Save the West Country, save the world...

THE North Cornish coast in the early 1990s seems, on the face of it, a rather unlikely place for a revolution...

But the end of an old world order has to start somewhere - why not the small village of Delabole? It was here, 33 years ago, that the UK's first commercial windfarm was built.

My earliest childhood holidays were just a couple of miles away; the turbines - china white against the skyline - visible from the front of the bungalows.

The structures were the legacy of local dairy farmers who, having lost a barn roof in stormy conditions, began to consider if they couldn't in fact harness "the damn wind" for good. And in doing they were not just entering a new UK industry, they were starting one from scratch.

Back then this technology was new and strange enough to attract visitors - 100,000 in just a few years. I still remember standing outside the site's tourism office, staring up at the giant blades with a sense of awe. 

Fast forward three decades and there are, at the last count, more than 11,000 turbines across the country - many on breezy hills like those at Delabole, others standing in, or even floating on, our coastal waters.

If you were to believe reporting on, let's say, GB News or in the pages of the Daily Express, the rapidly expanding sector does about as much for our energy needs as the flimsy children's windmills you see on the beach.

Yet figures out only this week reveal that between April and June this year a record 52 per cent of national power came from renewable sources - mostly wind and solar.

Throw nuclear into the mix as well and over that three month period less than a third of our electicity was generated by the filthy fossil fuels which, in my own lifetime, were utterly central to keeping the lights on.

If you need further proof that change is in the (cleaner) air, consider what has happened to coal. In 1990, when Delabole's windfarm was still in the planning stage, 80 per cent of all the UK's electricity relied on burning the black stuff.

Today it has been all but eliminated from our systems; the country's last coal-fired power station closes in a few days' time and a ludicrous proposal to open a new mine in Cumbria has been cut to ribbons in the courts. A country which once ran on coal, consuming more than 200 million tonnes a year, is now back at levels of usage not seen since the 1600s.

The transition has been driven not - as Liz Truss might claim - by "Net Zero zealotry". Instead the markets, those very forces which Conservatives once lionised, have come to a clear conclusion - green is in actual fact cheaper.

This leaves us with the pitiful sight of the real zealots - Trump, Tice, assorted right-wing commentators - arguing not only against the science but the economics. Severing ties with volatile oil and gas markets is nowadays as much about new jobs and saving money as it is about saving the planet.

The power sector is arguably the biggest success story of the green transition, the one in which change is finally becoming apparent after decades of dither. But in other areas of the economy, more environmentally-friendly options are also gaining traction.

I have a dim recollection, from early in my journalism career, of being taken a drive round a car park in an electric vehicle. Back then the industry was still struggling with suspicions that your average EV handled like a milk float and had the battery life of an ageing Game Boy.

It is a perception still keenly encouraged by the climate sceptics - "EVs," they insist, "are unreliable, sluggish and will never catch on". Yet last year almost one in five cars sold worldwide was electric. In Norway, the internal combustion engine increasingly looks like a museum piece, with almost 95 per cent of all new vehicle registrations all-electric.

It is again worth remembering that this shift is being made possible because the world today is not the one of Cornish ice cream and visits to an electricity generation company because it was cheaper than the otter park. Back in the early 90s, the battery which powers a Tesla Model S would have cost just shy of a million dollars. Today it's almost a hundredth of that.

These graphs showing plummeting costs and rising efficiency are something to cling onto at a time when climate science shows so much other data moving at a frightening pace in the wrong direction.

I write this blog in a week in which floods have once again devastated homes nationwide. Last week conservationists warned that this summer has seen a record fall in butterfly sightings. And last month was the hottest worldwide since we started taking note of such things in 1880. Warnings about the damage we have done, and are continuing to do at pace, emerge daily.

And yet if we are to change the disastrous trajectory we find ourselves on, the work begins with making the case that it can be done. 

This is particularly important at a time when the fossil fuel sector and its willing cheerleaders in politics and the press pivot from outright denial to something altogether more insidious.

