Boris climate plea

Failure to act ‘will put us on road to extinction’

BORIS Johnson will tonight warn world leaders they need to ‘grow up’ on climate change or risk making the world ‘uninhabitable’.

In a hard-hitting speech to the UN General Assembly in New York, the Prime Minister will warn that mankind cannot continue to act as if ‘someone else will clear up the mess we make’.

Mr Johnson, once a climate change sceptic, will warn that failure to take dramatic action at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow in November will put the human race on the road to ‘extinction’.

Joe Biden yesterday threw Mr Johnson a lifeline in his bid to create a £73billion ($100billion) climate fund to help developing countries cut their emissions.

The President doubled the US contribution to £8.2billion ($11.2billion).

But government sources said a string of other countries – including France, Italy, Spain and Canada – still need to ‘step up to the plate’.

In tonight’s speech, the PM will note that mankind is 200,000-years-old, roughly onefifth of the typical survival range of mammal species on Earth. He will say: ‘In terms of the life of our species, we are about 16.

‘We have come to that fateful age when we know roughly how to drive and how to unlock the drinks cabinet and to engage in all sorts of activity that is not only potentially embarrassing but also terminal.’

He goes on: ‘We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with a primitive assumption of our own immortality.

‘We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done. We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.’

But the PM will warn that the ‘adolescence of humanity is coming to an end’, with the world facing a ‘critical turning point’ in Glasgow.

‘It is time for humanity to grow up,’ he will say. ‘It is time for us to listen to the warnings of the scientists – look at Covid if you want an example of gloomy scientists being proved right – and to understand who we are and what we are doing.

The world – this blue sphere with its eggshell crust and wisp of an atmosphere – is not some indestructible toy, some bouncy plastic romper room against which we can hurl ourselves to our heart’s content.

‘Daily, weekly, we are doing such irreversible damage that long before a million years are up will have made this be au ti acknowledged ful planet effectively uninhabitable – not just for us but for many other species.’

Mr Johnson’s comments are a striking U-turn for a politician who spent years questioning whether man-made climate change exists.

Speaking to reporters during his trip to the US, the PM he had changed his mind in the face of growing scientific evidence. He said he was convinced the world faced ‘catastrophe’ unless it acted.

‘If you were to excavate some of my articles from 20 years ago you might find comments I made about climate change that weren’t entirely supportive of the current struggle,’ he said. ‘But the facts change and people change their minds.’

The climate fund is seen as critical to the hopes of securing a deal in Glasgow to limit the rise in the global temperature to 1.5 degrees centigrade.

Earlier this week, Mr Johnson suggested the chances of hitting the funding target were just ‘six out of ten’.

But he received a major boost yesterday when President Biden doubled the US contribution. Speaking at the UN, Mr Biden urged the world to turn from conflict towards cooperation. He said: ‘Instead of continuing to fight the wars of the past, we are fixing our eyes and devoting our resources to the challenges that hold the keys to our collective future.’

Mr Biden described climate change and the continuing pandemic as ‘urgent and looming crises wherein lie enormous opportunities’ if the world can work together.

He warned the world will face further pandemics and without action on climate change, humanity will suffer ‘the merciless march of ever-worsening droughts and floods, more intense fires and hurricanes’.

The PM last night welcomed Mr Biden’s climate funding pledge as a ‘very good start’ that takes them ‘a long way towards the goal’.

‘Irreversible damage’

NICOLA Sturgeon has that most precious political commodity: luck. She was lucky to become SNP leader and First Minister just as Scottish Labour was self-combusting after the independence referendum.

She was lucky that Brexit happened at the moment she was looking for an excuse to demand a rerun referendum on independence.

And in the week Scotland and the rest of the country was catapulted into an energy crisis, leaving many of us facing higher gas and electricity bills, Miss Sturgeon’s luck has held yet again.

It is because of a promise she made four years ago and then broke.

In 2017, the First Minister told excited delegates to the SNP conference the Scottish Government would set up a ‘publicly owned, not-for-profit energy company’ with charges ‘as close to cost price as possible’. It would do so by 2021.

With a number of smaller supply companies being forced out of business in the last week, she must be relieved her promise came to nothing.

Had ‘Sturgeon Hot Air’, or whatever the company was to be called, gone the way of the People’s Energy Company and put up the ‘closed for business’ sign, many of Miss Sturgeon’s political enemies would have been delighted.

The promise was typical of the First Minister’s political style: heavy on presentation and tone but light on delivery and substance. It was an easy – some might even say lazy – promise to make.

Announcing that anything in Scotland should be ‘publicly owned’ is a guarantee of copious positive coverage and sure to get the already faithful to drool with delight.

But for all the fanfare at the announcement, the Scottish Government’s eventual admission that it had failed to deliver received only a fraction of the same attention.

