He was asked about funding for farming and pointed out that he agreed with the Conservative election manifesto. That was hard! But he did say that he was meeting the NFU later today – I wonder whether environmental NGOs will be in the room too – I hope so.
He was asked about his voting record on climate change – an issue which does not primarily fall within the Defra remit – and he was able to say that he voted with the government when he was a minister. That was hard too!
And he was asked about Brexit in general where he said some interesting things about consensus and agreement.
And he was asked about whether he would get on with the Prime Minister who has just brought him back into the cabinet. That was hard!
But he wasn’t asked about whether he still thought that the Habitats Directive was absurd – and how he would like to shape environmental protection in a post-Brexit age.
Gove did well in terms of sounding good. He is a classy performer. But he wasn’t asked a single difficult question, particularly about his job, which is Defra Secretary of State.
The Today programme did very poorly as it often does on the environment. Today seems to think that the environment consists solely of climate change – is that the influence of Roger Harrabin or what? Gove was thrown a few easy balls and batted them to the boundary with aplomb.
Why was he not asked whether the EU environmental protection would remain in place and if not, what was going to be removed?
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Similar shower on Sky news as well. Lots of questions on Brexit, his relationship with Boris and other such gossip stuff the popular news love. Very little on the environment, and nothing of any substance.
Paul – thank you for that. Irritating isn’t it.
Sadly it’s not just Today that thinks the environment consists solely of Climate Change a lot of environmental and conservation groups do too. Like the one that told me they didn’t want to do a campaign on ecologically damaging Scottish Sporting Estates because it would ‘dilute’ their other campaigns on climate change/fossil fuel divestment. Never mind that it could help rejuvenate their aging and declining membership, increase their media profile and broaden their scope to actually achieve anything, nothing can get in the way even theoretically of fighting evil carbon.
Waste (i.e Chris Packham’s comment on Springwatch yesterday that if we stopped wasting 30% of our food we could give nearly a third of our farmland back to nature), population growth, ungreen/green consumerism, environmental education, rainforests etc very, very rarely get a mention for their own sake. Even with the emphasis on carbon emissions the enviro/conservation NGOs are inconsistent and inadequate. In all the time I’ve supported the RSPB not once have they suggested to the membership they could take personal action to reduce carbon emissions by driving a smaller car – would also save money, make the roads safer and cut air pollution. Why not (think I know the answer)?
Bottled water is one of the most wasteful and idiotic products that imaginable and the CO2 made in its production and transport is horrendous and totally unnecessary yet both the Woodland Trust Scotland and the Wildlife Trusts have entered into partnerships with bottled water companies – £30,000 Highland Spring and £10,000 Nestle respectively. These trusts are very big on the CC message and if a fraction of the money saved by not buying the crap that is a bottled water went to good causes it would dwarf those sponsorship sums.
It will be a very long time if ever before the actual damage of any climate change overtakes what’s been done and lost due to campaigning being reduced to brand Climate Change. Replacing rainforest with palm oil plantations to produce ‘green’ fuel for gas guzzlers takes the biscuit, but if anyone is to blame its the NGOs who screamed for little else but reducing carbon emissions – then we got a political rather than rational reaction. I haven’t participated in any form of climate change campaigning for years specifically because I feel it does far more harm than good – the plot’s been lost.
“It will be a very long time if ever before the actual damage of any climate change overtakes what’s been done and lost due to campaigning being reduced to brand Climate Change”
I’m sorry for having to be robust here, but that is uninformed nonsense. Your idea that the effects of climate change will only overtake other environmental impacts in a long time, or never is grossly ill-informed. Is this for real? Are you really that badly informed?
Climate change alone, even if there was no other environmental impacts could destroy our civilization, wipe out over half the Earth’s biodiversity and completely alter the history of life on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years. I can and regularly do support such assertions with the latest scientific research.
For clarity I repeatedly point out that even if anthropogenic climate change as a phenomenon did not exist we would still be facing major crises as regards both our biodiversity, and our civilization/economy/food supply system. I have repeatedly been critical of the way some focus purely on climate change as if that problem is solved, everything is hunky dory. I have repeatedly been critical of hiving off these different environmental problems and impacts as if they are separate, when they are highly interlinked and interrelated.
But I’m sorry, you are engaging in a type of climate change denial here. For the record I regard climate change denial as any form of denial of the threat and likely impact of climate change.
Please give reasons instead of just marking my comment down. If your have got rational and evidence based reasons for disputing what I say, then put them in writing.
