In a report due this week Britain's climate change committee, a government advisory body, is expected to recommend that the nation "should eat less red meat, plant millions of trees and build a new generation of onshore wind turbines," according to The Telegraph.
All this is part of radical plans to hit "net zero" greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 instead of the existing target, which is to reduce the UK's greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon, methane and nitrous oxide, by 80 per cent. ("Give up red meat, plant millions of trees and replace your gas boiler, climate change committee advises," Telegraph, April 29, 219)
It is strange that "green" policies always seem to involve junking perfectly good stuff and building new stuff: new gas boilers, new wind turbines and - unless they propose that like Blackadder's sidekick Baldrick we live on raw turnips - new processing plants for vegetable foods that "taste like" meat.
It turns out that first generation wind turbines have a lifespan of 20-30 years; thus, many are too old, too small and too inefficient to keep working, which, Politico informs us, "means dealing with heaps of waste created by green energy - particularly the high-tech blades made of exotic compounds that are difficult to recycle."
How this can be good for the environment is anybody's guess, even without the latest madness of Natural England which, at the behest of Wild Justice, is replacing general licences for culling nuisance birds like crows and pigeons, which are in no danger of dying out, thus ensuring the demise of threatened songbirds ('Campaigners block farmers licence to kill nuisance birds', Telegraph, April 25, 2019).
A visiting Martian would be bemused to hear the climate change committee explain that in order to avert a theoretical environmental catastrophe we must stop producing energy from available natural resources (coal, gas, oil) because they are "running out" - even though reserves of coal still exist and a new deep coal mine is to be opened in Cumbria. And when Man succeeds in inventing from these very sources plastic, a material that won't run out, they insist that it is a menace to the Planet.
We found that animals could eat grass - often in places unsuitable for growing crops - thus turning an indigestible foodstuff into something that we can eat, but since farm animals produce methane - entirely naturally - we must abandon grazing land to "nature" and take up enormous tracts of land here and overseas to grow vegan-approved food.
Carbon is essential for life, but we are intent on eradicating it from the atmosphere because it is "causing climate change." For the same reason we propose to cover any land not used for growing vegetables with trees - even though the Anglo-Saxons who cleared the trees from the county of Essex wielded their seaxes long before the industrial age.
Since everything that humans do has an impact on the Planet, the logical outcome of the green philosophy is to eradicate humans. Environmentalists Sir David Attenborough and Chris Packham have been honest enough to admit that this is the plan. Packham says he will not have children in order to spare the Planet, and will encourage women everywhere to follow suit (Interview, Daily Telegraph, April 3, 2017), while Attenborough has called human beings a "plague on the Earth" whose numbers must be controlled.
A visitor from Mars might be equally puzzled to learn that Man's positive impact on the Planet - draining the marshes (with windmills still in existence) and clearing the brambles, as well as providing clean water and sewerage systems to prevent human disease ‑ is being ignored. The trouble is that making things better for humans means fewer of us will die, thus interfering with nature's way of decreasing the surplus population, as Ebenezer Scrooge might put it.
Environmentalists present their ideology as fresh and new, and attractive to the young, which might be even more confusing for our visiting Martian when they also support the mass culling of the unborn in order to save the Planet, denying personhood to unborn humans while granting it to rivers.
Far from fresh and new, green philosophy reeks of stale old Malthusian philosophy and a religion as old as the hills - paganism ‑‑ which involves the sacrifice of new thinking and new generations. But it is offered with all the naivety of people who have no real experience of the world they would defend ‑‑ an approach even greener than the little green men from Mars.