Stephen Tindale, the former head of Greenpeace UK, has a post up at the RTCC website. Tindale has come to the attention of this blog before, you may recall, because of his newfound level-headedness on environmental issues now that he is no longer trying to keep a big green scaremongering machine solvent.
In today's post he is speaking in similar vein, taking environmental campaigners to task for their lack of pragmatism. This is welcome, of course, although unfortunately his idea of pragmatism seems somewhat different to mine. So while he takes his fellow greens to task for their visceral anticapitalism and their on-off hatred for technological advancement, he seems remarkably keen on carbon capture and storage, an idea that could best be described as "rather far-fetched". His suggestion that renewables are the best source of energy is similarly preposterous.
Nevertheless, it's fun to see him laughing at the absurdity of Naomi Klein:
Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything is the current vogue read among climate campaigners. This is basically a diatribe against capitalism (though, interestingly, cannot be downloaded for free – unlike the excellent Sustainable Energy – without the hot air - by uber-pragmatist David Mackay.
And there are hints that the "greens are homicidal maniacs" line is getting noticed.
Hundreds of thousands of people – most of them women and children – are killed each year by indoor air pollution. Should they stop wanting clean cookers?
I think it's fair to say that for most environmentalists, they should.