These days green activists try to quash reasoned debate on the environment by
claiming that all of science, and all of the world’s experts, are on their
side. But here’s an Inconvenient Truth. They aren’t.
There are many scientists, really properly good ones with really properly good
qualifications, who maintain that man’s impact on the environment is
minimal. There are even more who say we just don’t know.
Then you have Danish egghead Bjorn Lomborg, who studied a vast range of eco
reports before presenting his findings in a book called the Skeptical
Environmentalist.
Let us take the Exxon Valdez tanker crash as an example. After it happened men
with sandals came on the television to call the accident an environmental
catastrophe. We saw shots of sticky guillemots in their death throes, and,
of course, we knew it was all our fault for driving 4x4s and turning up the
central heating whenever it gets a bit chilly.
But Lomborg presents an interesting fact that wasn’t covered by the news
reports. Yes, 250,000 birds were killed by the spillage, but this is also
the number killed each day in America from collisions with plate glass. In
Britain alone 250,000 birds are killed every two days by domestic cats.
Sadly, though, the true impact of man’s activities on the environment are
almost always swept away by headlines suggesting we’ll all soon be
“consigned to the dustbin of evolutionary history”. Not in a thousand years,
but maybe by teatime if we don’t watch out.
Then you have the Kyoto protocol. This is seen by most people as a political
device that would save the world if only George Bush and his oil-rich neocon
advisers in the White House would sign up. But Lomborg disagrees.
Kyoto calls for industrialised nations to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 30%
below what they would be by 2010, but, as Bjorn says, this would only
postpone by six years the temperature we’d reach in 2100. So to reach the
Kyoto goals we’d be spending anything between £100 billion and £350 billion
each year and then we’d have to pay the costs associated with global warming
anyway.
In other words we’d spend all the money we should be using to feed the poor
and heal the world’s other problems so that we don’t have to rehouse 200m
Bangladeshis. Only to find that in 2106 we’re going to have to rehouse the
Bangladeshis anyway.
A big story? You’d have thought so, but it simply doesn’t get a look in. If
anyone dares to suggest that global warming isn’t man’s fault, or that it
won’t be such a bad thing, or that technology will save the day — like it
always has done — you will be ignored, or you will be hauled onto the Jeremy
Vine show so that George Monbiot can call you a lunatic.
Some of the green propaganda is driven by a post trade-union vision of world
equality. You’ll note they never attack fat lazy northerners who won’t get
off their arses and fit loft insulation; only middle-class mums with 4x4s
and families who use cheap airlines to get to their second homes in
Provence.
Then you have plenty of other greenies who need funding for their research and
they know it’ll all dry up if they announce that everything’s fine.
This is probably why, in 1997, the World Wide Fund for Nature announced that
two-thirds of the world’s forests had been lost for ever. When questioned,
it admitted that the report on which this was based had never existed. In
fact, the truth is that there are many more forests in the world now than
there were in 1950.
But of course, it was swallowed whole by the media, who have an endless
appetite for bad news, and now we have the world’s governments leaping on
the bandwagon too, because they’ve realised that they can capitalise on our
guilt with a raft of new green taxes. And George Monbiot is on hand to
dismiss as a madman anyone who dares complain.
You know in your heart of hearts that the world is constantly changing, that
continents move and that ice ages come and go, but you’re being browbeaten
by a slick and unstoppable industry into believing that because of your car,
and your central heating boiler and that cheap weekend break you took last
year to Prague, the gods are angry and that unless you pay Mr Blair another
£5,000 a year they will visit upon you a plague of locusts and a storm that
will last for at least a thousand years.
So, and this is an inescapable fact, there is about to be a complete change in
the sort of cars we buy. This happens only once in a while. In the Seventies
we all had four-door saloons like the Ford Cortina because Britain was a
depressed communist state and no one had any imagination. Then came the hot
hatchback, which afforded us the practicality of the saloon but with the
power of an E-type Jag. And then that was replaced by the Chelsea tractor.
Now the onslaught of miserablism from the greens means that four-wheel-drive
cars will be vandalised the instant they are left alone, so you will need
something else. But what? Well obviously this doesn’t work if you have a
school run to think about, but if you just have a 4x4 as a style statement,
might I suggest you replace it with an Alfa Romeo Brera? I should stress
straight away that it is not the fastest car in the world. The 2.2
(front-wheel drive) has the performance of a plant. The 3.2 (four-wheel
drive) I tried is better, but even so whenever I mashed my foot into the
carpet I sometimes thought, “Oh no! It’s broken.”
But examination of the data shows it to be a heavy car that takes seven
seconds to reach 60mph and about a week to reach a hundred. A problem? For
me, yes, but if you are used to the performance levels of, say, a Shogun,
the seven seconds to 60 is going to feel like you’re stapled to the front of
a Eurofighter. So you’ll be just fine.
You’ll be fine with the comfort, too. It rides beautifully and despite the
tall tyres handles nicely. Actually “nicely” is the wrong word. It is
exceptionally good.
Less successful is its interior. There’s not much space in either the back or
the front, and this being an Alfa Romeo nothing does what you expect it to
do. If, for instance, you wish to turn down the radio you push a knob on the
steering wheel which is marked with a telephone symbol. And everything is
written in Italian.
So why am I recommending it? Well, there are two reasons. First, as you drive
along you can feel the Alfa-ness of this car, the little tingles and the
droplets of feedback that you don’t really get from anything else in this
class. If you truly like cars, you will truly love the Brera.
And with it being so slow, you’ll have plenty of time on every journey to
appreciate this.
But there’s another bigger reason. The way it looks. Styled by Giorgetto
Giugiaro — a man I hate because I can never remember how to spell his name —
it is one of those cars that forces you to turn round after you’ve parked it
up at night, for one last look before you go inside.
The car I drove was red, and that’s wrong. In black, with tobacco seats, this
would be one of the sexiest cars made. The triple headlamps, that flowing,
tapered arse, the lean-forward stance, and best of all the sense that while
it’s Italian and unusual and exotic, it’s not a silly-money showoff’s toy.
Prices start at £22,800, and even for a 3.2 litre V6 with all the toys on
board, you’ll still be charged less than £30,000. There’s nothing here to
fan the fire of green fury, there’s nothing to make you feel guilty. You
haven’t bought a car to drive around in like your hair’s on fire, you
haven’t bought a car to lord it over all and sundry at the lights. You’re
not a yob. You’re not a bore. You’ve bought something for one reason
only: because it’s beautiful.
I think that could be the next Big Thing.
And what makes the pleasure so doubly satisfying is that you have a
four-wheel-drive car, yet no one can tell.
