Speech Delivered by Mr Roger Helmer, Member of European Parliament at the Reach & Teach Seminar in Putrajaya, Kuala Lumpur – 25 January 2011
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Good afternoon. Tan Sri, Tan Sri,
Datuk Datuk, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. It is an enormous
pleasure for me to be with you here this afternoon. And I must start by
thanking the Malaysian Palm Oil Council for inviting me. In fact, I spent three
very happy years here in Malaysia and I am horrified to think that it was more
than 20 years ago, from 1987 to 1990. I was based in Malacca and running
a textile business. So it is a great pleasure for me to come back to Malaysia,
albeit on a very short visit.
We have heard a lot since lunchtime
about the technology, and we are turning here to the politics. I have to
admit that I won’t necessarily be taking you down the green revolutionary road (a reference to an earlier speech). The title of my speech is “The Global Climate Change Debate
and Tax-Payer Funded Environmentalism”. It is a big subject and so I will get straight into it. The first
thing I want to tell you is that there is an enormous mismatch and dissonance
between what you would call the establishment, the government, the media, large
companies and academia on the one hand, and the view of the general public on
the other hand.
While what I will call the iron
triangle of the government, academia and media are still absolutely committed
to the orthodox view of climate change as set out by the IPCC, the public are
becoming more and more disenchanted with the whole idea. Indeed, I can
tell you that in Britain and America, and some European countries, the public
are frankly sick to death of being hectored and lectured and blamed for climate
change.
They are sick to death of seeing
industrial-scale wind turbines at the bottom of their gardens. They look at the
weather out of the window and, certainly, we in Britain have just had three of
the coldest winters that we can remember in 20 years and, perhaps even longer.
I appreciate that we must not make the mistake of confusing weather
with climate. Climate is, if you like, weather averaged over very long
periods, and you can have a trend for climate which is still interrupted by
very hot, very cold, very wet, very dry, occasions.
By the way, I hope you are aware
that the European Union’s Emissions Trading System is currently shut down
because the level of fraud in the system was so extremely high that they
decided that the only thing they could do on an emergency basis was actually to
close the exchanges. In some member states over the course of last
year, it was estimated that that about 90 per cent of transactions under
the Emissions Trading Scheme were fraudulent. So the public is losing
confidence. I say the public, but there are also many scientists, I agree
not a majority (clearly the majority of scientists are committed to the IPCC
orthodoxy) but there is a very significant and growing number of scientists who
are challenging the orthodoxy.
I myself have attended conferences
in the United States where hundreds of very distinguished scientists from
highly reputable institutions from around the world, from America, Europe, Japan
and Australia have got together and discussed their reservations about the
conventional theory of anthropogenic global warming. They don’t believe it is
all about C02. So what do they believe?
Many of them believe it is about
natural cycles, based on solar and astronomical factors, which drive the
earth’s climate. If I may give you an overview of the last 2,000 years
perhaps in 20 seconds, it is interesting to note that over the past 2,000
years, we have seen two complete climate cycles. From the period from the
year zero to about 350 to 400 AD, we have what is called the Roman
Optimum. It was warm, and in my country, we had grapes growing up to
Scotland where certainly no grapes grow at the moment.
Then about 400 to 500 AD, the
temperature generally around the world got cooler and we had the Dark Ages.
We had a cool period. Then about 1000 AD, we had something called
the Medieval Warm Period where it started getting warmer again. For the period
from 1000 to 1400 AD, it was actually pretty warm. That was the time, if you
recall, that the first Viking called Eric the Red actually sailed across the
Atlantic and got to Greenland. I would like to let you into a little
secret about Greenland. In the year 1000 approximately when the
Vikings got to Greenland, do you know what – it was green! It isn’t green today.
After about 1400, the climate started to cool again globally and we had
what is called the Little Ice Age.
So we had this cold period in the
17th and the 18th centuries and from the early part of the 19th century it
got considerably warmer and we have seen a slow and steady warming since then.
Now there is a principle in science called Occam’s Razor, which is
the principle of making the minimum assumption. If you can explain a phenomenon
by this assumption or that assumption, the question you should ask yourself is
are you starting with a complicated assumption or are you taking the simple
assumption.
If we are looking at the very small
change we have seen over the last 100 years — and it is a small change of
about 0.7 degrees centigrade in the last 100 years — that is very natural,
very slow and nothing to get excited about. But most of all, it is
entirely consistent with well-established, long term and natural climate
cycles. And the view that the scientists that I have referred to
have taken, and which I take, is that we are simply seeing a continuation of
the cyclical process that certainly happened over those last 2,000 years.
