No, Dale Vince: ‘climate denial' shouldn't be illegal

Spectator

13 hours ago

You can tell the environmentalists are on the back foot. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband is issuing doomsday proclamations in parliament, branding Reform and the Tories 'unpatriotic' for refusing to go along with his deranged Net Zero policies. And now Labour donors are also calling for 'climate denial' to be criminalised. Because nothing says 'we're winning the argument' like locking up your opponents.
Green tycoon Dale Vince, a man whose woeful politics can be accurately inferred from his appearance, donated £5million to Labour ahead of the last General Election. Ever since, he's been publicly dispensing increasingly crazed – and often totally self-serving – advice to the government he helped put into office.
After Miliband announced this week that he was to give the first of what he intends to make an annual climate statement in parliament, Vince took to X to congratulate the energy secretary, and urge him to go further: 'Good move from Ed, it's time to tell it like it is. I'd make climate denial a criminal offence – given the incredible harm it will cause, even by slowing down progress to Net Zero.'
This isn't a new idea. Deep greens have been agitating for it for years. Last month, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, Elisa Morgera, called for 'media and advertising firms' to be held criminally liable for 'amplifying disinformation and misinformation by fossil-fuel companies'. Because, as we all know, the scientific method is all about some bureaucrat deciding what the truth is and then imposing that on the press and civil society.
These are not the proposals of a movement that is confident in its arguments. The more that voters bristle against elite greenism, refusing to accept that their lives must become more expensive and less free in order to meet arbitrary climate targets, the more greens start fantasising about the 'deniers' being led away in handcuffs.
Ordinary people care about the environment, they're just not buying the eco-austerity the elites are selling. And rightly so.
Indeed, for all of Vince's talk of the 'incredible harm' done by 'climate denial', this seems infinitely more true of Net Zero. Cheap and reliable energy is what allows human beings to flourish and prosper. The headlong dash towards so-called renewables, by contrast, has given us nothing but soaring energy prices and deindustrialisation.
Miliband warned darkly this week about the supposed 10,000 excess deaths due to heatwaves over the past four years, blithely ignoring the fact that more lives are lost to cold than heat. The brass neck is almost impressive, given Miliband's government has not only worked to make it more expensive for everyone to heat their homes, but also tried to rip away winter fuel payments from freezing pensioners.
As for supposed 'misinformation' in the climate debate, the greens haven't got a leg to stand on. Any old cobblers about climate change is now presumed to be legit by the elites, provided it is sufficiently apocalyptic. The BBC's climate editor, Justin Rowlatt, is so cavalier about the facts he was rebuked by the corporation's own complaints unit in 2022 for 'misleading' statements about climate deaths. In a Panorama documentary, Rowlatt suggested that the 'death toll' from extreme weather is 'rising around the world and the forecast is… that worse is to come'.
The truth, as the Beeb had to sheepishly concede, is the opposite. The death toll has actually fallen. And not by a little bit. Deaths from climate-related disasters have actually declined by 99 per cent over the past century, thanks to economic growth and new technology fortifying humanity against the brutality of nature. Shall we arrest Justin, too, Dale?
From the fossil-fuel workers who backed Donald 'drill, baby, drill' Trump to the gilets jaunes revolt in France against Emmanuel Macron's punishing eco-taxes, ordinary people have had enough of being made worse off to salve the consciences of rich greens posing as saviours of the planet. No wonder Vince is rattled. Now the environmentalists hope to do with censorship what they have failed to do with persuasion. Don't let them get away with it.