Let’s not kid ourselves on with orgy of climate self-righteousness

I loved watching it as a 13-year-old, not least because it featured the rather wonderful English actor Jenny Agutter in a lead role.

The movie was a commercial success but wasn’t entirely well received by critics who thought the plotline too absurd and the special effects rather too jumpy and inchoate. 

And yet, within little more than a generation, its main theme and its consequences have begun to beguile some of our big thinkers. There was a hint of it at COP26 in Glasgow when the issue of overpopulation was being discussed in relation to the planet’s dwindling resources. 

Of course, global warming and our carbon footprint is one of the great challenges facing humanity: everybody says so. And it behoves us all to take it seriously. But let’s not kid ourselves on here.

When middle-class politicians who have overseen poverty and inequality at home and in the third world begin talking about the planet’s finite resources and overpopulation, you know they’ll always choose the path of least resistance. 

When there’s talk about there being too many people on the planet, what they really mean is that there are too many poor people on the planet. The world’s political leaders all descended on COP26 – and the other COPs – like packs of wolves. Their governments are influenced and often funded by lobbying groups representing the richest capitalist enterprises on the planet.

They have one purpose and one purpose only: to protect those profits. 

A recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us the ruinous effect of unfettered capitalism on the climate.

It showed that global industry and the planet’s largest multinationals were responsible for almost 40% of greenhouse gas emissions. They dominate energy and food production, manufacturing, and building construction. 

In an essay last year for The New Statesman, the progressive economics thinker and author Adrienne Buller elegantly dismantled the hypocrisy that lies at the heart of the COP virtue orgy which was held last year in Dubai, one of the world’s richest oil states. 

“It is clear,” said Ms Buller, “that these negotiations are predicated on a contradiction: the task of agreeing a programme of radical global economic transformation is allocated to those – including, this year, a record 2,500 fossil fuel industry representatives – who stand to lose the most from disrupting the current economic model.” 

Write to die
I’VE long admired the writing of Matthew Parris, the former Conservative MP. He is witty, erudite and urbane. Along with those such as Joanna Cherry and Adam Tomkins, he belongs to a very small and exclusive club: politicians who write well.

Last week, he stated a rather startling – but refreshingly honest – opinion about the proposed assisted dying legislation in Scotland.

He suggests that one of the main arguments against assisted dying – that it will increase pressure on the terminally ill to hasten their own deaths – is actually its greatest virtue. And that it will help the UK economy be more competitive with younger and nimbler Asian economies. 

Supporters of Liam McArthur’s Assisted Dying Bill have strived to assure Scotland’s older people and disabled groups that there are safeguards to ensure they’re not up first against the wall when there’s talk of finite resources. I’m sure they mean well, but let’s face it: Mr Parris’s cold analysis is what always prevails in the end.   

Perhaps, then, it’s time that rich Western governments ditched the pretence of wanting to find solutions for inequality and helping infirm people access healthcare more easily. Trolling the climate emergency community by holding last year’s COP in Dubai was a good start.

Besides a mild ripple of consternation, no-one really seemed to mind.

Vision of health
INSPIRED by the themes in Logan’s Run, might I suggest an imaginative suite of measures to curb population growth and to relieve pressure on the NHS by the frail, the elderly, the sick, and the dying.

I’d start slowly at first to acquaint the population with the normality of culling the population. I’d be requiring those approaching decrepitude (maybe around 60) to take a stiff, nationally-approved fitness test adhering to the usual human rights stuff blah, blah, blah.

If you fail, then it’s off to “The Clinic” for you, sunshine, and make it snappy. Obviously, wheelchair users and those with other disabilities could have something much more compassionate in line with best disabled rights practice. Maybe we could have a quota system there.

And then every decade or so we could reduce the age bar on the Codger Run to 50 and then 40 and so on, until Scotland is the youngest, fittest and most dynamic wee country on the planet. Perhaps, too, we could conduct intelligence tests to separate the wheat from the chaff. Obviously, very rich people will have the opportunity to access a VIP lane sparing them anything too strenuous or intellectually testing. 

No country for old men
YOU might very well mock the idea of such edgy and progressive measures to keep Scotland virile and muscly. How would any government propose such a thing, you might ask?

Consider this, though: the Scottish Government currently thinks fully-intact men can become women and enthusiastically backs mutilating vulnerable young girls and sending them on irreversible medical pathways.

Conducting culls of people who are a burden on our finite resources should be absolutely no bother at all.