Memo to Prince Charles: CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is plant food.

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For those of us who still believe in logic, reason, empiricism, rationality, commonsense, economy reality and our inalienable right not to have trillions and trillions of our pounds, euros and dollars flushed down to the toilet to no purpose whatsoever, listening to the Prince of Wales’s pronouncements on “man made global warming” is becoming an increasingly trying experience.

In the Spectator today, I interview an Australian geology professor called Ian Plimer whose brilliant new book - Heaven And Earth - is rightly being hailed as the one that is going to nail once and for all the crazy myth that man’s contribution to “climate change” is remotely significant, let alone something we should worry about or waste money trying to stop.

As Professor Plimer observes with characteristic Aussie bluntness: “CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is plant food.”

Yet so many of the ruinously expensive policies being formulated on our behalf by everyone from Barack Obama to EU president (and former Maoist) Jose Manuel Barroso to Ed Miliband to (God help us) David Cameron’s Conservatives are based on the scientifically groundless urban myth that human generated CO2 (quite minuscule, anyway, compared with the quantities of greenhouse gases volcanoes belch or even cows fart) is the most dangerous substance on earth.

Prince Charles is fond of telling us that we only have 100 months left to save the earth. (Apparently down to 96 now, or so he claimed in his recent Dimbleby lecture). But I’d say the time we have left to save the world is quite significantly less than that. Not from the perfectly natural process of climate change, of course, but the far far greater threat of climate change alarmism.

Unless those of us with more than half a brain cell unite and act soon, the earth is going to fall prey to  the most destructive, expensive, suicidally pointless taxation and regulation and protectionism in global economic history. We simply cannot afford any longer to allow the likes of the Prince Of Wales, Al Gore, NASA activist James Hansen, Lord Stern and their amen corner in the mainstream media to go on pushing their ludicrous scare story unchallenged.

Right now, out there in the real world, are numerous genuine ecological challenges that urgently need addressing: the decline of fish (thanks European Union fisheries policy!); pollution; diminishing water tables; deforestation; overpopulation; and the great eco-disaster that are bio-fuels. The Quixotic quest to arrest “climate change” - something that has been happening for 4,567 million years regardless of man’s input - is a silly and expensive distraction.

What’s particularly galling about the most outspoken supporters of climate change taxation and regulation is that many of them either are rich enough not to be affected by it or - worse - stand to make vast fortunes as a result of it.

The Prince of Wales is a case in point. When you’re on a salary of £18 million, as he is, you’re probably not going to be bothered overmuch by tiny details such as your gas and electricity bills doubling because of green taxes on carbon emissions. You’re not even going to mind, that much, that if Barack Obama’s new $7.4 trillion cap and trade tax on carbon emissions is introduced the global economic recovery is going to be set by a generation. Indeed, it’s probably very much in the Prince’s interests that we should all be rendered so poor that we can’t even afford to run our cars any more. It will leave Britain’s roads free for Charlie to pootle about as freely as he wishes in his bio-ethanol-powered Aston Martin.

Poop! Poop!

By James Delingpole
http://www.jamesdelingpole.com