Leave the hot air in the cold and be realistic

I was the victim of a virtual mugging on the road to the climate talks in Montreal. An unassuming e-mail crept into my mailbox, apparently from a rather naïve student. It inquired why, if I wrote about the environment, I did not ever mention the underlying cause of environmental destruction on a finite planet: the unsustainable patterns of economic growth, fuelled by billions in advertising revenue. By not doing so, I was clearly part of a capitalist conspiracy to belittle the real problems facing humanity.

Thus goaded, I felt I had better complete this shadowy figure's education. I wrote back, irascibly, saying that the days of seeing growth as a problem passed with the 1970s. Since the 1980s, just about all mainstream political parties believed we should try to achieve green growth or the dread term coined by the Brundtland Commission, "sustainable development'' rather than no growth. Anything less would condemn billions of the unborn in the developing world to lives of abject misery.

I was dismayed to find this e-mail, and the subsequent ones I sent, plastered all over a website called Media Lens, complete with helpful advice from other conspirators about how the sender should phrase his faux-naïve questions to make this Establishment lackey, ie me, fess up to his part in the global media conspiracy. It was clear from what I read that the shadowy participants in this virtual gang-bang had roughly the same view of Western civilisation as Pol Pot.

Mounting evidence

So when George W. Bush suggests that some environmentalists are just out to bankrupt the American economy, I'm right there by his side. Some of them actually are. A small minority of the Greens do indeed include a section of the old, apocalyptic Left. They are just as loopy in their way as the people on the American Right who argue, in the face of mounting evidence, that nothing is happening to our climate that cannot be explained by natural variability and that Kyoto is dead.

As the world deliberates in Montreal about what to do about the climate, I believe it is a valuable exercise to try to take as non-ideological a view as possible about the situation. Reasonable people have to try to look at the facts and not the myths about global warming. We need to leave the hot air out in the cold.

One myth that has already passed by the wayside is that nothing is happening. As someone who has, in the course of the year, interviewed an elderly Inuit hunter about the ice he used to see from his window and now does not; listened to the head of the British Antarctic Survey talking about the first melting of the suspended ice mass in the West Antarctic; or researched the growing intensity of the hurricanes affecting the United States Gulf Coast, I feel strongly that will not do.

If you accept that at least some of this warming is man-made you have to ask yourself two questions. Does it matter? And can we do anything about it? Neither answer is simple. But from the perspective of a conference centre in this Francophone city, it seems to me that no responsible politician, on either side of the Atlantic, can ignore the possibility that the effects of this warming will be more unpleasant than pleasant.

When it comes to doing something about it, the best evidence to hand is that tackling global warming is a technical problem and not an ideological one.

If it is all so easy, why is it that most Western leaders find it so difficult to do anything at present? Why does Tony Blair talk up climate change and let people fly from Stansted to Poland for 99p? Why does he say we must cut emissions by at least 60 per cent by 2050 and then give industry all the emission permits they want? Why are Britain's emissions rising under Labour when they fell under the Tories? The answer to that, says Oliver Letwin, the Tories' new director of policy, is that there is a structural problem in a democracy with five-year terms which makes any politician who wants to survive always take the short-term decision.

Consensus

Labour says it does not like the idea of a cross-party consensus on climate change because deciding what to do whether for example to build nuclear power stations is intensely political. That may be true, but I suspect a certain consensus could be hammered out on a matter so important to the human future. If it isn't, we will just see more rhetoric and inaction of the Blair variety, which has corrupted the currency of rational debate.

As David Cameron has already detected, it is that shortfall between political thought and action which depresses younger voters. It is they who will have to live in a warmed world. The challenge for the leadership of any political party that wants to attract new voters is to show that democracy can solve one of the world's biggest problems. Otherwise some very nasty people will crawl out from under stones.

The Telegraph Group Limited, London