I am not a climate change denier at all, I do not believe that Climate Change should have been extracted from the full range of environmental issues and put above everything else as if all the issues aren’t interconnected. To me it’s a secondary factor at best/worst, the things that are unequivocally causing massive damage right here and now – population growth, deforestation, inefficient agriculture, production of waste – also produce CO2 as a byproduct that may or may not cause additional problems in the future. But I think stopping deforestation now for the sake of stopping deforestation is a better plan than talking about predicted climate change affecting forest that will no longer be there at this rate and has in fact led to major forest destruction to provide ‘biofuels’.
I’ve listened with horror to problems being caused by land use change and overfishing being appropriated as examples of ‘climate change’ obscuring the real source of the problem and thereby any chance of remedying it. The worst enemy of fighting climate change are many of those who are supposed to be fighting it – they’ve pissed people off with their stridency, melodrama and often poor rationale. Whether or not they say they believe in climate change it’s made it so easy for politicians to ignore any other environmental topic as the delightful Mr Gove has just shown, as I say brand Climate Change. If it hadn’t been for that there would almost certainly now be a specific, and I believe successful (how could it not be) campaign against not only driven grouse shooting, but also the vast area of Scotland bare of trees through a ludicrously high red deer population for easy stalking that additionally increases the number of fatal road accidents! But it’s not because you can’t point to a grouse moor and say ‘This is the direct result of climate change’ after all it’s only real environmental and ecological devastation right here and now affecting more than 10% of the Scottish uplands rather than a CC projection. Try getting something done that doesn’t involve carbon emissions…frustrating.
Thanks for your response Les. I can agree with most of the points you make, all except the issue of priorities, and logical priorities.
You stated “It will be a very long time if ever before the actual damage of any climate change overtakes what’s been done and lost due to campaigning being reduced to brand Climate Change. ”
That’s untrue and quite contrary to the best possible scientific evidence we have. Also the relevant levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions is not a matter for speculation as there are rigorous estimates of this. Most definitely the predominant issue is the burning of fossil fuels.
In addition, it was the beginning of the industrial revolution which set in place population growth, industrial scale farming, consumptionism, and all the other problems you highlight. For instance the global population was less than 1 billion before the industrial revolution and had taken over 1000 years to double. In only just over 200 years after the beginning of the industrial revolution, the population is over 7 billion.
For the record I personally believe that only a complete re-writing of the economic model, and our value system will address these problems. I am all for these problems being addressed as an integrated whole. In fact it is essential.
No one knows exactly at what point dangerous uncontrollable climate change will happen. This is the tipping point at which simply reducing our carbon emissions will no longer halt the warming. It could happen very soon, or later. The so called safe figure was arbitrarily set at 2C, but the study which this was derived said there was nothing safe about 2C and the risks of dangerous climate change began at 1C which we have already past.
StEB1 I think you may not have read Les’s comment correctly. What he is saying, it seems to me, is that the future reduction in CO2 etc will be lower than could have been achieved if it were not for counterproductive ‘green’ actions, lack of focus on better actions and increased resistance caused by simplistic campaigning. And that the difference between what has been achieved and what might have been achieved is greater than the change to date. That is an arguable proposition (with which I disagree) but not ‘uninformed nonsense’, and it seems to me that it is you who are closer to being in denial by not addressing the challenge he lays down.
“StEB1 I think you may not have read Les’s comment correctly. What he is saying, it seems to me, is that the future reduction in CO2 etc will be lower than could have been achieved if it were not for counterproductive ‘green’ actions”
With all due respect that is complete nonsense. The failure to reduce CO2 emissions is nothing whatsoever to do with “green actions” and everything to do with the power of the fossil fuel industry, other vested interests, and how they finance politics and politicians. The whole narrative is entirely false. I can and have contradicted this argument with massive evidence, but this blog is not the right format for me to do it.
I am not trying to be disrespectful or argumentative. My concern is effective action, and false narratives lead to a lack of focus on the core problems.
I could easily give references to contradict this narrative, but I’m not sure if they are allowed.
Les, you’d got a lot to say for yourself just now when you were sounding off. Why don’t you actually address what was supposedly incorrect with my points. I am suggesting that you can’t.
I’ve not answered you because I’ve been away weeding my mother’s garden and also hammering away trying to drive up signatures for my petition to get a proper economic study done into driven grouse shooting http://www.parliament.scot/GettingInvolved/Petitions/PE01663 which I believe could (no WILL dammit!) take away the ‘grouse moors are good for jobs argument’ and knacker them politically. My very, very humblest apologies for that.