In fact, it happened for thousands of years before that: we had the
Holocene Maxima. So, it has been going on for a very long time indeed.
I personally wonder how long the
present situation can last. How long can the leaders continue leading the
people when the people are finding they don’t believe it? And it is worth
noting that in Britain there are now several opinion polls that are showing
that a majority of people, that is voters, do not believe that human activity
is solely or primarily the cause of climate change.
Can it last? I don’t believe it can.
I believe that sooner or later we will see the political establishment obliged
to pay attention to the opinions of the people. And the people are increasingly
taking the view that first of all they don’t believe that man-made climate
change is happening. Secondly, they see the hysteria, if I may use the word,
over man-made climate change as being primarily directed towards two purposes.
The first purpose is to enable governments to raise taxes. Certainly in
the UK, the government’s Climate Change Bill is estimated to cost close to a
trillion dollars over 40 years. Not millions, not billions but a
trillion dollars.
That is a fantastic amount of
money. Even the current programmes at hand which, as I have mentioned,
are heavily dependent on wind power are estimated to increase the domestic
price of electricity by 60 per cent by the end of the decade, in real terms.
What we are doing in my country is giving ourselves the most expensive
electricity in the world, and I think that is a rather unwise move. Now,
what are the implications of this for palm oil and for bio fuels generally?
I can well imagine that someone
in the audience is perhaps thinking that if this chap is right, surely
there is no future for bio fuels. I don’t think that is the right
assumption to make at all, as while we don’t know what exactly will happen to
political opinion on climate change, we can afford to make some predictions
with a degree of confidence. Politicians should always be very careful
about making predictions unless they are very long term predictions in which
case we know we won’t be here to check them out when they come true or don’t
come true.
But I will make you a prediction for
2020 and I make it with considerable confidence: my prediction is that the
world population will have grown by then. My prediction is that the demand for
food will have increased by then, and that the world demand for carbon-based
fuels will have increased by then. You may know that in the European
Union where I sit in the European Parliament, the EU has decided that it wants
to set a target for reducing C02 emissions in the EU by 20 per cent by 2020.
Indeed, there are some voices in the Parliament and elsewhere who are saying
that 20 per cent is really not good enough. It should be 30 per cent.
I think those people ought to go
away and look at the projections from the International Energy Agency
(IEA) and large fuel companies (BP produced a projection), and they are all
about the same. They are all saying that C02 emissions, broadly-speaking
and despite what we are doing on renewables, despite what we are doing on bio
fuels, despite what we are doing on nuclear – will rise by about 20 per cent by 2020.
They are going up and will go up
and, frankly, to argue otherwise is like King Canute sitting on the beach and
telling the tide not to come in. The European Union can do all it wants
to call for 20 per cent or 30 per cent reductions, but what we are actually
going to see is an increase. And there is going to be great demand
for palm oil, whether for food or, I believe, for fuel. I may be
right or wrong, but I am convinced that in 10 years time the issue will no
longer be climate change. I think the heat will have gone out of the
issue. The issue will be energy security and energy availability. The pressure
will then be to diversify supply and technologies and to use every available
source of energy.
So, I see a great future for
bio-fuels and palm oil as a bio-fuel, but I have to say that the reason has
more to do with energy security than it has to do with anthropogenic global
warming and C02 emissions. I have told you that certainly in Europe and
America public opinion is moving against the theory of man-made climate change.
I think it would be instructive just to go through the reasons for that, because
there has been a series of events that have undermined public confidence. I
would like to take you back 10 years to 2001, to the IPCC’s third assessment
report (TAR). That featured a graph that became very familiar to anybody
engaged in climate or energy debates in the early part of the last decade.
It was a so-called Hockey Stick
graph. I am sure you have all seen it. What it purported to show
was global temperatures over the past 1,000 years. It showed more or less
a flat graph for 950 years, and then in the last few decades of the 20th century, it showed a massive spike.
This graph was developed by an
American scientist called Michael Mann. It made him extremely famous rather quickly. He was promoted as a
young scientist very fast, and he soon found himself as a lead author on the
IPCC studies. This graph became the sort of pin-up chart for the IPCC in
2001. When they launched that report, you had the then chairman of the
IPCC standing in front of this enormous picture of the Hockey Stick graph.
