The Great Moonbat comes up with two impossible theories in a day
Last Wednesday was quite a day for that grand “environmental” campaigner George Monbiot. He began by regaling Guardian readers yet again with that IMF paper which last year startled the world by revealing that fossil fuels receive far larger subsidies than “renewables”.
The paper argued that we should take account of the true cost of all the damage fossil fuels are doing to us all, by causing global warming, air pollution, traffic congestion and deaths from traffic accidents. That the producers of coal, oil and gas can get away with not being charged for all this damage amounts to a “subsidy” worth $5.3 trillion a year, more than the entire global cost of health care. And if we were sensible enough to tax them for it, this would make the subsidies paid to windmills and solar panels look like peanuts.
One can see why this theory would appeal to someone like Monbiot. But to call it a “subsidy” may remind the rest of us of Humpty Dumpty’s dictum that, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.”
Later that day the great environmentalist was deferentially invited by the Commons Environmental Audit committee, to explain his theory that the way to stop floods is not to dredge rivers but to plant trees, to slow the flow of excessive rainfall from higher up in the catchment area that causes them.
On the 2014 floods in my county of Somerset, Monbiot then went out of his way to rubbish by name those, including me, who revealed how those floods had been made much worse by the deliberate flooding of a key area of land to provide water for wildlife (because the Met Office had predicted a dry winter). To support his point he triumphantly cited a report by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.
In fact that report didn’t properly address this issue at all. It made no mention of how the flow of the Somerset Levels’ main “flood relief scheme”, the Sowy, was deliberately reversed, to flood Natural England’s Southlake Moor, thus blocking the drainage of a much larger area of the Somerset Moors to the east.
But nor did the Great Moonbat tell the MPs that the same report had trenchantly rejected his theory about tree-planting on the hills, by finding that this does nothing to halt the downward flow of excessive rainfall (and if he had looked at the relevant hills in Somerset, he would have seen that they are covered in trees anyway).
What made all this even odder was that an expert witness, who had been invited to follow him to point all this out, was then told that he could not appear before the committee after all, because of “allegations” (unspecified) that he had written something “offensive” online.
So the MPs were only allowed to hear one side of the story. It will be interesting to see how this is reflected in their report.