In an articletitled “The trouble with Greta Thunberg”, Clark wrote that he was tired of the “fawning attitude” the media was taking towards the climate activist. He also wrote that if MPs were to follow the demands of the protest group, they would “ruin the economy while simply exporting Britain’s carbon emissions to countries which have not burdened themselves with legally-binding targets”. The Daily Mail published an article by Clark titled “My inconvenient truth: Ross Clark accepts that the planet IS warming. In an article for The Daily Mail, Clark commented on Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s plans to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars from 2030, disputing the efficacy of electric cars in reducing carbon emissions.

Clark began a Spectator article titled “How did climate doomsters get the Great Barrier Reef so wrong? The article concludedthat, “we are still a long way from efficient CCS, but there is nothing to say that it can’t outflank technologies such as hydrogen and battery storage, to become a large part of a transition to zero carbon.Clark also cited an article written by Michael Shellenberger for Forbes Magazine advocating for the development of nuclear energy as opposed to renewables, which has since been removed. We’ve had 30 years of vested interests standing in the way of change,’ Rishi Sunak declared in his conference speech in Manchester. ROSS CLARK: How absurd you may be banned from selling your own home if you don’t meet draconian new eco rules (which just happen to cost the earth),” The Daily Mail, April 6, 2021. He also claimed that “no one really has any idea of how Britain can reach this [net zero] target without crashing the economy” and that “thanks to the Climate Change Act, our economy now has a very large weight attached to its feet”.

Few Conservatives will argue with that, nor with the idea of introducing sanctions for benefit claimants who refuse to look for work. In a Telegraph comment piece titled, “Myopic politicians are wilfully blind to the truth about green energy”, Clark wrote: 42 Ross Clark. Children will be taught, for example, the ‘impact of diet choices for land usage and environmental impact’ […] That isn’t educating children to think for themselves; it is trying to train them to be the next generation of environmental activists. Notwithstanding these rare pieces of useful advice, Clark’s book is further confirmation that the fringes of British conservatism are stuck in an intellectual cul-de-sac, unable to accept fully the science and economics of climate change for fear that it threatens a rigid adherence to free-market fundamentalism. It involves nothing less than decarbonising the British economy – energy, manufacturing, transport and agriculture included – all in the space of just a few decades.A rich, Western businessman or politician gets to fly in their private jet and carry on as they were – and then they pay a bit of money to offset it. And that’s the point of Forum: to publish the books that rationally challenge groupthink, to ensure that important contributors to the key debates of our time who have unfashionable views aren’t closed down. The elites’ preaching is annoying, but far worse is the fact that they’re prepared to impoverish the world’s poor and prevent them from developing. A continuum of the anti-globalisation movement, which has leapt upon climate change as a vehicle with which to further its battle against capitalism.

Clark agreedwith comments by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, claiming that climate change was unrelated to the country’s bushfires. Electric cars may promise us a greener future but they are a non-starter until they make one I can drive to Scotland in,” Daily Mail, November 16, 2020. Clark concedes that “the world is warming and there are many reasons why we should want to cut carbon emissions and adopt cleaner forms of energy”, but also argued that “some of what passes for warnings on climate is sheer flight of fancy” and “is not climate science, nor science of any kind; it is science fiction, dreamed up to serve a particular political outlook”.Climate scientists and campaigners, he suggested, could undermine living standards with their efforts to replace oil, coal and natural gas with renewable power and other alternative technologies. O’Neill: Just 30 or 40 years ago, radicals in the West wanted to help the developing world achieve our standards of living. Clark referred to the policy of developing renewable wind energy as “all of this wind madness” before suggesting that “the current moratorium on fracking […] is utter madness”. Clark is the go-to journalist for the comment desks of conservative newspapers seeking to downplay climate change.

Many climate campaigners have been saying so for years, but now Sustainable Aviation – a trade body which represents the UK aviation industry – seems to agree, at least in the case of less well-off passengers. When Nigel Lawson died in April, most obituaries of the former chancellor found space to note his recent lobbying on climate change. After arguing that Britain’s energy crisis “has been made much worse by energy policies which for a decade and a half have doggedly pursued the objective of cutting carbon emissions without any regard to the costs”, Clark also claimed that the Government had “deprived Britain of what could have been by now a very productive native shale gas industry”. He criticised the new GCSE – an academic qualification in a particular subject taken by secondary students in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland – as “green propaganda”, an “introduction of political spin” and “the latest manifestation of the old Marxist trick of trying to advance your politics by drumming them into the impressionable young”. Would Britain be right […] to pay reparations to developing countries on the basis that the industrial revolution started in Britain and we, therefore, have high historic carbon emissions?In his new book ‘Not Zero’, journalist Ross Clark suggests the Government has bitten off far more than it can chew, with a policy agenda that threatens to make Brits a lot worse off, with almost no benefit to the environment.