I agree with everything that the man says, up until the point where he solely blames foreign spending for the lack of money to spend at home. The scale of the recent bailout of the financial system (which doesn’t seem to be working) seems to me to be a more important spending event to highlight.

For me, this video hammers home the reality that most people have made no connection between (i) the scale of the financial sector bailouts; (ii) the fact that the increase in the size of the financial sector over the past twenty years is directly linked to the increase in income inequality; and (iii) the fact that it’s largely due to bailing out the financial sector that there are such strains on Government budgets. The lack of this understanding is the key to why no credible alternative is emerging as capitalism as we know it seems to continue crumbling around us.

I believe that the UK and the rest of the world need to massively reform our economic system. The current approach of trying to get back to “business as usual” is clearly failing in lots of different ways. Unless we reform the economic system more widely, we’re not going to have the money to spend on the well-needed things that the man in the video is confronting Boris about.

We should be looking at the kinds of economic policies employed under Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1930s America, as part of the New Deal. However, we also need to bring it up-to-date: the New Deal focused on building things like motorways and in the 1930s the poor were concentrated in rural areas rather than cities. We need to grow new sectors like a clean energy infrastructure and making sure that we are producing food locally rather than spending loads of cash transporting it from big factory farms.

The New Economics Foundation has some good stuff to say on this subject, but this is just a starting point, and we need to go much further to actually define a new political agenda that confronts the challenge of economic reform.

Every time I visit a shop I am massively frustrated by the fact that I am offered a bag for anything but smallest of items. Every single time I have my own bag, and I have to politely interrupt the cashier as they attempt to put my items into one of the shop’s plastic bags.

Although I am polite every time (I know that the person serving me thinks that they are being helpful), inside I am screaming “I’ve got a fucking bag!”, especially when (a) it is a shop I visit regularly and the person should really know by now that I always bring my own bag or (b) it is a chain store like Tesco who supposedly have policies around who they offer bags to, but that are hardly ever followed in practice (in the post below I’ve published some emails I’ve previously exchanged with Tesco customer service on this subject).

Today, I read that after a temporary decline (potentially in part due to a short-term fashion-fuelled awareness boost from I’m not a plastic bag and similar campaigns), the use of plastic bags is on the rise again in the UK. So I thought I should write this blog post and try and make something happen.

I bought the domain, inspired in part by goodfuckingidea.com and now I am thinking of things to do with it. I’ve had a few thoughts myself, and I’d love to hear any responses/further ideas in the comments:

1. It could simply be a place to go and say “I’ve got a fucking bag!” and feel less bad because you’ll see all the other people who have got a fucking bag and are feeling as frustrated as you…
2. We could have a map where users could add a red pin to say they’ve visited a shop and had to prompt the shopkeeper to stop putting stuff in bags or  a green pin if the shopkeeper explicitly asks if they need a bag. If the shop is already on there then there could be voting system to say whether the shop is improving or not.
3. We could use it to create a dialogue between the big retailers and their customers. If a company has a stated policy and their individual store managers aren’t passing it on to the people actually serving customers, then they should be told, and they should do something about it!
4. Maybe the site could become a (non-confrontational!) talking point between customers and smaller shopkeepers, though it may be difficult to build any kind of momentum with independent shops (i.e. the ones where the same person serves you every time) with this approach.

—– Original Message —–
From: “Jamie Andrews”
Date: 19 September 2010
Subject: Customer service feedback

Hi,

I am writing to you because my previous contact to Tesco customer
support left my enquiry basically unanswered.

I wrote a considered email about the fact that every time I visit a
Tesco store I am offered a plastic bag, rather than being asked whether
or not I want one (making me depressed about how much plastic is
wasted/sent to landfill).

My feedback was about Tecso’s policy in general as clearly staff are
trained from a central policy and not on a store-by-store basis. However
the answerphone message I received in response phrased it as if I was
talking about one specific store, which clearly wasn’t the case. The
response I received before was a perfunctory response which left me with
absolutely no confidence whatsoever the issue was being looked into by
anyone, or that my feedback had made it beyond the email system. I was
simply told that my feedback “would be passed onto the store” in a very
general sense.

I would like to see the policy changed so that plastic bags are only
given away to those who really need them (I suspect that simply asking
whether someone wants a bag, especially in Metro/smaller stores where
people are often buying only one or two small items would slash the
number given away and ending up in the bin). Failing that, I would like
the rationale for this policy not already being in place explained to me.

