More is Less

Britain's latest secretary of state for fossil fuel profiteers looks set to rival the likes of Owen Paterson and Andrea Leadsom for sheer intellectual distinction. In the first place, he cannot add up: always a useful qualification in a minister, and especially in one whose brief is to defy the unpatriotic assertions of the treacherously evidence-based. The Right Honourable Graham Stuart, BA (Failed) informed the parliamentary environmental audit committee that fracking and drllling for fossil fuels would help to reduce the danger from fossil fuels, and threw in the term "world-leading" because that always helps. Stuart proclaimed that domestic production would stop Britain giving money to dubious régimes such as the woke Viking hordes of Norway, whose standards for gas extraction are criminally stricter than Britain's own and, at least by the vulgar literalist standards of mere reality-dwellers, are in fact world-beating. When this fact was more or less gently pointed out to Stuart by one of the committee's anti-growth traitors, Stuart responded that the fossil fuel industry in the North Sea is committed to reducing emissions in a manner far beyond the comprehension of mere experts at the International Energy Agency, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, the UCL Energy Institute or, for that matter, the parliamentary committee on environmental standards. To anyone lacking the requisite Britishness, it's all simply too sublime.