The antics of the climate clique
The Energy Security and Net Zero select committee is currently holding an inquiry entitled “Supporting the energy transition”. It’s very much what you might expect – panel after panel of prominent members of the green blob, with not a dissenting voice heard, either among the witnesses or the panel members.
This is no surprise – most select committees are simply choreographed stageshows, carefully designed to maintain narratives and suppress inconvenient truths. Nevertheless, the current inquiry was interesting from a sociological perspective. Take the two panels the committee invited to give oral evidence back in September. Across the two hearings, they invited:
Angharad Hopkinson, a political campaigner from Greenpeace
Lorraine Whitmarsh, from the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations
Stephanie Draper, a climate campaigner
Roger Harrabin, ex-BBC Energy and Environment Analyst
Bob Ward, PR bod at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change
Rebecca Willis, ex-Green Alliance, and now an academic at Lancaster University.
It’s hard to argue that this isn’t a tightly closed clique. As an example, consider the fact that both Whitmarsh and Willis were key witnesses at the “UK Climate Assembly”, a body which a 2021 NZW report showed was put together to try to de-democratise the climate agenda. Remarkably, so was one of the select committee members, Polly Billington, the Labour MP for East Thanet and a former Spad to Ed Miliband.
As you’d expect, the inquiry agenda seemed to be not only about “supporting the energy transition” but also about silencing dissent. That impression is heightened by next week’s panel, which will hear from Ofcom, no doubt to discuss crushing “disinformation” (or as those outside the clique call it, “dissent”).
The sense of groupthink at play is almost tangible. For example, Chairman Bill Esterson asked, “How do those who want to promote the desperate need for action get their voices heard?” (before immediately contradicting himself by observing that Bob Ward was a frequent contributor to, for example, GB News). Ward’s response was somewhat tangential, but nevertheless interesting, saying that he felt it was wrong if “the GB News audience should only hear one side of the argument”.
Fair enough, but there were no such concerns about BBC output. As Roger Harrabin observed shortly afterwards, the corporation has long since silenced dissenting voices.
Fran Unsworth, who was then head of news, made a declaration with a rather odd phrase which was, “The referee has blown his whistle, and the game is over, and we no longer have to have an oppositional voice on climate change” but people still feel the need to push for it. It is a basic journalistic need to push back, “Here are some facts. Let us push back at them”.
The contrast between the views expressed about what was expected from the two outlets was remarkable, but prompted not a single comment from committee members. This is, as I have pointed out, a closed world, which never hears a dissenting view, let alone grappling with the knotty question of who is right.
Another example came from when some of the witnesses discussed the infamous “trick to hide the decline”, the occasion, revealed in the Climategate emails, when scientists decided to delete part of a tree-ring series that was diverging from the instrumental records, thus suggesting that it was not actually the proxy for temperature it purported to be.
The subject was raised by Billington, who characterised the deletion – in astonishing fashion – as follows:
In 2008 and 2009 in the run-up to Copenhagen negotiations a scientist was revealed to have used the word “trick”.
Harrabin’s take on the matter was perhaps even worse:
The scientists later explained what they meant by “trick”. It was a mathematical thing, “If you do this thing this way you get the sensible result”
The idea that deleting inconvenient data is “a mathematical thing” is absolutely shocking, and I have struggled to find an interpretation of Harrabin’s words that doesn’t lead to the conclusion that he is simply being dishonest.
One less appalling conclusion is that Harrabin’s eyes simply glaze over when presented with scientific data. His degree is in English literature, so we may be looking at someone who simply struggles with numbers. A similar explanation may hold for Billington, who has a BA in history and French. That said, it is hard to credit the idea that two such senior figures are genuinely so mathematically challenged.
Alternatively, they might simply be acting as enforcers in the culture war. As the late Roger Scruton warned, once language is detached from its primary function of describing reality, it becomes a vehicle for asserting political power. In that world, the role of the “intellectual” is not to test claims, but to defend the prevailing moral and political settlement. The behaviour on display in this inquiry fits that pattern uncomfortably well.
But perhaps the most plausible explanation is that Harrabin and Billington are victims of their own ideological bias, having spent their careers inside institutions where dissenting views are treated not as arguments to be engaged with, but as heresies to be excluded.
That, of course, is the case across most of our institutions. Everywhere you look – from universities to the academies to the mainstream media there has been a complete shutting out of dissenting voices and an absolute refusal to engage with counterarguments. That is why we are in the disastrous economic state we are.
The silver lining to this very dark cloud is that at least things are starting to change. In the aftermath of Ukraine and Venezuela, and the USA’s withdrawal from both the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the IPCC, it is clear that the world is moving on very quickly. Seen in this light, the select committee inquiry can be seen as the last hurrah of a dying movement. They will surely eventually be consigned to irrelevance along with the rest of the climate cliques who have taken us to the brink of disaster – the BBC, the green academics, and the eco-warrior pressure groups – and also the institutions that have aided and abetted them or simply kept silent in the hope of a quiet life – the universities, the academies and all the rest.
It's probably too late to save much of the economy, but we can at least console ourselves with the possibility that all of these monstrous groups might soon be cut off without a penny. The universities, the academies and the BBC will be well advised to take note.