Tom Heap presented a programme on Radio 4 in the Costing the Earth greenie strand called “Can Lawyers Save the World?”. It is the most outstanding piece of partisan propaganda I have heard in 11 years of monitoring BBC output for a living. I urge you to listen to it, if you have the stomach to do so.
It was so astonishingly one-sided that it’s difficult to know where to begin. But the theme was that governments are not doing enough to save us from being poisoned by carbon, or from flooding, or from heat, so the fate of the world is now in the hands of wonderful environmental lawyers who are battling heroically to save us all. Seriously, folks.
Mr Heap treated all these greeedy, chancer nutcases with breathless reverence as one by one, they spelled out their strategy. His profiles included a legal warrior in New Orleans who wants money for his house that he claims was destroyed by hurricane Katrina, because that was unquestionably caused by climate change. This was followed by an outraged Inuit who wanted millions because the Alaskan coastline is being inundated by unquestionably rising sea levels (not “seal” levels, as I previously had!: h/t Roland Deschain). Next stop was Europe, where a hero legal-eagle was invoking the chilling EU Aaarhus ruling to ensure that every green activist who believes they are affected by climate change can sue whomever is held responsible.
Mr Heap followed with a UK woman who has blown £150,000 of her own money heroically fighting a court battle to stop a cement works being built because it plans to use nasty fossil fuels for power. The programme then took on an almost surreal air as environmental camapigners entered the frame. There was an interview with a woman from an organisation called Gaia, who wanted legal rights for trees, and an end to the Western tradition of law because it did not recognise that Mother Earth needed its own charter so that in future, nothing could be done that could be seen to cause harm to ecology. And finally, there was a British lawyer who is campaigning relentlessly to bring in a new international law called “eco-cide”, to stand alongside genocide in seriousness. Under it, anyone who transgresses against the environment will be put on trial in the Hague, or wherever, just like the Nazis. She stopped short of calling for the death penalty for offenders – but that was clearly on her mind.
In this 30 minutes of eco-buffonery, Mr Heap never once questioned any element of the claims about man-made climate change. It was an unmoderated, unsubtle, one-sided, preposterous pitch in favour of lawyers becoming all-powerful in suing, jailing, and generally nailing everyone and anyone who commits an eco-crime. By giving them such a platform, he clearly supported the idea that those affected by climate change should be awarded billions of pounds in compensation, and for lawyers to have instant powers to jack boot us all into nature worship. Under this regime, any burning of fossil fuel, any cutting down of trees, any human action that was deemed to interfere with nature would be punishable.
The so-called climate experts (all warmists, naturally) he called on to confirm that damage is being perpetrated, and to show how it might be calibrated, did concede that everything they did is based on modelling, and that precise measurements of the actual impact of climate change were therefore difficult. But Mr Heap cheerfully glossed over this little difficulty and told us that it would no doubt be overcome in the near future.
This was a full-scale pitch of the BBC eco-creed. They may not be sending an army to Cancun, like they did to Copenhagen, but inside the corridors of Portland Place, Television Centre, White City and Salford Quays, they are clearly planning how climate sceptics will be put on trial, and all industrial activity involving fossil fuel will be suspended and so much bound in red tape that it will become impossible. And one thing is for sure. There will be whole battallions of BBC staff at the eco-cide show trials.