Dail Mail: Littlejohn - Carbon advisers? Just empty the bins

- by Richard Littlejohn

My latest edition of Nice Work comes from the People's Republic of Islington, where the council is anxious to employ a 'Carbon Reduction Adviser' on thirty grand a year.

It's just one of 3,500 new jobs created by local authorities to cash in on the 'global warming' hysteria.

"Islington Council is leading the way in tackling climate change..." the advert boasts. You could have fooled me.

Islington may be leading the way in deliberately creating traffic congestion, vindictive parking enforcement and turning almost every road in the borough into a crazy golf course.

It could mount a convincing case for leading the way in stabbing, street crime, litter, graffiti and child molestation in council care homes.

But saving the planet? No one would ever confuse the Holloway Road with the Brazilian rainforest, even without the CCTV cameras every five yards.

 

Where Islington has always led the way is in hiring graduates of pretend 'universities' for lucrative non-jobs at the taxpayer's expense. But it doesn't have the field to itself.

 

Just as I predicted, the latest employment bonanza for the Guardianistas is the 'climate change' racket.

Town Halls across Britain are estimated to have spent more than £100 million recruiting an army of green warriors.

Take Hull. A couple of weeks ago, the council was woefully unprepared for the floods which swept through the city. Residents washed out of house and home were left to fend for themselves.

I'm sure it came as a great comfort to them to learn that Hull now has 30 staff beavering away on 'environmental issues'. It's just a pity they weren't beavering away building dams, instead of dreaming up exciting new punishments for people who put the wrong kind of rubbish in the wrong kind of sack.

In Tower Hamlets, the poorest borough in London and arguably the most deprived in Britain, 58 employees have job titles which contain the words 'climate change' or 'global warming'. Tower Hamlets still has the worst recycling record in the country, as well as some of the Nottingham has 22 staff dedicated to dealing with 'issues around global warming'. The city also boasts 70 'green champions'. We're not talking Robin Hood and his Merry Men here.

East Hampshire, hardly a hotbed of the Guardianistas, is employing someone to go round schools showing impressionable pupils Al Gore's propaganda flick An Inconvenient Truth - even though scientists remain deeply divided on what the 'truth' about climate change really is.

As far as the bien-pensants are concerned, the debate is closed. The truth doesn't enter the equation, it's an article of faith.

Global warming is the new multi-culturalism. And it can only be addressed by a vast new bureaucracy, backed up by a raft of laws, inspectors, monitors and enforcers.

This is Gordon Brown's Britain. Under his stewardship, 800,000 people have been added to the public payroll over the past ten years. Council tax has doubled.

Thirty grand seems to be the going rate for an eco-warrior; the Toyota Prius the company car of choice - although I notice that Taunton council is buying a fleet of pushbikes for its staff to use on official business.

Meanwhile, a parliamentary report has just concluded what we all knew anyway - that collecting rubbish once a fortnight in the name of saving the planet is reckless, unworkable and insanitary.

Not that I expect it will make much difference. Councils will carry on fitting microchips in wheelie bins, slashing open plastic bags to check for the 'wrong' kind of rubbish, taking householders to court for putting out their bins on the wrong day.

They won't give up 'alternate weekly collections' in a hurry, nor will they sack the legions of carbon footprint advisers and global warming co-ordinators they have hired.

None of this is about saving the planet, it's about - as usual - making them feel good about themselves and showing us who's boss.

By my reckoning, one Guardianista gets you two dustmen. So they could have hired another 7,000 binmen for the money they've wasted on eco-warriors.

If councils must employ these people, then at least make them do something useful. Put them on the dustcarts; give them a broom and make them sweep the streets; or send them down the tip to help the recycling effort by sorting our bottles, plastic, paper waste, left-over food, disposable nappies and potato peelings into separate piles.

Then see if they think saving the planet is such Nice Work.

Comments

[John]

"...scientists remain deeply divided on what the 'truth' about climate change really is."
99% of scientists examining global warming and climate change are deeply divided against 1% of scientists whose research is funded by corporations such as ExxonMobil. I don't understand the willful resistance to the overwhelming evidence that the current and increasing climate change is man-made and poses the greatest threat to our existence. Is it that you don't like being told what to do? Because it's often associated with 'liberals' or 'lefties'? Even if you do think that concern about global warming is being exploited to create and expand bureaucracies, please don't dismiss the very real threat. The evidence is there for people to examine, and time is running out.

[Paul Biggs]

John - the 99% and the 1% Exxon claim is just silly. The argument is over what drives climate change, not whether or not climate change is happening. Even the much hyped Lockwood and Frohlich paper says that climate is driven by solar factors up to about 20 years ago. There has been very little 'global warming' since 1998, andthat year was boosted by El Nino. There has been no ocean warming for the past 5 years, and solar activity is poised for a big fall in the coming decades, raising the possibilty of 'gobal coolng.'