News: Tony Blair - Return of a Shop-soiled Messiah.

According to The Guardian (14/03/2008) Tony Blair has found yet another retirement occupation to add to his assorted roles as a Middle East fixer, divinity lecturer and merchant banker. He is to spearhead a task force aimed at picking up the broken pieces of last year’s Bali World Climate Conference and broker an international deal that will lead to a 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. Welcome back to the politically safe ground of climate alarmism Mr Blair!

For an experienced and ruthless politician with a rather tarnished reputation, the climate bandwagon has so much to recommend it. No one is likely to criticise you for trying to save the planet. Scepticism about even your most ill-founded and exaggerated claims will be silenced by a sententious barrage from the media powerhouses of the green NGOs. Targets for CO₂ reduction are so far in the future that there will be no need to kick them into the long grass; they are there already. If all else fails, and the media notice that you are not making any progress, then blaming the American and Chinese governments will win public approval and get you off the hook. As one wag said when asked why the Blair government was so keen on saving the planet, ‘Well, you know, it’s so much easier than saving the National Health Service’.

Until Gordon Brown slipped behind the big desk in Downing Street last year, the political leaders in the battle against climate change were Al Gore, Tony Blair and Arnold Schwarzenegger; a triumvirate that many global warming sceptics must have found reassuring. Why, they pondered, is this political campaign led by two failed politicians with credibility problems and a body builder whose brains are reputed to be in his biceps? Doesn’t this rather suspect dramatis personae tell us something about the credibility of the evidence? Surely if humans really are changing the climate then other, more trustworthy champions, would have been forthcoming.

According to The Guardain’s report, Mr. Blair is being ‘backed’ by a not-for-profit organisation called the Climate Change Group, which is supported by ‘businesses’. A quick look round their website reveals that their membership is a roll-call of leading multinationals: BP, Dow Chemical Company, Duke Energy, Goldman Sachs, Marks & Spencer, News Corporation, Tesco and Virgin catch the eye, and there are a couple of dozen other similar names.

This line-up should present the environmental pressure groups with a spin-doctor’s nightmare. For years they have been telling us that any think-tank that is ‘in the pay of big oil’, ‘industry’ or ‘multinationals’, is completely untrustworthy and dedicated to misleading the public about global warming. Obviously, they say – and everything does seem to be so obvious to the enviro-lobby – they are simply propaganda machines for vested interests; don’t listen to them and don’t trust them. Everything these people say is contaminated by the source of their funding.

Now, it seems, we must forget all that and put our trust in a shop soiled politician who is ‘backed’ by a not-for-profit organisation which has just the same kind of financial support that they have condemned in the past. But in the crazy world of the climate debate such inconsistency will probably pass unnoticed.

This story broke on the same day that Gordon Brown asked the EU to reduce VAT on green products such as eco-friendly fridges. That should go down just fine with multinational consumer goods manufactures. In fact this proposal is a compelling reason for them to fund organisations like the Climate Change Group that can be relied on to keep global warming on the front pages and promote an ever growing market for such products.