When Nigel Lawson died in April, most obituaries of the former chancellor found space to note his recent lobbying on climate change. Clark agreedwith comments by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, claiming that climate change was unrelated to the country’s bushfires. Clark wrote an article for The Telegraph headlined “I’m no fan of the Chinese Communist Party – but on the environment, they’ve got it right,” which claimed that while western countries like the UK are “ramping up the alarmist rhetoric in the hope of extracting carbon-cutting pledges,” countries like China, Russia, India will not be “making their people poorer in the name of a greener future.

Clark criticised Miliband, who is Shadow Secretary of State for Climate Change and Net Zero and former leader of the Labour Party, for committing a future Labour government to making loss and damage payments to developing countries especially vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change. Clark wrote an article for The Daily Mail criticising the government’s plans to replace 600,000 gas boilers with heat pumps by 2028 as part of an attempt to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050. The Office of Budgetary Responsibility (OBR), Bank of England, and the IMF have been among those to have predicted recessions that have not – yet – happened.

It is fair to say that the book is more polemical than analytical, despite the peppering of numbers in the text. Nevertheless, we should also explore ways of incentivising imports of zero-carbon goods and services. Given the failure of the world to come to an end, it is tempting to say, just as we do when religious cults and other fantasists make doom-laden predictions which fail to come to pass: well, the whole thing must be a hoax.

In a Telegraph comment piece titled, “Myopic politicians are wilfully blind to the truth about green energy”, Clark wrote: 42 Ross Clark. Rather than setting carbon targets, we should be setting targets for fresh water, for education, for eradication of disease and particularly for women and girls’ education – because that’s where we know the world is failing at the moment, particularly in places like Afghanistan. Cutting Bangladesh’s carbon emissions, and impoverishing it in the process, in the hope that maybe the sea might not rise quite as much as we expect?

Huge strides were made to relieve poverty in developing countries, and to reduce disease and improve access to fresh water and so on. If Rishi Sunak caves in to the wind turbines zealots, the lights will go out in Britain… and perhaps on his premiership, too,” Daily Mail, November 29, 2022. Ross Clark is a British journalistwho has written for the Spectator, the Times, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, and the Sun.