I stand by what I said – the actual drivers of increasing atmospheric CO2 which is just about everything that is directly damaging for the environment such as deforestation have been neglected in favour of the stand alone CC message. That to me has been a disaster – I repeat without apology the example of the biofuels/biomass fiasco. Realistically the climate can only warm or cool so if it is warming I think there is a degree of caution needed in asserting that this is human induced and that it will ncessarily result in runaway or even large temperature rises. That’s dependent on a lot of extrapolations and assumptions about the interaction of a large number of variable, little understood and I suspect even unknown factors. Yes we are changing the composition of the atmosphere and that certainly needs flagging up and serious scrutiny, but not hysteria verging on religous type dogma, sadly there’s been a fair degree of that. I.e the ‘environmentalist’ writing in the Independent who claimed we needed to cut down ancient forest to stimulate regrowth which would take more carbon out of the atmosphere than protecting old growth trees. Ethically dodgy – definite ecological damage carried out on the ASSUMPTION that it would counteract PRESUMED ecological damage, now turns out that the original supposition is scientifically dodgy anyway. See what I mean?
Thanks to a childhood fascination with ice age mammals I’ve been interested in climate change for more than forty years and within my lifetime have seen the story of the advance and retreat of ice caps going from happening very slowly over thousands of years to something that happened in a few decades, even faster than the worst CC projections. So the dire predictions of wildlife being unable to cope rang a little untrue with me. Lo and behold some of the research coming in is showing wildlife is coping better than expected, it had to cope in the past after all. The real problem is not being able to move due to habitat loss which is just a bad thing full stop.
If I have sounded off then I’ve a bloody good right to after what I’ve seen and heard and what it’s done to the environmental movement. I could go on and on – i.e how Climate Challenge funding has skewed what local groups do because there is no equivalent Environment, or Waste, or Wildlife in Town Challenge fund, but I’ll leave it there. I can assure you there are lots and lots of decent, reasonable people who have been pissed off by the dogmatic, strident near hysterical way CC has been rammed down their throats.
Mark, I have to take issue with 3 issues here.
1) Your claim that Michael Gove is “a classy performer”. Personally I don’t consider being good with shallow flippant sophistry and evasion – “classy”.
2) That climate change “does not primarily fall within the Defra remit”. Climate change is having an impact on everything Defra deals with, and will in the future have a massive impact on everything Defra deals with.
3) Your flippant ill informed remarks that “Today seems to think that the environment consists solely of climate change”.
See my other response to @Les Wallace so I don’t have to repeat my points. Yes, there is a problem with solely focusing on climate change. However, let’s be very clear about this, if we do not address the threat of dangerous climate change, and there is no coherent plan in place to do this, the COP21 Paris Climate Change agreement will not do it (please read Professor Kevin Anderson’s blog for more insight), all other environmental issues are irrelevant. What I mean by this is that the impacts of dangerous climate change would be so severe as to override all other impacts, cause massive biodiversity loss, and the possible collapse of our civilization.
Please look up the history of the 2C figure on Carbon Brief. You will see that the way this figure was derived, the risk of dangerous uncontrolled warming i.e. when feedback loops such as the release of methane kick in, starts at 1C of warming, and there is nothing safe about 2C of warming. We are already past 1C of warming. In other words we are in the danger zone, and as the warming gets greater the risk of this tipping point being engaged, becomes greater.
I’m not putting in links and references because I’m not sure if your blog accepts them.
However, I find that some degree of climate change scepticism, and denial of evidence is unfortunately common with conservationists.
Your criticism of Today being solely focused on climate change, when there are many other environmental impacts may be correct, but I do not listen to it, because the state of current political analysis is dire. This election just gone proves that political analysts, political pundits and political journalists have got no idea what they are talking about. All their analysis is based on past precedents, which are no longer relevant.
However, what I am criticising is your presentation of this. You do not seem to acknowledge what a serious threat climate change poses, where if we do not effective address it, and there is no current plan that will effectively address it’s threat, it’s impact will be so overarching as to make all the other impacts irrelevant.
To effectively avoid dangerous climate change means immediately reducing our carbon emissions by as much as possible, as quickly as possible. There are no current effective plans to achieve this. As Professor Kevin Anderson points out the COP 21 Paris climate change agreement assumes negative emissions technology to actually suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. Such technology does not yet exist, and may never be feasible.
SteB1 – you don’t have to persuade me about climate change’s importance. But asking Gove about climate change is a bit like asking the Secretary of State for Scotland about the NHS in England – not his primary or even secondary responsibility. Defra has a big climate change mitigation remit, that’s true. But since we’ve just had a Brexit general election (we are told) and this is one of the leaders of the Brexit campaign, who is now in charge of a department whose focus will change after Brexit then maybe asking him for his first thoughts on the subject might have been a good idea – particularly because he has mouthed off on the subject already.
Gove can be a classy performer and was pretty good today. But he wasn’t asked the right questions.
It would be a good idea to subject the whole of the Conservative cabinet to greater scrutiny, but this is what they avoid.