Thanks in advance.

Jamie Andrews

On 21/09/2010 10:23, Tesco Customer Service wrote:

Dear Mr Andrews,

I’m sorry to hear that the last response didn’t answer your query, I understand how frustrating this must have been.

Our policy with regards to carrier bags states that they should be under the counter and not on display and our customers should be asked if they need them before they are given needlessly given out.

If your local store has carrier bags on display, please let us know and we will follow up with the store manager to ensure our policy is implemented properly.

I hope this helps and look forward to hearing from you shortly.

If you have any further queries please do not hesitate to contact me at customer.service@tesco.co.uk quoting TES8234633X.

Kind Regards

Daniel Lewis
Customer Service Manager
Tesco Customer Service

From: Jamie Andrews
Date: Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 10:34 AM
Subject: Re: Customer service feedback TES8234633X
To: Tesco Customer Service

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for getting back to me.

I’m glad to hear that your policy is in theory to ask customers first, but you’ll be disappointed to learn that I have only been asked if I want a bag around 5% of the time. The rest of the time the person just gets it out for me and starts putting the stuff in a bag for me before I’ve done anything.

That leaves me in the socially-awkward position of having to actively refuse the bag. Because I am pretty committed to the environment, and am a confident individual I do always say something, but I imagine there are a lot of people who don’t really need a bag but wouldn’t be confident/bothered enough to actively refuse it. So Tesco is wasting loads of money handing out bags that are not needed.

Note that this is not something that only happens in one store. I go to a lot of different Tesco stores around London (mainly Metro/local ones) and I am hardly ever asked if I need a bag. So if this a truly a policy then there is a categorical failure across a vast number of store managers, and not just one in particular. Please can you clarify how you will be addressing the issue in terms of central policy enforcement, not in one or two stores (as this would only address a fraction of the failure).

Thanks and I look forward to hearing from you.

Jamie

From: Tesco Customer Service
Date: Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 9:15 AM
Subject: Re: Re: Customer service feedback TES8234633X
To: Jamie Andrews

Dear Mr Andrews

I’m sorry to hear that you have visited stores in London where our policy on offering carrier bags was not being followed.

We are committed to reducing the number of carrier bags we give out, and have implemented several measures to achieve this, including offering a range of reusable bags in all stores, rewarding customers with green Clubcard points when they reuse their bags, and offering delivery without carrier bags through tesco.com. A Tesco customer now uses more than 50% fewer bags than in August 2006.

All our staff who operate checkouts are trained to follow this policy when they join us, as are Team Leaders and Store Managers. We also re-train all our staff on this periodically: the last training sessions were in October 2009, and we plan further sessions this October.

I’m sure you’ll appreciate that mistakes will occasionally happen, but I am concerned to hear that you have seen carrier bags on display in more than one store. Please let me know the stores where you have seen this, and I will arrange for our store operations team to contact the store manager to ensure our policy is implemented properly.

If you have any further queries please do not hesitate to contact me at customer.service@tesco.co.uk quoting TES8242224X.

Kind Regards

Daniel Lewis
Customer Service Manager
Tesco Customer Service

A few months ago we realised that we needed to start taking payment on the Loco2 site. We wanted the entire booking process to take place on the Loco2 site, because our testing told us that is what users expect when they book rail tickets.

After doing some basic research (e.g. by reading very informative blog posts like this) we realised that we had a choice between using Paypal’s Website Payments Pro or going for a full merchant account and payment gateway solution. Our software is built using Ruby on Rails, and there is a great ruby library called Active Merchant which handles integration with a number of a payment gateways, including website payments pro.

Because Paypal doesn’t require the set up of a full merchant account or payment gateway (and we already had a Paypal account set up to receive payments into a Loco2 bank account) we thought this would be the simplest way to get up and running quickly. We could then switch to a full merchant account and payment gateway solution (where charges would be lower) later when we’d had a chance to make applications and shop around for the best deal. Because of our use of Active Merchant, the switching process between Paypal and another payment gateway would be straightforward.

So… I made the application with Paypal to use Website Payments Pro. I understood that there would need to be a vetting process and so I made sure that we provided all requested information in a timely fashion. Thankfully (or so we thought), the application was approved relatively quickly and with minimum hassle, and we proceeded with the integration process. We invested a significant amount of development effort in integrating with the test server and making test bookings, and then when we were satisfied that the integration was working as expected, we switched to the live server and made our first transaction.

