We''ve never had it so good

Unless you”ve been on an eco-friendly holiday in far distant cave, you would have noticed that it”s been a bit wet recently. Flood waters the size of small countries covered half of Romania, many of Bucharest”s streets were temporarily turned into rivers, and – the real sign of a crisis – the Pro TV news team have been slowing down their footage, turning it into black and white and stamping massive words like TRAGEDY, FLOODS and DISASTER across the screen. If ever there were an award for ”making a drama out of a crisis” then the Pro TV news boys would win it. Anyway, back to the point, which is that unseasonal weather caught Romania off guard and some severe flooding hit much of the southern part of the country. The rains and resulting floods have been followed by some rather gorgeous, sunny days: a real Indian summer.

Listen to just about anyone with a voice and the finger of blame for such freakish weather will be pointed squarely and firmly at the all-encompassing Devil that is global warming. Blamed for just about everything these days from hurricanes to floods to heat waves and even summer snowfall, global warming is the new enemy. In a blame culture it is the perfect target: it cannot answer back, while to jump to its defence marks one out as a lunatic. Indeed, the most public opponent of the myth of global warming, Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish scientist whose 2001 book The Sceptical Environmentalist blew apart what he calls the environmental ”litany” has been labelled ”worse than a Holocaust denier.”

In this litany, global warming is just one way that we nasty, evil, diabolical human beings are ruining the planet: this unique gift from nature entrusted to our care. We are hunting species after species into extinction, destroying natural habitats, polluting the atmosphere and ultimately sentencing the human race to a long, painful death. We are expected to pity our poor children, for God only knows what kind of world we will leave them.

All this is utter hogwash. The facts, you see, do not bear out the doom-mongering theories. In fact, we have never had it so good. More people have access to fresh drinking water than ever before; more people can read and write than ever before; the world is cleaner than ever before; fewer people are starving than ever before; people live longer than ever before. It appears then that we aren”t doing too bad after all. Of course there are floods, of course there are warm days in October, of course there is snowfall in August. It has always been thus!

Alas the green lobby do not see it that way, as their latest target – air travel – bears witness to. Flying in this day and age of global warming and pollution is a sin, apparently. Mayer Hillman, author of How We Can Save Our Planet, wrote in the UK”s Independent last week about how our increasingly energy-profligate lifestyles were speeding up the death of the planet: ”An increasing majority of the population is inadvertently complicit in a process that is already reducing the quality of life of literally billions of people, and which will almost certainly cause the deaths of millions in the near and longer-term future,” Hillman wrote. He also argued that carbon use per capita must be reduced by 85 per cent by 2030 (without troubling to mention why). He suggests each person should have an annual carbon ”allowance.” One return flight to New York from London represents about three years worth of carbon ”allowance.” So, looks as though our holiday plans are buggered. Hillman also said that the time for ”awareness raising” on green matters is over: now, ”only urgent and ruthless government action will do.” To support him, the preposterously self-important communist-liberal commentator George Monbiot (you can read more of his crackpot views at www.monbiot.com) has even gone as far as to say that ”flying across the Atlantic is now as unacceptable as child abuse.”

This would be laughable were so many people not taken in. But they are, for the green lobby is in the fortunate position of being seen to be ”on the right side.” They want to save the planet, ergo they are the good guys. How could we not want to save the planet? My answer to that question is that the planet does not actually need saving, at least not yet. Bjorn Lomborg goes further, insisting that instead of saving the planet, we will in fact do it harm: the Kyoto Protocol in particular risks siphoning off vast amounts of money to ultimately futile projects; money that could be spent providing clean running water to the relative few who do not yet have it.

Population growth, increased natural resource usage and global warming do not actually present threats to mankind”s survival. They do create problems; but we have always been able to deal with them. The human being is a clever animal. If global warming does at some remote point in the future threaten our existence, we will deal with it. ”Oh! Remember the dinosaurs” say the doom mongers. Well, dinosaurs didn”t build desalination plants or oil refineries. They didn”t put dinosaurs on the moon or send probes into deep space. They didn”t shop in supermarkets or buy groceries on the internet. They simply roamed around all day hunting for things to eat, which, when you think about it, is in fact what we would be doing right now if the green lobby had existed 10,000 years ago. Or at least we would have done to the age of 30 of course, when we would all have died.

Enjoy life. And envy your children, don”t pity them.

* Craig Turp is the publisher of In Your Pocket, a series of locally produced bi-monthly city guides printed all over Central and Eastern Europe. He flies on aeroplanes regularly.