If broadcasters fail to challenge the hysterical claims of the eco-zealots, they might as well join them on the M25

We are all, I’m sure, grateful to the tiny organisation known as Just Stop Oil for suspending their disruption of the M25. above all, it will come as a relief to those using London’s orbital motorway for getting to the work that feeds their families, and to the essential services for whom it is a vital speedy route to hospitals.

I am in neither of those categories. But I am still relieved that (at least until their next stunt) I won’t have to see television news presenters treating the occasionally hysterical young demonstrators as if they were unchallengeable experts on the risks of climate change.

Perhaps the only one who showed any exasperation, last week, was the Sky News presenter Mark austin, when he pleaded with one Indigo rumbelow to ‘please stop shouting at me’. She was, too. Though in his position, I would have been more discomfited by the wide staring eyes of the fanatic, which she also displayed.

Throughout the interview, the experienced presenter kept asking the activist whether she thought the nature of the Just Stop Oil protests was damaging the group’s message. But he never questioned any of her assertions.

Bizarre

So when rumbelow declared that the Government’s decision to license more drilling in the North Sea (mostly for gas) ‘will kill millions of people’, his response was: ‘Yes, but what about your tactics?’

‘Yes, but …’? How about: No, the British Government will not kill ‘millions of people’ as a result of such prospecting. It might, however, lead to fewer old people freezing in their homes.

But this is all about ‘the children’. Or, as rumbelow put it to austin: ‘Do you love your children more than you love fossil fuels?’ This was followed by the even more bizarre question: ‘ Would you like to destroy much of life on earth, including everything you know and love?’

It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if austin had responded: ‘Indigo, please tell me where the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change actually says that life on earth will be destroyed by global warming?’

Because the IPCC has never claimed that, or anything remotely like it. Nor does it say ‘we are going to plummet towards total destruction’, as his interviewee exclaimed, again without contradiction.

Similarly, the IPCC does not claim that ‘all our liberties are at risk’ because of global warming. But that’s what rumbelow — yet again not challenged — told the viewers of the Sky News Hour.

a similar encounter took place on Newsnight between the normally razorsharp Victoria Derbyshire and another young Just Stop Oil demonstrator, Phoebe Plummer. This student had gained the desired attention a few weeks ago when she threw a can of Heinz tomato soup at Van Gogh’s painting Sunflowers in the National Gallery: a terrible waste of perfectly decent soup.

Ms Plummer’s line was to take the Government’s allegedly inadequate response to climate change as a personal affront, saying it was ‘an act of betrayal against me’ and that ‘civil resistance is the only chance to ensure I have a future’. and she went on to say that ‘the renewable future is not happening in policy . . . which is murderous’.

If Ms Plummer were one of Derbyshire’s usual guests, I would have expected the presenter to say something like: ‘What are you talking about? This country has invested countless billions in wind power and has all but eliminated coal from the energy supply mix.

‘Our CO2 emissions, per capita, are the lowest level since the 1850s. What about China, which is increasing its coal production, and now burns more of the stuff than all the other countries in the world put together?’

Instead, after Newsnight’s guest had finished her tirade about how the British Government had destroyed her future and been engaged in deliberate mass killing (she presumably sees herself as one of those due to be ‘murdered’), Derbyshire just said, in the deeply respectful tone usually accorded by interviewers to victims of real crimes: ‘Phoebe Plummer, thank you so much.’

Decline

It is certainly true that climate change is causing more deaths from higher temperatures — though that increase has been greatly outweighed by the size of the decline in deaths from cold weather.

and because mankind has become more technologically resilient, the number of deaths from storms, floods, droughts, wildfires and extreme temperatures has fallen by 96 per cent over the past century — a figure all the more remarkable when you consider the tremendous increase in the population over that period.

and this trend applies to poorer countries as well as richer ones: to Bangladesh as much as to the Netherlands (much of which lies below sea level).

But these points are rarely made. Instead, the interviewers of Phoebe and Indigo barely even defended their own journalism when their guests told them that they weren’t doing their job in communicating ‘the climate catastrophe’. amazing cheek, when you consider that Sky has a daily programme devoted to climate change.

If these experienced interviewers really do have no counter to offer when their young guests claim that the policies of this country (which produces not much more than one per cent of the world’s CO2 emissions) are ‘genocidal’, then indeed they, too, should join those attempting to bring the M25 to a halt.

Because if Phoebe and Indigo were right, then their tactics would be justified. Which means that if television interviewers wish to question those tactics, they must also question the claims on which that ‘civil resistance’ is based.

But they are too scared of being accused of ‘climate denial’, or possibly just too illinformed, to do that.

and the Just Stop Oil crowd have only been encouraged by almost all leading politicians, who, as a class, have never dared issue a word of criticism of Greta Thunberg, the teenage Swede who declared that by 2030 the world would face ‘the end of civilisation as we know it’.

It comes from the very top: Boris Johnson, during the COP26 conference in Glasgow last year, addressing young people in general, declared: ‘Your future is being stolen.’ really? Is that what he tells his own children?