And that’s when Paypal told us our account was suspended.

I got a phone call from Paypal soon after the first transaction on the live server and was told that as per the small print of the application, Paypal reserve the right to review our usage as soon as we made our first sale. Only then were we expected to provide detailed information about the booking terms and conditions for the tickets being sold via our site, and legal documentation such as our company’s Certificate of Incorporation.

It was at this point that I discovered how bloated and poorly architected the B2B customer experience is on Paypal. There were about four separate parts of the account section of the website that I needed to refer to, and I received automated emails from about four separate email address (none of which I could reply to) each with different reference numbers, and each requesting very similar information but supposedly for different purposes. When I called customer services, I was told on a number of occasions that the relevant department did not accept calls, and all I was able to do was have a note left on our account by the operator.

Finally, after a couple of weeks of complying with Paypal’s demands for documentation, I was told that we were not successful in our application for Website Payments Pro, but that our account in general had been reinstated. The nuance of this news was not communicated very clearly, and for a while I thought that our Website Payments Pro had been reinstated as well (only when making a call to the server did we realise that our access was still denied).

So for the past few months we’ve been using normal Paypal, and taking users off our site to make the booking. Thankfully we have now switched and are using a proper payment gateway and merchant account (still through Active Merchant) and so I feel calm enough to vent my frustration without the risk of needing to deal with Paypal again in the immediate future.

In conclusion, my clear words of warning for other start-ups in this position are as follows:

When Paypal tell you that they have approved your Website Payments Pro application, they haven’t really. They will only look at it properly (and ask you for lots of inf0) after you have invested the development effort in the integration, and actually made a live payment.

For a company that claims to support innovation, I think Paypal need to work much harder to clearly articulate their policies before companies invest their precious time and resources. Why not just make the test integration server open to everyone? It would then be far clearer that the initial application process was not the real one, and that the small print about “reserving the right to review” was the real thing to be concerned about.

I would also just like to reiterate how absolutely awful the information architecture is throughout the whole B2B Paypal process. It seems to be a classic example of a company being the first mover in a market, succeeding commercially and then getting massively bloated, and the polar opposite of lean. As a success story of the internet generation, I would have hoped for better.

Perhaps we were naive: we could have read all the small print more clearly and enquired before starting the integration. And perhaps we only got reviewed/rejected because travel is seen as a high-risk industry. But nevertheless, I am very glad that the process is over! Any comments/questions very welcome.

The reaction to 10:10′s “No pressure” film can teach us a lot about the political dynamics of the climate change debate.

In the hours between the original release and withdrawal of 10:10′s short but controversial film entitled ’No Pressure’ on Friday, there was – rather predictably – uproar from many quarters.

I’ll come onto my own opinions about the film in a second, but first let’s look at the reaction of the supposed arch nemeses of the environmental movement: people who like to refer to global warming as a ‘myth’ and make as much noise as possible attacking the emergence of a scientific or political consensus around the issue.

Chief amongst such commentators is James Delingpole, a blogger for the Telegraph who describes himself as a “Libertarian Conservative”. Shortly after the film was released he published a post on the Telegraph’s website celebrating the spectacular own-goal that had been scored by 10:10 et al, referring to Curtis’s work as “eco-propaganda”. Later he published a second blog about the decision to pull the video, this time using the term “eco-fascism”.

Clearly the fact that recalcitrants in the film were (sarcastically or not) blown up with the pressing of a big red button gave massive fuel to the fire of the “leave me alone or I’ll shoot you” brand of Conservatism, of which Delingpole represents the more tweed-tinged English counterpart of the Tea Party movement in the States.

The widespread use of the term of ‘Ecofascism’ is very interesting in this context, because it exposes the root cause of the vast majority of anti-climate change sentiment: a fear of individual liberties being curtailed in pursuit of the collective goal of stabilising carbon emissions.

This is an important issue. Even as a fully paid-up climate change activist who is incredibly concerned about our lack of action to reduce emissions, I have to admit that I’ve not witnessed much real engagement with this prickly political problem from environmentalists.

The Curtis film was in my opinion ill-advised because the satirical elements could appeal only to those who are already familiar with the tension between persuasion and coercion, yet it did not seek to address the issue explicitly, leaving the 10:10 campaign and its supporters exposed to charges such as those raised by Delingpole and his self-congratulatory cohort of followers.