I remember I was much less involved
in the debate then. I hadn’t studied it but I though the graph looked
pretty frightening. A lot of people thought it looked frightening, and
this contributed to the climate scare. But there were a lot of people,
especially those working in the earth sciences where they study geology
and long-term history of climate and how it has affected the earth’s
development, who were very suspicious of this.
They knew about the Medieval Warm
Period, but now suddenly they were presented with this graph which omitted
it. I should add that the Medieval Warm Period was clearly shown in the
IPCC’s second report about four or five years before that.
Suddenly, that Medieval Warm Period
had ceased to exist, and suddenly you had a straight line through that period
and this massive spike at the end of the last century.
So, a lot of scientists started
asking questions about it about who this guy Michael Mann was, and where
he got his data from. Two scientists particularly became concerned in
this debate. You may have heard their names – Steve McIntyre and Ross
McKittrick. They started pressing Michael Mann to produce his source
data, so that they could analyse it and see whether they got the same sort of
information. They spent months and years pushing him and applying to his
university and the IPCC. They faced all sorts of problems. Those
who controlled the data were desperate to avoid it coming out in public.
Finally, McKittrick and McIntyre got
hold of it, looked at it and decided that whether or not the climatology was
right, the statistics (bearing in mind that you need the statistics to get from
the raw data to the graph), the statistics were simply nonsense. It was
so bad, in fact, they showed that a biased algorithm had been used which had an
innate tendency to create hockey stick type graphs. They demonstrated this
in a very dramatic way by taking a Chicago telephone directory and plugging in
the phone numbers as source data and, guess what? They got a hockey
stick graph.
You could hardly have a more
effective way of debunking a theory. Anyway, this story, of course, was
widely reported particularly in America, and the US Congress became very
concerned about it. In 2006 it appointed a Congressional Committee,
and they brought in one of America’s most distinguished statisticians, Edward
Wegman. Bear in mind, this is a statistician and that is what is
critical. You can be as good a climatologist as you want, but if you take
the data and apply the wrong statistical techniques, you end up with nonsense,
which is what Michael Mann did.
The Wegman Committee (and the record
is there in the Library of Congress, if you want to go down and read it), took
expert advice, studied what had happened and they confirmed that this graph was
nonsense.
The next major development, taking
the story stage by stage, was, of course, Al Gore, and his film “An
Inconvenient Truth”. I am sure many of you here have seen it. There
are one or two little problems with it. The first problem is that he uses
that same Hockey Stick graph, or an adaptation of it, which we now know is one
of the most discredited artefacts in the history of science.
He also produces another pair of
graphs which is very impressive. They purport to be a record of mean global
temperatures over a long period, 600,000 years, taken from ice cores, and also
a corresponding record of atmospheric C02 levels over the 600,000 years.
Al Gore compares the two graphs – the C02 graph and the temperature
graph. And he puts them one on top of the other. If you have seen
the film you will remember this. And guess what? There is an amazing match.
There is a very clear correlation. And, says Al Gore, that proves it.
That proves that C02 is driving temperature.
What he did not tell us is that if
you look at those two graphs in high resolution, you find that the curves
follow each other with great accuracy, but you also find that the C02 curve is
about 800 to 1000 years after the temperature curve.
In other words, the two graphs taken
together are strong evidence of correlation, but the delay, with C02 second and
temperature first, is clear evidence that it is the temperature that
drives the C02,and not the C02 that drives the
temperature. And the mechanism by which this happens is well-understood, and is
to do with the amount of C02 dissolved in the oceans. We think there is a
lot of C02 in the air. Actually in geo-historical terms our C02 levels in
the air are very low. But while there are thousands of tonnes of C02 in
the atmosphere, there is 50 times as much CO2 in the oceans. Changing the
temperature of the oceans changes the C02 levels in the oceans and therefore
the atmosphere.
Al Gore was also very big on his
polar bears. If you had seen the film, you would have seen the polar bear
drowning. The polar bear scene saw him using a cartoon instead of a real
illustration. And possibly, the reason he did that was because polar
bears are among the best swimmers in the animal kingdom. If we leave
aside the whales and the dolphins, polar bears are amongst the best swimmers,
and they tend not to drown very much. The other thing, and I want to make a
point here, is the effect the media have had on public opinion. I am sure
that if you go into the average classroom, and you say to children “what
about climate change and polar bears?”, they will say to you that climate
change is killing the polar bears.
