We’re so glad Mike Berners-Lee has caught up with us on climate change

This is very welcome:

People should confront their family members who read news from “nefarious” sources, suggests the environmentalist Mike Berners-Lee.

“Challenge your friends and family and colleagues who are getting their information from sources that have got nefarious roots or a track record of being careless – or worse – with the truth, because we need to make this sort of thing socially embarrassing to be involved in,” said Berners-Lee, the brother of the World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.

Speaking at Hay festival on Saturday about his most recent book, A Climate of Truth, the writer encouraged people to ask themselves “really discerning questions” about their basis for trusting the media they consume.

Berners-Lee, 61, said that lack of progress on climate issues comes down to political “deceit”, which he likened to abuse.

Absolutely, quite so. There are indeed those out there ignorant enough - or potentially evil enough - that they’ll misinform over what must be done about climate change. Vast swathes of propagandists in fact. Who should not be listened to and who pollute the public conversation with their misleading.

As Berners-Lee points out, what is to be done is really pretty simple:

Alright, in one way or another, eventually we’re going to require carbon to bear a tangible cost. Once that happens, it will naturally become an integral part of all management decision-making processes. Every business will then be driven to understand the full extent of the carbon in their supply chains, as there will be a direct financial implication tied to it.

…

Currently, the lack of a carbon price stems from the fact that it would indeed be effective. There are influential entities in the economy that have been tirelessly employing sophisticated strategies, originally developed by the tobacco industry, to delay action on climate science. From a cynical perspective, these entities seem to permit world policy makers to say or do almost anything, provided it doesn’t lead to effective results. The issue is that a carbon price would indeed be effective.

Indeed so and that’s why we’ve spent the last two decades insisting that the answer is the carbon tax. As the Stern Review insisted it would be and as every British Government since then has not done. Nor has the international community, nor have all the shrieking mobs demonstrating in the streets demanded.

Madsen Pirie of this parish insists that our job, here at the Adam Smith Institute, is to be the loons off howling in the forest. Saying the absolutely unsayable because someone has to. Then a decade or two later it’s the commonplace wisdom and people actually do the right thing.

It’s a pity it’s taking a little longer than usual here but success is success - good to see environmentalists as significant as Professor Berners-Lee coming aboard.

The Professor is correct. There really are people out there deliberately misleading the public about climate change. Everyone insisting that it should be solved by planning, degrowth, socialism, the abolition of capitalism, the destruction of markets and whatever else passes across the lone synapse of such people.

Accept your climate change policies only from those who know what they’re talking about. Us at the ASI for example - accept no substitutes.

Tim Worstall