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‘Why Al Gore is too chicken to debate me’
...At the end of last month, one of Britain’s most controversial climate change sceptics - Monckton, the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, or whom I prefer to call ‘Christopher Monckton’ - was invited by Republicans to testify on climate change at the House Energy & Commerce Committee, one of the oldest standing committees in the US House of Representatives, alongside a ‘celebrity witness’ offered up by the Democrats: none other than Al Gore. But something dramatic happened while Monckton was in the air. Upon landing in the US, he was told that he could not testify after all; that Democrats had vetoed his appearance; that, in the words of one Republican insider, Gore had ‘chickened out’ of debating him.

‘It is believed that never before in the history of Congress has the Minority been refused its choice of witness’, Monckton tells me. He had been invited by Joe Barton, the ranking Minority (Republican) member of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, to give testimony alongside a then unnamed ‘celebrity witness’ put forward by the Majority (the Democrats). But as soon as the Democrats told the Republicans that Gore, maker of the movie An Inconvenient Truth, was to be their ‘celebrity witness’, and the Republicans revealed that Monckton was to be theirs, the Democrats reportedly ‘immediately refused’ to allow Monckton to testify. And given that the Minority had ‘failed’ to come up with a respectable, appropriate witness, the Majority took the unusual step of choosing a new witness for them. ‘The one person they did not want testifying alongside Gore was me, for I would have destroyed forever what little credibility he still retains’, says Monckton, cockily. ...

...Monckton says environmentalism has become a ‘new religion’ that is intolerant of dissent. He believes Democrats refused to allow him to testify because ‘they know, from earlier testimonies, that I know enough about the science to expose [Al Gore’s] lies in detail’. Certainly the Democrats seem keen to protect Gore, the failed president turned global prophet of man-made doom, from one of his sternest, most relentless critics. In 2007 Monckton wrote a widely distributed essay titled ‘Thirty-Five Inconvenient Truths: The Errors in Al Gore’s Movie’, and he helped with the distribution of Martin Durkin’s climate-sceptic film, The Great Global Warming Swindle, to schools in the UK after it was revealed that the government planned to send Gore’s film to schools. Gore, honoured with the Nobel Prize and fawned over by governments, the media and both moderate and radical greens, is more used to being treated as a secular version of the Dalai Lama - that is, Beyond Criticism - than as a mere mortal whose ideas should be submitted to the messy and potentially embarrassing rigours of public debate. Little wonder House Democrats vetoed Monckton. ...

...It is their conviction that they are, in Gore’s words, engaged in a ‘generational mission, with the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose’, where The Science plays the role of The Truth and the CO2 plays the role of Evil, that environmentalists can brook no dissent or ‘heresy’. Theirs is a profoundly moralistic movement, which comes complete with stories of good and evil, and, in Gore’s words, with ‘the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence’ - and like all religious-style ‘generational missions’ built on simplistic morality and mythical scenarios of future, weather-driven punishment for our sins, it does not lend itself to rational discussion or alternative viewpoints.

Hence its non-adherents are not just labelled ‘wrong’, but morally suspect: they are ‘deniers’, ‘heretics’, even psychologically flawed (2). Real scientific investigation always involves dissent and debate; so do normal political projects. But a ‘shared and unifying cause’ that is stuffed with goodies and baddies and is designed to allow those ‘suffering from a loss of meaning in their lives to find hope’ (yes, Gore again) does not. History tells us that. ...

...And in a recent debate with climate change sceptics at a film festival in Amsterdam, Franny Armstrong, director of the much-lauded (including by Miliband) The Age of Stupid, predicted - without a flicker of shame - that in 50 years’ time, when ‘hundreds of millions of people have died [as a result of runaway climate change]’, there will be an ‘environmental court [and] climate sceptics will be charged with those murders’ (3).

In short, the words of sceptics are murderous. These sceptics - Monckton, David Bellamy, Nigel Lawson, Bjorn Lomborg - will be as guilty of murder in Bangladesh and other parts of the world reportedly threatened by climate change as if they had strangled those poor people with their own hands. The erosion of the distinction between words and actions, and the explicit attempt to make it socially taboo to raise awkward questions about the politics and science of environmentalism, speaks to a rather terrifyingly censorious streak in the green outlook, and reveals the extent to which non-debate is being normalised across society. This is something worse than a behind-closed-doors conspiracy to protect Al Gore’s ‘lies’ from irritating challengers, as Monckton seems to see it. It is the slow but sure, instinctive and all-encompassing creation of what John Stuart Mill called ‘custom’: a new general way of seeing things, a new kind of conformism, of the sort which, as Mill said, ‘stands as a hindrance to human advancement’. Custom is the enemy of freedom and progress, said Mill: ‘The progressive principle, in either shape, whether as the love of liberty or of improvement, is antagonistic to the sway of Custom.’...

...Indeed, the rise and rise of environmentalism, which springs more from the traditionalist, aristocratic desire for conservationism than it does from old left-wing projects for progress and development, can be seen as representing the death knell of once-progressive left-wing politics. ..