I must stress that this is merely a
prediction based on disputed science and speculative computer models . It is
not a fact. If you go out there and look at current studies of polar bear
numbers, you will find that polar bear numbers in the Arctic have doubled in
the last 30 years. The polar bears are doing very nicely. In
theory, the polar bears are at risk. In the real world, the polar bears
are doing very well indeed. And the same applies to sea level.
If you go out into that same classroom and say what is climate change
doing to sea level, the children will say that the sea level is rising rapidly
and dangerously. We have seen the movie and we saw New York flooded and so on.
I can tell you that in fact that sea level is currently rising at between
six and seven inches a century, and that is the rise as long as we have had reliable records. It
is not accelerating.
But we do know that from the
geological record that there was a much more rapid sea level rise about 10,000
years at the end of the last glaciation which actually was driven by melting
ice, which caused the sea to rise. That is why my country, the United Kingdom,
is an island. 12,000 years ago we were fastened on to France. But
the sea level rose about 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, and created the English
Channel and, of course, it rose all around the world because that is what the
sea does. It is now rising much, much, more slowly. It rose several
hundred feet at that period and is now rising roughly six or seven inches a
century. And there is no evidence of that rate increasing. There are
projections from the IPCC, there are wild claims by the World Wild Life Fund
and all those guys. But there is no actual evidence.
There was a UK court case
about three years ago when Al Gore’s movie was being shown in schools, and a
concerned parent was upset that his child was exposed to what he regarded as
propaganda. He took the case to a British court, which ruled that
there were actually nine substantive errors in the film. And as a result,
even though it can still be shown in British schools, it has to be shown
with accompanying material pointing out the errors and the alternative point of
view.
In fact, people who have studied the
movie from a sceptical point of view suggest that there are as many as 35 or 40
errors. It is full of substantive scientific errors. This brings me
on to the event that became to be known as Climate gate, which was the massive
release of e-mails (that was before we had even heard of Wikileaks!).
They came from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. I
should stress that at the IPCC, a lot of people imagine that there are 2,500 very
highly qualified, unbiased scientists, who are seeking for the truth.
But nothing like that exists. The whole IPCC process is
driven by a couple of dozen insiders, including this Michael Mann whom we
mentioned, and including three or four of the people at the University of East
Anglia and at several other major institutions around the world.
And it is clear from those leaks
that they are not unbiased scientists looking for the truth. They are advocates
driving an agenda. What do we see from those leaked e-mails? They
discuss with each other how they should eliminate the Medieval Warm Period,
which we saw they did with that graph. They cobbled together different
data sets that were unrelated to each other, and then presented the results without saying
that they were from unrelated data sets. They conspired to block the
publication of articles and scientific papers that disagreed with their views.
They conspired to dismiss the editors of learned journals whom they
thought were not sufficiently committed to their view.
They sent each other e-mails asking
each other how they should (and these are their words), “hide the decline”.
They refused requests for information and source data made under the
Freedom of Information Act. In fact they sent each other e-mails urging
each other to destroy any information they were holding, so that it could not
be released under the Act. That is a criminal offence in the UK and I
still do not understand why they have not been prosecuted.
The main professor involved who was
actually suspended while these matters were being investigated, Prof Phil
Jones, recently said on the BBC that there had been no significant global
warming for the last 15 years.
He also said, eventually, when
ultimately pressed for the source data on which his and the IPCC’s record of
global temperatures were based, that he could not find them. His filing
was not very good.
Now, I don’t know if this applies in
Malaysia, but in Britain if a child is supposed to do some homework but fails
to do the homework, then the traditional excuse is “Sorry, Miss, I did the
homework, but the dog ate it.”
Phil Jones has not actually said
“the dog ate it”, but it is extraordinary that we have this global issue of
climate change, and yet the source data on which it is based does not appear to
be available. Just really finishing that one off, in New Zealand only
just last October a very similar thing happened. An interested group of
citizens brought a court case requiring the New Zealand Meteorological Office
to provide source data on which their trends of climate change were based.
Initially, they were going to defend the case. Then they decided to
withdraw their defence, admitting that they could not provide the data. Again,
it was the “dog ate it.”
There is a process they use called
“homogenization” of data. It is an adjustment process, which is fair
enough. All sorts of data need various kinds of adjustment. But now
there is overwhelming evidence that all the homogenization and adjustment of
data which has been applied to temperature data records tends to impose an
upward bias which was not there before.
In addition to all that, we had a
series of scandals with the IPCC itself and frankly I could take all my
remaining time to tell you about it. But I will tell you only about one
point, and that is an estimate I am sure you saw in the press, a shock-horror
report from the IPCC saying that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by
2035.
