Is Supporting North Sea Oil and Gas an “Extremist” Position? The New Statesman Thinks So
The intellectual poverty of the intellectual green Left
“I think supporting new oil and gas licences in the North Sea is an extremist position”, explained the New Statesman‘s “Executive Editor (Digital)” Oli Dugmore in a provocative social media clip. And here we are indeed provoked. Typically, we should ignore such tantrums. But the claim and its supporting argument are irresistibly illuminating of a section of the British Left, whose worldview is best explained as a developmental disorder. Founded by socialist intellectuals Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and its pages filled by such lights as George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes and Christopher Hitchens, the progressive intellectual’s weekly now both eschews thought and rouses the lowest possible denominator to its causes. But perhaps its current staff have confused their own organ’s decline with the degeneration of the atmosphere.
Dugmore’s account of his position is, you will not be surprised to discover, not grounded in a deep understanding of the subject. It is, in its entirety, something that resembles an Extinction Rebellion media training crib sheet. It begins as follows:
The International Energy Agency has been really clear that new oil and gas extraction and consumption is not compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees. 1.5 degrees is the limit we agreed at the Paris climate accords, and the reason for that is because past 1.5 degrees, what happens? It’s the acidification of our oceans, so that’s the collapse of marine ecosystems, the fish that we eat and rely on to support our human population. It’s the widespread bleaching of coral reefs. It’s increasingly severe droughts and wildfires and the knock-on consequences of our food systems.
The problem with taking on people who are armed only with such a litany of factoids is that it is like being required to decode someone else’s fever dream in order merely to legitimise having your own position. Each item in Dugmore’s stream of not-quite-consciousness is a claim he has no understanding of, yet which would require an article as long as this one – or longer – to take apart; it adheres in the green ideology-addled mind through emotional attachment, not reason.
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