GET LOST, GREENPEACE

A few weeks ago I wrote of some overweening bumblecrats--no, forgive me, it was Britain's Olympic Delivery Authority, quite a different thing, surely--who had "taken it upon themselves to nanny the British nation out of its cars". I was mistaken. I withdraw the word unreservedly. For nanny read chivvy, push, shove, force, police or, why not, while we're at it, thumbscrew us toward that desirable end.

Not that I really think our Olympiarchs would go to that extreme. But their plans certainly go as far as policing: how else are they to enforce their insolent schemes for London's roads? And there are plenty of others who would readily go further still. Being, or at least talking, green, and compelling other people to be so, is the name of the game in Britain these days.

Let us agree that the end is indeed desirable. Cars clog Britain's cities and pollute its air. They add to man-made global warming, a nasty phenomenon whose reality I, like many sensible people, once doubted, and, like most sensible ones by now, today accept as a fact. What isn't desirable at all is the self-righteousness with which the green lobby preaches such things as truths that one cannot morally question, or even qualify; and damn as sinners all who do not take the counter-measures that they demand. Savonarola, the self-appointed scourge of Florence, and Carlyle's "sea-green incorruptible" Robespierre--snot-green corrupt, in fact, up to his eyeballs, where the rights of men other than himself were concerned--were like this.

Listen to Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. Listen indeed--you can hardly avoid it, so readily do journalists hang on their words. And why not, after all? They know the issues and the answers, don't they? Don't they just, and don't they just know it. Does it ever even cross their minds that they may be fallible, like other humans?

It certainly doesn't cross their lips. Not an iota of self-doubt infects the pronunciamentos of their spokesmen. Do they ever say should when they can say must? Shoppers must (plastic bags and food-miles), drivers must (gas-guzzlers, nay cars of almost any sort), airline passengers must (stay on the ground), electricity-users must (switch off), and, of course and endlessly, governments must.

Let's agree again that they may be very largely right about climate change, and the urgency of action to halt it; countless scientists are on their side, so too the United Nations, not to add Al Gore. And their strident certainty might be excusable if they confined it to this one huge issue. But they don't. They are just as certain, just as strident, but at least arguably mistaken, about another of their obsessive hates, nuclear energy--the only real-world alternative, in the short term, to fossil fuels. And much of what they preach, with equal self-certainty, about yet another pet hate, genetically modified crops, is emotive claptrap. Humankind, in ever-rising numbers, has been eating these alleged "Frankenfoods" for more than ten years now. So far, not one of us has been shown to suffer as much as a stomach-ache from them.

These greens are worthy folk, granted. Devoted ones too: it takes that to get half-drowned and frozen to challenge Japanese whalers, or, as happened in 1985, to have your ship sabotaged, and one person drowned, by a French government happy--not alone--to use the far side of the globe as its nuclear test site. They ask real questions. They may have the right answers. Yet it is possible not to share their (and on some issues my) views without being a moral cretin. Or even wrong.

Even were they always and entirely right, it is also possible to preach virtue without quite such a show of one's own gleaming halo. Or such an assumption of authority. Who appointed these and other such lobby groups to boss the planet and the lives of the six billion rest of us? Isn't that what we elect governments for, with all their many and manifest faults?

The section of The Economist that I was then running once carried a story from our Vancouver stringer on public opinion in those parts about logging. The public of British Columbia wasn't vastly bothered, he reported. In thundered a letter from Thilo Bode, the chief panjandrum of Greenpeace at its global headquarters in Amsterdam. Before printing such stuff, why, it asked indignantly, and very much de haut en bas, hadn't we consulted them? Greenpeace could have given us reams of information about the sundry flora and fauna at risk from the loggers.

No doubt it could have, and maybe at risk they were. But, as I replied to him, though our stringer had indeed talked to Greenpeace's supporters on the spot, our story wasn't about wildlife, it was about public opinion there. And on that topic we thought a professional reporter in British Columbia likelier to know the facts than a professional pressure-group in Amsterdam.

Alas, the courtesy due from a dignified, measured magazine to its readers constrained my pen. What I wanted to tell this one, and I wish now that I had, was to get lost.

That is a sinfully unmeasured, undignified way of reacting to people whose concern for our planet, and knowledge of it, must be ten times greater than mine. But by the time you have been hectored silly by a host of self-canonised saints, sin has its excuses, does it not?