Nigel Farage, one of many hard-right politicians bent on frustrating environmental progress, recently told one broadcaster that he didn't dispute the science of climate change. Instead the excuse for inaction is increasingly bound-up with an insistence that the solutions are simply too costly, unworkable or inherently unpopular. 

Yet in the power and transport sectors these arguments are ever more untenable. The trends I've alluded to show the increasing viability of the technology which underpins the change. And opinion polling suggests broad support. No matter how many Telegraph articles rant about "range rage" or explodable batteries, 93 per cent of EV owners have no plans to switch back to petrol.

It is of course undeniable that we can't invent our way out of every problem. To reduce emissions from agriculture and aviation - each responsible for a huge proportion of greenhouse gases - we will almost certainly require changes in the way we live our lives. 

At the minute there's an uncomfortable silence around the reality that we may in the end have to eat fewer burgers or fly less often. Expect the indignant populists to pounce when, at last, more mature politicians try to start these conversations.

These same saboteurs are so dangerous because they represent a strand of campaigning increasingly divorced from reality. It is a tendency which trades on instinct and outrage rather than what the facts might have to say. It wilfully stokes conspiracy theories in hope of further eroding trust in experts and empirical evidence. In their eyes green policy is another sign of "wokery" or, worse still, the latest attempt by shadowy global elites to exert control.

Among those most immersed in a hard-right alternate reality it is hard to see that numbers or data sheets will carry the day. These are people, lest we forget, who often flirted with the possibility that Covid was a hoax even as thousands of their fellow citizens died. Trying to convince them of the systemic advantages of green energy in the years to come seems a thankless endeavour.

And yet it is important to remember that support for tackling climate change - indeed a belief that our governments should and must go faster - is strong across both the developed and developing world. 

Opportunists who steal pages from the Trump playbook might find that trashing the planet isn't the vote-winner they might think. Part of the reason that Rishi Sunak's cynical attempt to turn climate action into a wedge issue failed is that a good solid chunk of the electorate rather like the idea of a habitable world for their children and grandchildren*. 

It is to this decent, rational majority that the positive trends I've pointed to must be presented, often and at length. If we don't take action to tackle climate change it is not because it is not possible to do so. Many of the solutions are available, affordable and ready to be deployed at scale if only we have the courage to proceed.

Of course not every intervention will be universally liked. While polling certainly suggests a healthy majority endorse the new government's decisions to lift the long-time ban on building new onshore wind and increase solar capacity, it is easy to imagine how this support may waver when the panels and pylons start to arrive in a citizen's own area.

Here those who recognise that the green transition is essential must counter controversy by spelling out the advantages. Not only can clean energy save the planet it can save ratepayers money. And it can bring jobs to areas long robbed of investment. The most dramatic change to our economy since the industrial revolution must always be framed as an opportunity as opposed to an ordeal.

Another difficulty in driving change now - when so much depends on it - is that achieving net zero is a generational challenge. It will be the work of all nations across many decades. And it is undoubtedly hard to persuade many of those struggling to see their way to the end of the week about the singular importance of avoiding a possible end of the world scenario in the century ahead. 

It is into this gap the snake oil salesmen slide, painting climate activists as privileged sign wavers utterly ignorant of people's day-to-day concerns. Never mind the existential threat of crop failures, rising sea levels and zoonotic diseases, Sadiq Khan wants to tax your uncle's Ford Anglia! Against this barrage of bilge what then should be the answer?

In branding arguably the most radical piece of climate legislation in history "The Inflation Reduction Act", US President Joe Biden offered a blueprint for how green initiatives can be tailor-made to appeal to people's priorities in the here and now. 

It is an approach that Ed Miliband, for my money one of the new government's most bold and effective ministers**, has also followed - welding environmental and economic policy together

In a strident speech to an Energy UK conference last week, the Secretary of State argued that "every wind turbine we put up, every solar panel we install, every piece of grid we construct protects families from future energy shocks."

