Roger Harrabin is positively revelling in his role as agitator for the green movement today, with an article on the views of Unilever boss Paul Polman, who is apparently demanding decarbonisation.
This is an astonishingly poor article. For a start, we have to wonder why the views of a businessman nobody has ever heard of are considered newsworthy. Of course it fits the BBC's agenda, in a way that "people dying from lack of fossil fuels" just doesn't ("lifting them out of poverty", Roger's concession to the facts on the ground, is not exactly the same as "stopping them dying", in my opinion). Again and again we see the news agenda being set by whatever green-tinged press release happens to pop into its correspondents' inboxes of a morning. GWPF press releases, or even things like the Ecomodernist Manifesto go straight in the bin.
The content of the Polman piece is derisory:
"The reality is, if we don’t tackle climate change we won’t achieve economic growth.”
Mr Polman said Unilever had faced business costs €300m-to-€400 million (£216m-to-£316m) higher than normal due to extreme weather.
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a breathtaking display of ignorance, given that there has been no discernable change to extreme weather (unless you accept the IPCC's Orwellian inclusion of daily temperature maxima and minima as "weather extremes"). What is it about green bilge that Roger Harrabin finds so enticing that he feels that it is worthy of dissemination to a wider audience and without a word of comment? Is there an agenda here perchance?
Perhaps we get a clue later on in the article, where we get a quite stunning display of Koch derangement syndrome.
But for every CEO who makes promises in Paris this week, others will warn against a rush away from CO2.
America’s fossil fuel giants, the Koch Brothers, are spending $900 million on political advertising to make their case.
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a dirty piece of political propaganda, inviting the reader to believe that the Koch brothers are spending the best part of a billion dollars on climate change activism. But if you read the linked article and you find that the money is actually being spent on things like Tea Party groups and the American Chamber of Commerce.
GWPF gets a mention too, with Harrabin describing them as "fossil fuel advocates". You can't imagine him describing the Grantham Institute as an environmental advocacy group, can you? (You also have to wonder how all 1290 articles about nuclear power on the GWPF website have escaped his notice.) GWPF refer to themselves as a "think tank", but it appears that Harrabin considers this too polite a term to use for the non-green side of the climate debate, being reserved for organisations such as E3G, who are honoured with just this description in the same article.
Finally, we shuld also note who Roger felt he should talk to for his article:
Harrabin claims that the BBC "obsesses about fairness and impartiality". You can't fault his sense of humour at least.