I actually disagree with Jeremy Corbyn on Brexit. The huge problem with Brexit is that there has never been any form of proper study of the likely impacts, how it would work, could it work etc, etc. One of the problems of course is that any study of it would have to be based on an assumption of what the UK position would be, and of course the Tories refuse to give any concrete account of what their strategy is. Unfortunately this vacuum of knowledge allows the those good with clever, but empty and meaningless spiel like Gove, a field day.
However, getting back to the point. One of your commenters @Les Wallace went much further than you by saying “It will be a very long time if ever before the actual damage of any climate change overtakes what’s been done and lost due to campaigning being reduced to brand Climate Change. “.
Note the “ever”. This is clear climate change denial which I could contradict with massive evidence i.e. full scientific references. Yet this comment has 9 upvotes, and only one down vote mine.
Therefore I can only assume that the people reading your blog are a form of climate change denier. This is because my points are firmly based on scientific evidence. I have sent you an email with basic references for my points. All of which entirely contradict @Les Wallace.
What I am concerned about is the way my points are being dismissed. It’s difficult to gauge what people really think and believe about climate change, but if they are downvoting points you can support with massive evidence, then something is clearly very wrong.
I don’t think SteB1 you can legitimately brand anyone on here a climate change denier and certainly not those who have contributed to this thread thus far. Nobody should dispute the potential impacts of climate change but to present your arguments in the way that you do smacks of intolerance and is precisely why many people are no longer listening. For what its worth I can’t stick Gove but he is an accomplished performer and was very well-prepared this morning. The BBC will have to “get up earlier” to catch him out (which might be difficult for the Today team!).
Gove was once a member of the “Today” team – sez Wiki
“I don’t think SteB1 you can legitimately brand anyone on here a climate change denier and certainly not those who have contributed to this thread thus far. ”
Then explain and support this assertion because it is quite contrary to the best scientific evidence?
“It will be a very long time if ever before the actual damage of any climate change overtakes what’s been done and lost due to campaigning being reduced to brand Climate Change. “
I believe that Gove’s interview on 5Live (with Nicky Campbell, I think) produced commitments to look again at the ivory ban and re-examine the science of the badger cull.
I have previous with our new friend in education: he is slippery as an eel and always unpredictable. He has a track record of being prepared to upset vested interest groups – it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if he took on agri-business.
Gove is quoted in the meejar as saying he will “exercise appropriate humility, and listen and learn” – which seems unusually apt for a politician parachuted into a brief for which he has had no previous experience.
He might consider getting a more manly dog – at least for photo-opportunities.
I too heard the interview. Kinda wish I hadn’t.
Whilst Gove is a particularly unsavoury character, any returning Tory minister was likely to be bad for the environment (and no, I agree that the interviewer didn’t ask any searching or pertinent questions).
I guess Gove is who we have (and he is bound (ha!) by the manifesto) and we all now have a duty to jump on any hint that the Tories are looking to weaken or abolish environmental protection.
If they listening, this particularly refers to the NGOs, who need to ensure that their houses are in order & united. I feel their biggest test is yet to come.
My response was to this assertion “It will be a very long time if ever before the actual damage of any climate change overtakes what’s been done and lost due to campaigning being reduced to brand Climate Change. ”
This assertion is quite contrary to the best possible scientific evidence. I sent references to Mark by email to support my points.
On the Guardian where I can use full references, quotes from them, I can prove my points quite easily.
There are different levels of climate change denial. Many people claim to accept the evidence and the need for action. But when you start going into detail of what needs to be done, they start muttering about “alarmism” etc, and it is clear that they are both in denial of the seriousness of the threat climate change poses, and what needs to be done to prevent dangerous climate change.
Please read Professor Kevin Anderson’s blog and read the article “Is the climate change academic community reluctant to voice issues that question the economic growth paradigm?” – 23 August 2016. It deals with how even supposed academic experts on climate change distort their thinking on what needs to be done to address climate change. Don’t take my word for it, read what a proper expert on the subject says.
I too heard the interview, whilst driving. I do wish Today would realise that they are putting the nation at risk by causing high blood pressure, palpitations and loud shouting, especially when they conduct dreadfully lazy interviews with Tory ministers, and especially with Tory Secretaries of State for the Environment. What a joke – Gove is ‘entirely unfit’ to be Environment Secretary according to Caroline Lucas in The Independent, but it would nice to be able to make a judgement on this based on his answers to probing and pertinent questions by the Today team. No chance based on what they asked him today. Is it deliberate?
The Tories don`t give a toss about the environment or global warming, what`s new? Putting a twerp like Gove in the job says it all.
I wonder who is more horrified, environmentalists at Gove’s appointment, or Gove at being sent to the Cabinet equivalent of Siberia ?
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