This was published and became
headline news around the world. And guess what, it turns out it was not
based on peer reviewed science. It came, in fact, from a propaganda sheet from
one of the green NGO’s, I think it was WWF. In turn, that was based
on a nearly 10-year-old report in an UK scientific magazine, that itself was
based on a single telephone conversation between a reporter and an Indian
scientist. They found that Indian scientist when the story broke, they went to
him and asked where his research was showing that the glaciers will disappear
by 2035. And he said it wasn’t research, but just a
speculative idea. In any case, he said “I didn’t say 2035 but
2350.’ It wasn’t a decade but a few hundred years. The
scientist worked in fact in the TERI Research Institute which is owned and
operated by the railway engineer, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, who is also the
chairman of the IPCC.
What a railway engineer is doing as
chairman of the IPCC, I don’t know. But there you are. It is
interesting that the Indian government was so concerned about that particular
event, the statement about the Himalayan glaciers, and so discouraged and
lacking in trust of the IPCC, that it talked in terms of setting up its own
Indian Climate Research Unit. I understand why it wants to do that and I
hope that it will.
So that is a brief explanation of
why many people in the UK are now less than convinced about the climate scare.
Let me turn to the second half of my subject: the green NGOs and the campaigns
that NGOs have been running to the detriment of the palm oil industry.
I won’t attempt to cover the pro and
cons, the arguments they put and the standard counter arguments, first of all
because I suspect you know them a great deal better than I do. Secondly,
because the next presentation after I sit down is on exactly that point. But I
would like to make a point about the EU’s attitude towards NGOs.
In my country we have had a system
called democracy, which you could call representative democracy. It has
been developed over many centuries, and it involves the people electing their
representatives and representatives making their decisions. Within the EU
and its institutions, there are a number of voices saying that representative
democracy really has had its time and is a bit played out. It isn’t
working and perhaps we should move to a new model which they call
“participative democracy”.
What exactly does that mean and why
do they think that representative democracy has failed? I’ll tell you why.
First of all, representative democracy has failed because the people out
there, the ignorant unwashed voters, occasionally elect people like me, and
others who are critical of the European project. So clearly the voters
don’t understand the benefits of European Union membership, and we need to find
a new way of consulting them.
The other point is that the European
institutions have noticed that whenever you put a European proposition to a
referendum in Europe, the people vote “NO”. In 1991, the Danes voted
against the Treaty of Maastricht. They were told to go away and vote
again until they got the right answer. In 2002, the Irish were invited to
vote on the Treaty of Nice. They voted “NO” and you know what
happened. They were told to go away and vote again. Then the
European Union developed the European Constitution, and it rashly put it to the
vote in France and in Holland. The results came out within days of each other.
The French voted “NO” by about 57 per cent and the Dutch voted “NO” by about 62
per cent.
This time they didn’t tell them to
vote again. They took away the document, thought about it for 18 months,
changed the name from the Constitution to the Lisbon Treaty (the text is 99 per
cent identical), and came back with it. But they said: “Look chaps, this is a Treaty not a Constitution, so
you don’t really need a referendum this time.” And the postscript to that
situation is that the only country which for its own internal reasons did
require a referendum was Ireland, and it voted “NO”. Again, Ireland was told to
go away and vote again until they got the right answer.
So you can understand that Europe
would be pretty unhappy with the representative government that actually
produces the wrong results every time. But what is a participative
government? It is very simple. Instead of going to the great
unwashed mass of people out there, you go to “civic society”. I must
confess that I struggled at one stage with civic society. Just what is
civic society? I understand what people are. I have 4.2 million of them in the region that I represent.
I wasn’t quite sure what civic society was, but now I have got it.
Now I understand.
Civic society simply means NGOs.
That’s what it means. It means you get the NGOs in and talk to
them. And they have had a number of meetings with civic society. I
attended a couple of them, one on climate change and another on European
integration. What is absolutely fascinating about this is, of course,
that virtually every one of these NGOs that show up at these events is actually
funded, in part, by the European Commission itself. So they are, if you
like, paying people to tell them what they want to hear. Years and years
ago, in simpler times, we used to have fair-grounds in Britain and, indeed, in
many other countries. One of the fair-ground’s attractions in those
simple days before television was called a Hall of Mirrors. You would
have a marquee, and in it you would have a lot of distorting mirrors. So
you would walk in and you would see a reflection of yourself but enormously fat
and enormously stretched. And this was an amusement.
