I admire young Greta’s idealism — but why DO our fawning politicians lose all reason over climate change?

When MPs recently discussed climate change in Parliament, barely a dozen of them bothered to turn up to talk about what is considered one of the greatest issues of our time.

But when Greta Thunberg, the 16-yearold Swedish climate change activist, showed up in Westminster on Tuesday, several dozen MPs packed into a room to hear her, and government officials were also present.

earlier, an empty chair was left for Theresa May (otherwise occupied at a Cabinet meeting) as Jeremy Corbyn, Lib Dem leader Vince Cable and Green Party leader Caroline Lucas found time in their busy schedules for a meeting with Ms Thunberg.

Caroline Lucas, one of the organisers of the visit, explained that her young charge was not willing to have a stand-in for Mrs May at the pow-wow. ‘Greta has been very clear that she only wants party leaders,’ said Ms Lucas.

Wow! It takes a lot of chutzpah for a teenager to decline to meet a mere representative of the Prime Minister — for example, David Lidington, often described as her de facto deputy.

how does this schoolgirl manage to fill a large room with MPs, or summon national leaders? Last week she had a private audience with the Pope in Rome, and addressed the Italian Senate, rebuking it for its inaction on climate change.

Part of the answer is that she is a remarkable person with a disturbing message which, as she put it on Radio 4’s Today Programme on Tuesday, is that the world faces an ‘existential crisis’ because of climate change.

her insistence that politicians have lied about the issue, or been shamefully inactive, has resonated with millions of young people in europe and beyond, some of whom have staged ‘school strikes’.

A friend of mine who could hardly be described as a climate change zealot put it well when he said that Greta Thunberg is ‘a fresh young voice asking questions which politicians have not answered’.

Doubtless some of the politicians and public figures who flock to meet her share many of her concerns. But a lot are surely also keenly aware of the power she wields on behalf of the young, with whom they don’t want to appear out of step.

PERHAPS

such inclinations explain the response of Michael Gove after meeting Ms Thunberg on Tuesday. The environment Secretary spoke in confessional mode of his sense of ‘guilt’ that his generation had ‘ not done nearly enough to deal with the problem of climate change’, and promised tougher action.

now I have no wish to criticise a brave and resourceful campaigner whose heart is in the right place. She is principled, too, and, when evangelising throughout europe, travels by train to minimise her carbon footprint.

Unlike, it must be said, the actress emma Thompson, who last week flew 5,400 miles from Los Angeles to join the protests organised by extinction Rebellion that virtually brought Central London to a halt. Ms Thompson’s mission of mercy is estimated to have created a three-tonne carbon footprint.

But well-meaning though Greta Thunberg undoubtedly is, she is mistaken on two

important points. It is a great shame that none of the politicians who greeted her appearance in the Commons with a roar of applause has had the gumption — or courage? — to say so. emotion is triumphing over reason.

In the first place, the Swedish activist is hardly being fair when she describes this country’s achievements in reducing carbon emissions as ‘beyond absurd’.

Britain has arguably done more than any other country. According to official figures — which Ms Thunberg disputes without offering much rationale — we have delivered a 44 per cent reduction in our carbon emissions on 1990 levels.

The UK is the first developed country to have made an undertaking to cut its emissions by 2050 by 80 per cent of what they were 60 years earlier.

Whereas hundreds of coalfired power stations are being built in China, and a few are sprouting up even in Germany, they are due to be phased out in this country by 2025.

The process has been so helter- skelter that cock-ups have occurred. Drax in north Yorkshire ( which supplies energy to four million homes) now burns wood rather than coal. Unfortunately, some of this wood comes from felling virgin hardwood forests in Virginia.

The truth is that the UK produces a minuscule amount of the world’s carbon emissions, and one which is falling relatively quickly, not least with the help of hard-pressed consumers, whose energy bills contain substantial ‘green taxes’.

Meanwhile, China — among other big economies, including the United States — is doing far less to address its enormous emissions. Why doesn’t Ms Thunberg go to Beijing to wag a reproving finger at those hatchet- faced mandarins who are throwing up new power stations?

This question was put to her by nick Robinson on Tuesday’s Today Programme, and she didn’t have a better answer than it is a long way to travel by train, and she hasn’t been invited. I wonder why.

GRETA

THUNBERG was unfair, too, to claim Britain has a ‘ mind- blowing historical carbon debt’ because of its industrial emissions in the 200 years since the Industrial Revolution. But that happened when no one realised the possible damage. What can be done about it now — unless she wants our economy closed down?

And that brings me to my second objection. Although she is vague in making specific proposals — instead, exhorting us to ‘listen to the scientists’, not, I suggest, always a sensible policy in life — what Ms Thunberg said indicated a clear aversion to further economic development.

She is against fracking, more exploration in the north Sea and expanding airports (bang goes that third runway at heathrow). She says she supports the antics of the extinction Rebellion protesters. her policies, like theirs, would inevitably lead to job losses and a diminution of wealth.

In the grown-up world, no

government, not even a semi- deranged Corbynista one, could take the kind of risks with people’s lives that the ill- considered and absolutist ideas promulgated by often privileged protesters, who succeeded in fouling up London, would entail.

The Government’s quite radical commitment to bring down levels of carbon emission has to be balanced against the economic needs of ordinary people, and this can only be achieved by commonsensical policies that enjoy widespread consent.

In short, the world is far more complex than the extinction Rebellion mob and the well- intentioned, though naïve, Ms Thunberg appear to believe. If carbon emissions were cut as rapidly as they propose, poverty and widespread distress would ensue.

The fault is not really Greta Thunberg’s. She is young, after all, and the young are entitled to be idealistic, and to point out the errors of their elders. nor is she an expert on climate change, and she’s certainly no kind of economist.

I don’t blame her. The guilty parties are the politicians who fawn on her, and who hang on her every word uncritically though perhaps insincerely, without asking the obvious questions or entering sensible reservations.

In no other area of political activity than climate change would the pronouncements of a 16- year- old be accepted without demur. It’s simply extraordinary that all good sense should be jettisoned on such an important issue.