The Earth is in trouble and “if we don’t act now, an entire way of life will be destroyed”, says Tim Stanley in The Telegraph. Saying that will lose me friends, but just look at Canada: hundreds have died in the extreme heat the country has been experiencing and most of the town of Lytton recently burned to the ground. It’s true that politicians and big business are acting to tackle man-made climate change, but we’re doing “too little too late”. And as we fight a rearguard action here, the Conservatives need to get their act together. Otherwise, they will lose to a green-left alliance that uses environmentalism to redistribute power and money. “If you want to save capitalism, you’ve got to go green.”
Leaders will have to be blunt with voters. We must all fly and drive less because you “can’t consume your way out of an ecological crisis”. Next, we must return to an older Toryism – to thrift, to localism, to the preservation of landscape. After all, what is more conservative than “an old lady lying down in front of a bulldozer to protect a tree from a digger”? It sounds like I’ve “drunk the green Kool-Aid”. But too few of us listened to those who knew the climate crisis was coming. Now it’s here, we have no time to quibble over facts. “Al Gore was right.”
Read the full article here (paywall).