Miliband will obviously be aware he speaks at a time when global headwinds, far stronger even than the gusts which power our Celtic Sea turbines, still threaten to derail his mission.

In a little over a month, Donald Trump could return to the White House and the most powerful office in the world again be occupied by a man whose contempt for climate action is unparalleled. If nothing else disqualifies the MAGA maniac from the job - and plenty does - surely it was his recent risible comment that a warming planet would bolster waterfront property.

How much can one man - even one in charge of the world's largest economy - threaten the growth in green industry which offers our only plausible pathway back from the brink? 

Opinion seems divided. America's former climate envoy, John Kerry, contends that not even someone as ideologically idiotic as Trump can turn the tide on the changes now underway. The once and maybe future president can possibly stall progress but no longer turn it around; even during his first term, 80 per cent of new electricity generated in the States came from renewables.

Equally, with the window for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees closing all the time, it is hard to see how any attempts to stymie progress from such a significant global player will not cause real difficulties. Farage and other fellow travellers will be emboldened, with multilateral initiatives imperilled.

But - I reminded myself - I decided to pen this post to push back against despair, not propagate it. I've increasingly been persuaded by the arguments of the eminent data scientist Hannah Ritchie, who feels that the biggest risk right now is not that people won't be persuaded of the problem but that they become convinced it's insurmountable***.

Even press outlets I admire, like The Guardian, expend most of their attention on the failures. Reports of apocalyptic wildfires and rapidly vanishing sea-ice enormously outweigh coverage of the steady progress being made today in spite of political cowardice and the polluters' financial heft.

This bias in favour of disaster might well frighten and alarm but whether it mobilises readers is rather less clear. It strikes me that presenting a situation which is out of control rather risks a sense of paralysis. Tragically, fatalism could frustrate progress at the very moment it finally appears in reach.

It's no coincidence that the noxious politics of Reform UK increasingly depends on a sense of hopelessness. Is it not strange that the exact people who convinced you that Britain was big and brave enough to go it alone when it came to ending our EU membership now lament that we are practically powerless to act on the international stage when it comes to global warming?

I return to that little windfarm in Cornwall, a one-time novelty which is now one of many facilities which are slowly but seemingly irrevocably changing things. Fifty-two-per cent was once treated as a cast-iron mandate for change and if so renewables have won the day - now and forever going forwards.

In difficult times I often recall a speech by Nye Bevan about the power progressives should draw from realising that "all the tides of history are moving in our direction". The socialist firebrand was speaking during one of Labour's (many) long spells in opposition and he called on courage from those he firmly believed represented the future.

That is not to encourage complacency. The epochal events of the past few years demonstrate that progress should never be taken for granted. It can be reversed as well as accelerated and even it if isn't there can be no guarantee that, in this particular case, things will move quickly enough. With time running out to salvage the commitments made in the Paris Agreement, the margin for error is shrinking by the day.

But this is not a debate about the plausibility of preventing the worst effects of climate change, it is about whether it is still possible. The answer right now, and for a short while to come, is still - in spite of everything - yes. Let's build from there.

* - Also he looked deeply uncomfortable buying petrol - not from a moral standpoint, he just didn't get out much.

** - Admittedly this frontbench also includes such luminaries as (quick Google) Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting, but notwithstanding the paucity of choice I like Ed a lot.

*** - Ritchie writes a rather brilliant blog on environmental trends which I would really recommend. She is an inveterate campaigner for not giving up. 

Idiot's guide to climate change:

Greenhouse gases = Emissions what warm the planet.

Net Zero = The point at which we are removing as many of these emissions as we are producing, preventing further harm. We need to hit this by 2050 to avoid the worst scenarios (see also 'bad shit')

Paris Agreement = International treaty, signed in 2015, pledging to limit warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

1.5 degrees = The increase in average global temperatures beyond which lots of really bad shit becomes more likely.

Bad shit = Crop failures, droughts, famines, floods, water wars etc etc.

Tice = Former Reform UK leader. Twat.