Centuries' End

Anyone who claims to be in any way on the Left, do you, or do you not, regret the defeat of the miners in 1985?

Of course, that one is reversible. If your definition of the Left is "whatever I happen to dislike, including opposition to fossil fuels", then it explicitly includes David Cameron. and at least implicitly it includes Margaret Thatcher.

It is insane that this country sits on vast reserves of coal while refusing to extract it, choosing instead to fight wars for oil in the Middle East and to rattle the sabre at the land of Gazprom.

I am also all in favour of nuclear power, as Gordon Brown was while David Cameron was still calling it "a last resort". It is highly unionised, and one of the principal lobbyists for it is Unite. Of course, the manner of extracting the fuel for it is hardly carbon-neutral.

We need an approach to climate change which protects and extends secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, which encourages economic development around the world, which upholds the right of the working classes and of non-white people to have children, which holds down and as far as practicable reduces the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and which refuses to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich.

Climate change is supposed to be anthropogenic. The human race makes the weather. The burning of carbon is the foundation of the working class, the foundation of the Left, the foundation of human progress (problematic though that term is), the foundation of civilisation.

We need a celebration of the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past.

The problem with the world is not that it has people in it. Which people, exactly? We all know the answer to that. Rather, people produce wealth, material and otherwise. People are wealth, material and otherwise.