Now, what the European Union has
created is its own Hall of Mirrors. It has paid for its own set of
interlocutors who reflect, broadly speaking, what the EU wants to hear.
Think of the incentives and motivations of an NGO. Yes, some of
them are honest and some of them are sincere. But all of them want to
survive, they want to grow, all of them want their salaries to continue to be
paid. So the first thing they are going to do is to protect their funding
stream. If their funding stream comes 50 per cent from the European
Union, they will be careful to say what’s expected. They are driven by the need
to survive and the need to fund themselves. They also need to get funding from
the public. And so their story must be alarming. It is the same
with the media. If you said last year that the sea level is going to rise
by 10 feet, that is not a story. You have to say that the sea level is going to
rise by 20 feet. Each time your prediction has to be more dramatic and
alarmist than the last one.
Many of these NGOs were, of
course, at Cancun at the UN Climate Fest last December. I was there
too. By the way, while I was there during the Climate Conference we
experienced the five coldest December days ever recorded in Cancun in December.
So we come to the point about the
NGO funding. Here I want to credit an organization in the UK called the
Tax Payers Alliance. They are excellent people who do some very fine research.
They publish very useful reports on their research. They did research on
EU funding of NGOs. They found that in 2009/10, the green NGOs received partly
from the EU and partly from the British Government a total of £10 million. Now
that is quite a substantial sum, three quarters of it from the EU and a quarter
of it from the UK.
They were not counting any money
from any other member states, and there are 26 other member states. Nor
did they count the funding for these organizations that comes from the USA. I believe this is
substantially higher than the figures for Europe. So there is an enormous
amount of tax-payers money going directly into these organizations. Now,
why should we worry about that? In the palm oil industry you may have
very specific reasons, but there are broader reasons of democracy and
accountability that I think we should be concerned about. The first thing is
that by taking the public out of the loop, you are actually producing an
anti-democratic structure. A structure designed to reinforce the prejudices of
the EU institutions.
It means that the nexus of the NGOs
and EU are pursuing the interests and preoccupations of a narrow élite.
As you may be aware, the NGOs have an enormous place in EU
decision-making. If you are lucky, the Commission when it is developing a
legislative proposal may talk to the industry. Yes it does talk to the
industry, let’s be honest. But it will also have Greenpeace, Friends of
the Earth and the World WildLife Fund and all those guys out there talking to
them as well. And that is in my view profoundly anti-democratic.
Those guys have no mandate. Certainly, in the UK, you get little old
ladies leaving money to the World Wildlife Fund in their will. You get
two million people contributing to the RSPB, the bird protection organization.
They are interested in protecting birds and panda’s and whales. They are
not consciously setting out to promote a green climate-change agenda. And
yet their money is used for that purpose.
Arguably, the arrangement we have is
a barrier to new thinking, new ideas. Once you get this consensus of people
working together, they tend to feel that they know what they are doing, that
they are unlikely to be challenged and therefore there is no incentive to put
in new thinking and new ideas — as you are finding, indeed, when you are
challenging some of their views on palm oil. And tax payers, of course, are
made to fund propositions which they may not agree with at all. I don’t
want to be unkind to NGOs. I think many of them are sincere and genuine
and doing a fine job.
But when you look at some of the
more aggressive and strident of the green NGOs, you realize that they are
anti-development, anti-growth, anti-prosperity, anti-business, anti-capitalism.
We have to add they are a little anti-human and anti-life. They do not
consider the needs and aspirations of real people.
In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen,
what are you going to do about it? How can you influence the work these
NGOs are doing and the criticisms that they are levelling against your
industry? Public information is absolutely at the heart if it. There is
no quick fix. You have to keep telling the right story over and over
again. We have a phrase in politics that you probably use in Malaysia too
– sunlight is the best disinfectant. The best way to deal with lies is to
tell the truth. The best way to deal with propaganda is to respond with the
facts. But it does really matter you respond with the facts in a targeted
way. Public opinion is very important but, of course, it is people like
MEPs and the European Commission who are creating the European regulations
which are likely to be a problem. I would think that you need a presence,
probably in Brussels where the decisions are being made. The legislative
process is extremely complicated.
The task is difficult but not
impossible. As I said in the early part of my speech, I believe
that demographic changes and energy shortages and, indeed, food shortages mean
that sooner or later sensible arguments will have to prevail because, ladies
and gentlemen, we need the food and we need the fuel. Thank you very much
indeed.