I think the Ecofascism debate is an incredibly important one to have, and I only wish it was possible to do so without those on the neo-conservative side of the political spectrum muddying the water by trying to claim that evidence for human-induced climate change doesn’t exist, when it clearly does.

When healthcare is debated in the US, the right is not claiming that “poor people aren’t really getting ill” because that would be completely ridiculous; instead the argument is purely economic and political (numerous people have somehow been persuaded by Fox News to protest against state healthcare when they actually are increasingly relying on it, but that’s a different debate). We need the equivalent playing field for a debate about climate change (preferably minus the corporate-controlled media).

It may be the case that the restrictions on individual freedoms necessitated by carbon reduction are too great to impose, and that we should instead let climate change take its course. That’s what the libertarian argument should be.

Instead, commentators like Delingpole put forward an incoherent mix of the freedom argument, and a denial of robust scientific evidence, meaning that most sensible people then disregard the potentially valid arguments being made in the political sphere.

Believing in the science of global warming doesn’t make me a Fascist, and believing that we shouldn’t restrict individual freedoms to limit carbon doesn’t mean that you have to question the consensus of thousands of qualified scientific professionals.

If the No Pressure film furore has taught us anything, it’s that the debate needs more sophistication from both sides.

A Labour/Lib Dem coalition seems like the best solution for the country, with the understanding that there will be another election in the near future.

Gordon Brown has to go. The vast majority of the electorate will be fuming if he remains as Prime Minister. Labour should negotiate a coalition on the basis of a new interim leader (and phrase it as this, not as a permanent PM). David Miliband seems best placed for this.

The Liberal Democrats need to have the balls to stand up for electoral reform and proportional representation. They should not form a coalition unless they get a commitment to a referendum on PR. This will be their only chance of breaking through the two-party system for the foreseeable future, if at all.

In order to save face as they form a coalition (and not just look like the lapdogs of Labour), the Lib Dems must make another demand in exchange for their support, and that is for Vince Cable to become Chancellor of the Exchequer. According to polls, this is exactly what the public wants, and given his credentials and general robust analysis of the financial crisis, the markets should also react well to this.

As for the Tories, they will obviously not take the formation of the above coalition easily. But as long as the Lab/Lib bloc make it absolutely clear that the idea is to have a period of stability before another election then the Tories can’t complain too much. They will, however, fight tooth-and-nail to avoid electoral reform because of how much change it would bring to the political system (ironic considering their campaign rhetoric). The challenge for the Lib Dems is to navigate these choppy waters successfully.

To have a referendum on PR, followed swiftly by another election, would be a massive shift in UK politics, and may be a complete pipe dream. But I honestly think that an explicitly interim government, with a strong, capable and popular Chancellor, is an attractive option for the political system as a whole.

DECC’s policy on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) for coal-fired power stations is all backwards. The policy has been devised around the following lines:

1. burning coal produces lots of CO2 (more than any other power source)
2. we want to try and reduce CO2 in line with our legal commitment to do so
3. coal-fired power stations are important to our existing energy infrastructure and the economic interests aligned around it
4. in theory it should be possible to store CO2 under the ground instead of continuing to release it into the air
5. the privatised energy market makes it hard to regulate effectively without bolding setting new policies that are not in line with ‘free market’ principles
6. let’s say that CCS is definitely possible, and pay some of the energy companies to develop it
7. let’s really hope that somehow it becomes economically viable for these projects to move beyond a demonstration phase (but we can’t actually say how we’d enforce that viability because of 5)
8. let’s ignore the fact that we’ve already committed to definitely reducing these emissions (because we want to keep expanding aviation) and base our policy on “hoping that it will be economically viable”

If it was a rational policy precisely targeted at mitigating CO2 (so that we can avoid the massive economic cost of climate change), rather than mainly keeping power companies happy and  not disrupting ‘the market’, the policy decision-making process would look much more like this:

1. burning coal produces lots of CO2 (more than any other power source)
2. we want to try and reduce CO2 in line with our legal commitment to do so
3. we need to massively change our energy infrastructure starting now in order to reduce CO2 enough
4. let’s put a moratorium on all new coal-fired power stations until CCS has been demonstrated as technically feasible
5. let’s fund proven low carbon technologies such as off-shore wind to the same MW capacity as the new coal stations in 4.
6. let’s concurrently demonstrate CCS works commercially (in one power station in the UK)
7. when 6 is complete, consider allowing new coal power stations with CCS fitted to be built, but only if this is a cheaper option than continuing to expand other proven low carbon technologies like wind
8. ensure that during 7 consideration is taken of the cost of buying and burning coal vs wind (which is free)

At the moment, DECC’s web page on CCS includes the following phrase:

In the event that CCS is not on track to become technically or economically viable, an appropriate regulatory approach for managing emissions from coal power stations will be needed.