Robust

When Thunberg made that claim in 2019, we experienced the first of the extinction rebellion demonstrations in London. The co-founder of Xr is roger Hallam, a sort of ecological Pied Piper of Hamelin for these troubled young people, and who told the Sunday Times: ‘We’re all going to be dead soon, so there’s nothing else to do.’

Back then (though it was only three years ago), TV interviewers were more sceptical and robust. So when rupert read, one of Xr’s organisers, was asked by Sky’s adam Boulton if they were ‘selfindulgent, middle-class people who want to tell us how to lead our lives’, read exclaimed: ‘I won’t stand for people who won’t stand up for what it means to live on this planet, and I won’t stand for anything else’ — and then stood up and walked out of the interview.

and when andrew Neil, then on the BBC, was told by a spokeswoman for Xr that ‘billions of people will die [as a result of climate change] over the next few decades’, he shot back: ‘I looked through the report of the IPCC and there is no reference to anything of the sort’.

His interviewee was at a loss how to respond (and subsequently left Xr).

alas, adam Boulton is no longer on Sky, and the BBC parted company with andrew Neil. But they had the right approach. and, best of all, it was neither indulgent nor condescending.

As if we didn’t have enough to contend with — what with the escalating cost of living, a looming recession, sky-high mortgage rates and NHs waiting lists out of control — we have also had Just stop Oil protesters causing havoc on our roads. A man caught in the ensuing traffic missed his father’s funeral last week; another missed the birth of his baby; someone else missed their hospital appointment for cancer treatment. A policeman nearly died in a collision on the motorway, all thanks to their hapless antics.

Traffic brought to a standstill for hours on end, chaos and disruption . . . it’s only a matter of time before someone is killed.

i want to support their cause, but nothing can justify their actions — and believe me, i’ve listened to the activists closely in the desperate hope they’ll be able to cogently explain their behaviour. instead, i’ve been struck by how bizarrely they come across.

it got me thinking about the psychology of what’s actually going on here, because this feels like more than just civil disobedience or a protest. WHeN

members of Just stop Oil are interviewed on TV, it’s clear some of them are genuinely petrified about the eco-apocalypse. it’s quite unsettling to see how distressed they appear to be.

Yet they seem incapable of putting forward a reasoned argument or summing up the issues in a way that doesn’t fall back on hysterical hyperbole. some come across neither rational nor logical.

They often seem well-spoken, middle class, presumably welleducated. so why can’t they string together a coherent sentence? for a group of people who spend so much about time thinking about climate change, they seem astonishingly bad at putting across the arguments.

The more i listen to them, the more i feel that, for some, this isn’t about the environment at all. instead, i think it’s symptomatic of a wider problem.

These days, many of the younger generation seem gripped by a crippling generalised anxiety, and i believe some of this has attached itself to environmental issues.

This gives them a sense of security because, rather than being free-floating, vague and unspecific, their worries now have a focus, an anchor, which feels psychologically r e a s s u r i n g. so could it be that some of the protesters are not anxious about the environment, but are just anxious full stop — and the environment is a convenient and modish focus for it?

Again, i’m not saying there isn’t a justified concern when it comes to the future of our planet, just that the way this concern is manifesting itself is so counter-productive, it must be pathological.

This would explain why so many of the activists can’t — or won’t — provide sensible alternatives to their protests. This may also explain why some of them appear to behave hypocritically, by taking multiple long- haul flights or driving cars; it’s really all about their anxiety, not the environment.

This doesn’t apply to all of them. i suspect some are lacking meaning in their lives and the environment is a convenient and suitably nebulous campaign to latch on to. it provides a sense of self- righteous purpose and superiority. But if it wasn’t the environment, it would just be something else.

The movement as a whole increasingly feels like a doomsday cult. The evidence is clear that arguing against such deep- rooted beliefs is often pointless because groups like this actually serve a psychological need, providing structure and meaning to the lives of the people following them. Looking at these eco-protesters, i see the middle-class equivalent of the man standing on the street corner wearing a ‘The end of the world is nigh’ sandwich board. Their demands — that everyone just stops using oil (and the development and licensing of fossil fuel projects) — are ludicrous and implausible.

There’s no endgame here. if they really cared about the environment they wouldn’t be sitting on roads or scaling motorway gantries, they would be studying engineering to develop alternatives to gasguzzling planes, or finding better ways of harnessing renewable energy, or searching for improved fertilisers for agriculture.

Let’s be honest, elon Musk has done more for the environment by developing mass-produced electric cars than all of these eco-zealots combined.

And then there are the darker elements of this campaign.

As with other movements, such as those supporting animal rights, it has the potential to attract certain individuals who may use it as a vehicle for their psychopathic tendencies.

i strongly suspect some of the campaigners, oblivious to the utter misery and danger they are causing, fall into this category.

The protesters may have a valid cause. They may well be right in some of their claims. But their behaviour suggests their underlining motivation isn’t really to change hearts and minds. it’s about serving their own psychological needs.