And when it comes to a difficult and contradictory relationship with energy policy, the SNP has form.

We all remember the slogan from the 1970s: ‘It’s Scotland’s oil’, a slogan that propelled the party, albeit briefly at the time, to the biggest electoral success it had ever enjoyed.

Alex Salmond proudly described himself as an oil economist and, during his leadership of the party, sought to capitalise on what was still perceived as Scotland’s most valuable natural resource, hidden under the North Sea.

During the 2014 independence referendum, his party optimistically predicted ‘Scottish oil and gas receipts are forecast to generate £6.8billion in tax revenue in 2016/17’.

The actual figure was £36MILLION – just over a half of 1 per cent of what Mr Salmond predicted.

At the same time, online Nationalist conspiracists shared their theories that Whitehall was covering up the truth about ‘hidden oil fields’ and was only waiting until after Scots rejected independence before exploiting them for the benefit of Tory voters in the South-East of England.

Mesmerised

Those weren’t the wildest conspiracy theories being shared by Yes supporters, it has to be admitted.

But there is no doubt that for more than 50 years, the Nationalist movement has been mesmerised by the prospect of an independent Scotland having access to such substantial wealth.

The discovery of oil gave an impetus to a previously moribund Nationalist movement. It has hardly looked back.

Despite the disastrous collapse in oil revenue after the referendum, many thousands of jobs still depend on North Sea oil, a fact that presents the SNP administration with yet another headache to add to its recent list of woes that include the ambulance crisis and the Covid pandemic.

Influenced by her new partners in government, the Scottish Greens, Miss Sturgeon is under pressure to reject oil and the oil industry in their entirety. The Greens see no virtue in a gradual shift away from our dependence on oil; they want a complete rejection of the oil-based economy and its carbon emissions in a drastically short timetable, irrespective of the terrible damage such a move would do to jobs and the economy.

In fact, the Greens see no virtue in economic growth, despite the benefits it brings to even the worst-off families (not to mention the comfortable middle-class lifestyle that economic growth has produced for the Green movement’s leaders in Scotland and across Europe).

So the First Minister has been forced into the risible position of writing to Prime Minister Boris Johnson not to object to the exploration of new oil fields, but to ask him to ‘reassess’ such projects.

In doing so, Miss Sturgeon hopes to assuage the Green wing of her government as well as those communities which are desperate for the jobs boom that exploitation of the new Cambo oil field will bring.

After all, what does ‘reassess’ mean? Reject? Approve? Will we ever be told?

With Russia threatening to cut its vital gas supplies to Europe and industry struggling to provide enough energy for the post-Covid kickstart the economy is now undergoing, is this really the time for the SNP to play politics with domestic oil fields?

Hundreds of thousands of families face higher bills during winter, there is talk of a three-day week to allow industry to cope with gas shortages and increased demand, and double-figure inflation could make its first appearance since the 1990s.

If ever there was a time when we could do with an alternative source of gas, this is it.

But the First Minister and her party have already capitulated to the environmentalist extremists by banning fracking. The new process has seen America benefit from vastly increased domestic production of shale gas just as foreign-sourced gas has become more expensive and rarer.

So where are SNP ministers in all of this? Instead of making unrealistic promises about non-existent energy companies and promising that the public sector can provide everything for free or at low cost, when will they face up to their responsibilities and do what every government worthy of the name must do, and make difficult decisions?

Scotland’s oil industry needs the support of the devolved government just as it depends on the goodwill of UK ministers.

And it is in the interests of the whole of Scotland that for now, at least, the oil industry thrives. Consumers need it, workers and their families need it, and the Treasury needs it.

So how can Miss Sturgeon’s apparently agnostic approach to it be justified?

Compromises

The answer lies in the Nationalists’ fondness for, and dependency on, easy answers.

Politics is complicated, it involves daily and numerous compromises and concessions to make improvements in people’s lives, improvements that frequently can be described best as incremental. That’s just a fact of life.

But Nationalism depends on short-circuiting all of that.

It thrives on pretending that everything, from an independent Scotland’s fiscal deficit to the challenge of climate change, can be addressed by a well-honed phrase or a loftysounding promise made in a conference hall.

No hard work is necessary; all we need is to inspire, with no need to follow through with actual policy achievements.

If bad news has to be delivered – and there is always bad news to be delivered – better to ignore it and leave that to the UK Government.

If you risk disappointing one part of your coalition by standing up for an already hardpressed and vital industry, just sit on the fence and hope that no one will notice your refusal to pick a side.

Such behaviour is hardly responsible, but once you’ve examined the SNP’s history and its historical relationship with oil, you can see how we ended up here.

Meanwhile, Miss Sturgeon’s luck continues to hold.

Lucky for her, of course. For the rest of us? Not so much.