This demonstrates that “regulation” and CCS technology are being looked at in separate spheres, and that policy is currently being devised on the basis of economic stability, rather than carbon reduction.

This doesn’t bode well for the destabilising effects of having to rapidly decarbonise the power sector if CCS is proven technically impossible (unlikely) or economically unviable (very likely in the absence of regulation). It would give a much clearer signal to the market if CO2 reduction was the bottom line right now, rather than putting it off.

At first I thought that the article had some merit, but then I went back and read this comment, which made me laugh, and makes absolute sense, so I thought I’d reproduce it here:

As a scientist, a technologist and a lifelong optimist, can I take this opportunity to distance myself as remotely as possible from this abject nonsense. This is not in any way a useful or even coherent response to doom-mongering.

Does the adage “necessity is the mother of invention” mean anything to you, Mr. Wainwright? The problem is already understood and the ingenious solutions are already under way. Suggesting we should artificially delay this process to demonstrate our faith in the inventiveness of future generations is utterly barking. It shows no understanding of how scientific advance and invention happen. It shows no grasp (or admission) of the human capacity for prudence and revolution. It is scientifically illiterate and politically reactionary. It is a sop to people who want to deny the problem or want to shirk their responsibility for it. It bears no relation at all to McEwan’s optimism. It is a truly pishpoor piece of journalism.

Stick to romanticising the lake district. You are so far out of your depth here that the bubbles aren’t even visible from the surface.

A few things struck me.

First of all, I was surprised that Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation was represented as the only NGO. Given that all other witnesses questioned were formally linked to the CRU or the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), I thought it was odd that what is effectively an anti-global warming lobbying organisation was given such credence.

Having said that, it was nice to see some of the more ridiculous claims by Lord Lawson answered comprehensively. For example, he asserts that ‘one single tree’ has been used by climate scientists who use tree rings to trace historical temperature records (outrageously reported by the Telegraph here). This was clearly rebuffed as part of the hearing, which was refreshing. Whether anyone who believes statements by Lawson and others like him will ever see the hearing is doubtful given how selective climate ‘skeptics’ seem to be in the information that they take in.

But the most interesting thing I observed in the hearing was when Dr. Phil Jones (head of the CRU and author of some of the most controversial emails) was being questioned by one of the panel about what constitutes ‘standard practice’ in academic practice. The questioner (who was generally quite hard on Dr. Jones) felt that it was wrong for the full data and computer programs behind scientific papers not to be made available at the time of publication.

Jones made it clear that all scientific methods were clearly documented in the papers, and that it wasn’t standard practice in the field to make all data available when publishing a paper (therefore clarifying that he wasn’t at fault for not doing so from the outset). But he eventually agreed that it ‘might be a good idea’ for all data and computer programs to be made available as standard practice when publishing papers (as opposed to the status quo, where data sources are cited but not actually ‘attached’ with the papers).

It strikes me that taking a coordinated approach to online dissemination of data would help with this issue. For a tiny research unit the size of the CRU (who have a full-time staff of three) it would be much easier to point directly to a URL (the modern equivalent of a footnote) with standardised and transparent data sets accessible rather than collate and re-publish all relevant data-sets themselves. This is exactly the kind of thing that Tim Berners-Lee has been advising the UK Government on (‘opening up’ data) and also why the company I work for (AMEE) has built AMEE Explorer.

The discussion of ‘standard practice’ (see around 1 hour 11 mins into the video of the hearing) seems key in the debate about how climate science can be fully transparent, and I’d like to see some leadership from academic institutions (perhaps research councils) and Government (through the ICO) about how to enable this transparency without massively increasing the Freedom of Information request burden on research units such as the CRU. Hopefully the committee will conclude something along these lines.

