Yet from left to right, the warming that is occurring today is taken as man-made, and many have made this opinion the central plank of their political campaigns. For reasons I find very hard to fathom, the environmental left movement has bought very heavily into the fantasy about anthropogenic global warming and the fantasy that humans can prevent or turn back the warming cycle.

This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline of the left, and the decline of the left’s optimistic vision of altering the economic nature of things through a political program. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice.

This is a fantasy. In truth, environmental catastrophism will, in fact, play into the hands of the sinister-as-always corporate interests. The nuclear industry is benefiting immeasurably from the current catastrophism. Last year, for example, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission sped up its licensing process, and there is an imminent wave of new nuclear plant building. Many in the nuclear industry see an opportunity to recover from the adverse publicity of Chernobyl in the story about carbon dioxide causing climate change.

More generally, climate catastrophism is leading to a re-emphasis of the power of the advanced industrial world, through its various trade mechanisms, to penalize Third World countries. For example, India has just produced an extremely cheap car, the Tata Nano, which will enable its poorer citizens to get about without having to load their entire family onto a bicycle. Greens have already attacked the car, and it won’t take long for the World Trade Organization and the advanced powers to start punishing India with a lot of missionary-style nonsense about its carbon emissions and so on.

The politics of climate change also have potential impacts on farmers. Third World farmers who don’t use seed strains or agricultural procedures sanctioned by the international ag corporations, major multilateral institutions, and banks controlled by the Western powers, will be sabotaged by attacks on their “excessive carbon footprint.”

Here in the West, the so-called “war on global warming” is reminiscent of medieval madness. You can now buy indulgences to offset your carbon guilt. If you fly, you give an extra 10 quid to British Airways; B.A. hands it on to some non-profit carbon-offsetting company, which sticks the money in its pocket and goes off for lunch.

But what is truly sinister about environmental catastrophism is that it diverts attention from hundreds and hundreds of serious environmental concerns that can be dealt with – starting, perhaps, with the nitrous oxide emissions from power plants. Here in California, if you drive upstate you can see the pollution from Los Angeles all up the Central Valley, a lot of it caused, ironically, by the sulfuric acid droplets from catalytic converters! The problem is that 20 or 30 years ago, the politicians didn’t want to take on the power companies, so they fixed their sights on penalizing motorists, who are less able to fight back.

Emissions from power plants could be dealt with now. You don’t need to have a world program called “Kyoto” to fix something like that. The Kyoto Accord must be one of the most reactionary political manifestos in the history of the world; it represents a horrible privileging of the advanced industrial powers over developing nations.

The marriage of environmental catastrophism and corporate interests is best captured in the figure of Al Gore. As a politician, he came to public light as a shill for two immense power schemes in the state of Tennessee: the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oak Ridge Nuclear Laboratory. Gore is not, as he claims, a non-partisan green; he is influenced very much by his background. His arguments, many of which are based on grotesque science and shrill predictions, seem to me to be part of a political and corporate outlook.

In today’s political climate, it has become fairly dangerous for a young scientist or professor to step up and say: “This is all nonsense.” It is increasingly difficult to challenge the global warming consensus, on either a scientific or a political level. Academies can be incredibly cowardly institutions, and if one of their employees were to question the discussion of climate change he or she would be pulled to one side and told: “You’re threatening our funding and reputation – do you really want to do that?” I don’t think that we should underestimate the impact that kind of informal pressure can have on people’s willingness to think thoroughly and speak openly.