The Eco Loons Are Crazy. But They're Winning.

This morning I had the dubious pleasure of appearing on Good Morning Britain alongside a spokeswoman for Insulate Britain. You can watch the full (and totally insane) discussion here. Alternatively, if you prefer to avoid a cringe-induced back spasm just watch a few seconds with the sound off - the effect will be the same. You cannot possibly come away from it believing that anyone should take these people seriously.

I have no wish to make this personal and the lady in question is perfectly nice and well-intentioned. She is not responsible for being given the opportunity to look mad on national television because TV producers at left and right wing media channels know full well how she will come across and put her on anyway. My issue is not with her.

You did not actually see the most worrying part of the interview - the camera was not on it:

Having spent over 10 minutes attempting to extract a single straight answer from this woman, Ed Balls and Susanna Reid became sufficiently discouraged to allow me to ask a question of my own. By this point I was bored enough to want to ask one and so I invited her to tell the British public what percentage of global carbon emissions Britain is responsible for. Her response was to avoid answering.

I explained that it is 2% and that getting this down to 0% would cost at least £1.5 trillion according to Government estimates and, as we all know, Government estimates of massive public infrastructure projects are always accurate and never end up costing several times more than budgeted.

So, if we spent several trillion pounds to reduce our share of global emissions to zero, how much would that reduce global temperatures, I asked? Now, of course, the other guest did not answer the question. I did not expect her to. They don’t know and they don’t care. The “something must be done” lunatics do not recognise trade-offs. In the words of a good friend, they are “trade off denialists”.

Predictably, her response to my question was to start blabbering on about the need for us to show leadership, as if President Xi, Prime Minister Modi and President Putin are sitting around waiting to see whether Britain insulates a couple of council houses before building another coal-fired power station.

(As I explained in my Oxford Speech, they’re trying to keep their people alive. Average life expectancy in India post-partition in 1947 was 32 years. That is not a typo. People in India lived to 32 on average within living memory. Today, average life expectancy in India is over 70. And this, I’m sorry to say, was achieved by burning fossil fuels. They’ll continue burning them until there’s a cheaper alternative. So will all the other poor people around the world.)

But it was not her answer that was interesting. It was the reaction of the two hosts that you did not see on TV.