As someone who works to help encourage a reduction in carbon emissions because of the overwhelming scientific evidence proving that human activity is causing potentially catastrophic climate change, I felt rather affronted by Hoggart’s assertions that somehow I am an irrational ‘believer’ of some sort. The implication is that because I am trying to do something about reducing emissions, that means that I am blind to any evidence that might be presented that truly questions the scientific consensus. I feel rather frustrated to be patronised in this way.

But more than that, I’m just plain confused about what Hoggart means when he says he is a ‘climate change agnostic’.

Does he mean he is undecided about whether or not the climate is changing at all? Well, even without human activity accelerating the warming trend, the climate would be changing in one way or another as it has done for millons of years, so I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mean that.

Does he mean that he is undecided about the world warming? This would be quite a radical position, as even the most vehement commentators concede that the observed temperature record since mass industrialisation began is accurate.

Presumably he means that he is agnostic as to whether or not humans are causing this rise in temperature. I’m going to work on that assumption and try and clarify what he means by using some basic scientific principles (I’m not a scientist but I got my GCSEs and I think the concepts that require discussion here are simple enough).

Firstly, burning fossil fuels (e.g. coal) releases CO2. To call that into question would require a radical rethink of the foundations of pretty much all physics and chemistry. There are lots of very simple experiments which prove it.

Secondly, CO2 is a warming gas. If you were to take two test tubes filled with air, and increase the concentration of CO2 in one of them before shining a bulb on both, the temperature would increase in the one with higher CO2 concentration because of the insulating properties of the gas (“Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas as it transmits visible light but absorbs strongly in the infrared and near-infrared“). Again, this is a pretty basic foundation of physics/chemistry and the experiment is simple to conduct.

So before it’s even necessary to begin consulting the vast body of evidence collected in scientific journals, I have a working hypothesis that at a macro-level our atmosphere will behave in a similar way to the gas in the test tube in the above experiment. This is my “null hypothesis”: the default position that I will believe until I am offered compelling evidence to contradict it.

What Hoggart seems to be saying is that he won’t accept this null hypothesis. Instead, he will remain agnostic. And whilst remaining agnostic about some basic tenets of science, he has the tenacity to suggest that global warming may be “an irrational belief designed for a rationalist world”. I’m sorry, am I missing something? Where on earth does the irrationality come in?

What I think is a far more likely explanation for Hoggart’s position is that he is, like most of us rational beings, terrified by the prospect that humanity may be rapidly destroying the ecosystem upon which we depend. But unlike myself, who is prepared to take a big gulp and concede that it’s looking pretty likely that this is the case (i.e. as likely that smoking causes lung cancer, or HIV causes AIDS), he hasn’t quite got enough courage to fully confront it. I cannot see any other reason that an intelligent human mind would be able to produce such a paradoxical statement that it is the people who accept the majority view of science who are the irrational ones!

In any case, phrasing it in terms of religious belief (which is exactly what Hoggart does when he proclaims himself an agnostic) is massively over-simplifying the issue. Of course our climate is hugely complex, and there have clearly been errors in various studies, but at no point has any evidence been presented that contradicts the null hypothesis above (in fact pretty much all the evidence supports it and this has definitely not changed in recent months, despite the errors identified). So unless Hoggart admits that it is a spiritual belief of some sort that breeds his agnosticism, I cannot see any justification for such a position.

We may discover at some point that against all the overwhelming odds that a world in which we have much higher concentrations of CO2 is still liveable. For example, scientists’ predictions about the behaviour of natural carbon sinks in a warmer/higher CO2 world may turn out to be wrong, as this is clearly a difficult thing to predict.

Or a technological leap forward could mean that we can grow food without relying on the natural carbon cycle as it currently stands, we adapt to extreme weather by developing sufficiently hurricane-resistant buildings, and we are able to desalinate water enough to withstand widespread drought etc.

It could also be argued that short-term well-being and happiness trump long-term considerations for our race as a whole, and therefore that we should carry on roughly as we are regardless of man-made climate change.

Discussing global warming and our need to act (or not) along these lines would be fine, because it’s a rational debate and one which allows all sides to utilise the valuable knowledge built up through centutries of progress in scientific and philosophical thought..

But to actually try and flip the script so fundamentally that it’s the people who accept the general tenets of the science as the irrational, faith-driven voice in the debate is utter insanity, and I can only conclude that Simon Hoggart is a nutter.