CHARLES & GRETA - THE KING & QUEEN OF GREEN HYPOCRISY

Oh, what a delightful spectacle we have here! Prince Charles, the man who speaks to plants, and Greta Thunberg, the Scandinavian oracle of eco-doom, have inadvertently staged a pantomime of green hypocrisy that would make even the most seasoned satirist blush with envy.

Firstly, let's consider the princely protagonist, Charles, who has been nattering on about the environment since the days when his hairline was still on speaking terms with his forehead. His green credentials, he insists, are impeccable. He talks of converting his 51-year-old Aston Martin to run on surplus white wine and whey from cheese-making, which sounds less like environmentalism and more like a recipe for a very exclusive cocktail party. And then there's the matter of solar panels and biomass boilers at his palaces - all very modern, but one suspects that the carbon emissions from maintaining royal estates might just tip the scales in the other direction. 

Greta Thunberg, our earnest young heroine, has become the poster child for climate angst. She's the Joan of Arc of our age, only instead of hearing voices, she hears the ticking of a doomsday clock. Her journey to America, eschewing the sinful airplane for a yacht, was not just a statement but a performance of such sanctimonious purity that it could have been sponsored by the Church of Scientology. The yacht, Malizia II, owned by a Rothschild no less, was meant to be a paragon of zero-carbon travel, but one wonders about the carbon footprint of the crew's return flight to Europe, not to mention the champagne corks popping in celebration of her arrival. 

Greta's message at the UN was as sharp as a Swedish winter: "How dare you!" she cried, with the righteous indignation of a teenager whose allowance has been docked. Yet, one might ponder, if her childhood was stolen by our empty words, how much of her innocence was traded for the spotlight of global activism?

The drama of their meeting is rich with irony. Here is Charles, the man who has spent a lifetime talking about the environment while living in a manner that would make even the most dedicated Greenpeace member wince. And there's Greta, whose very attendance at global summits seems to scream, "Look at me, I'm saving the planet!" - all while possibly increasing her own carbon footprint in ways that would make Al Gore’s documentary blush.

COP26 was billed as a turning point, but with Charles and Greta, it felt more like a theatrical intermission, where the audience could step outside for a cigarette, pondering if the next act would be any less absurd. Their shared stage was less about actionable change and more about the performance of concern - a pantomime where the villains are clear (all of us), the heroes are self-righteous (them), and the plot is as predictable as the British weather.

In this grand, green theatre, one must applaud the actors for their commitment to their roles, but one also hopes for a sequel where the script includes less "Blah, blah, blah" and more actual, tangible change. Because, dear readers, if history is any guide, the climate might just be the only thing not laughing at this show. 

THE RANTING BRUMMIE GOES TO THE [DIS]UNITED NATIONS

Given I'm a 40-year old, straight, white, binary Englishman with a penchant for drinking Guinness, watching Top Gear and eating steak, it's highly unlikely I would ever be invited to give a speech at the UN COP26 summit in Scotland this week in the same way Daft Punk would never be invited to play on MTV Unplugged.

However, if I did, it would probably go a little something like this ...

"Dear attendees. I am, like all of us here, a normal, bog-standard, pretty average, everyday citizen of the world. Whilst I am not the Prime Minister of the UK and have a duty to all, my primary responsibility is to my own. Fortunately we can improve the lot of the former and the latter at the same time.

The forecasts of climate science are no more accurate than our Government's recent efforts on Covid – In fact only one of the climate models gets anywhere near matching real world data and that’s not very near, predicting only half the warming we’re panicking about. So we have time to make the world economy more resilient. 

We Brits will demonstrate how this can be done, and we can lead the whole world into a brighter future based on the time-proven skills of entrepreneurship and engineering, beginning by teaching this in schools rather than letting our children think that waving placards around like windmills with the hiccups and blindly accepting backdoor communism will make a blind bit of difference.

Renewable energy is not the answer. By making fossil fuel and nuclear power stations provide expensive backups for cloudy and windless days - which we have rather a LOT of here in the UK, it forces up all energy prices and overcharges those who use most energy, the old, the poor, the sick, and those with a job. No new renewable schemes should be approved unless the operators guarantee delivery 24/7/365 at a reasonable price. We should instead right the wrongs of past agreements by imposing a windfall tax on wind and solar schemes which exactly matches their subsidies.

But what can give us the energy we need to power our factories, warm our homes, grow our food, while still being cautious about the demon carbon – if, that is, it turns out to be a demon? It must be nuclear. We should cancel all work on European Pressurised Water Reactors in the United Kingdom – given they were designed by EU committees they are as much use as Pope's testicles — but our greatest British engineering company, Rolls-Royce, is developing Small Modular Reactors. Once the design is optimised we should order SMRs in batches of four, with half of them exported as aid to nations which are energy poor.

We keep hearing from various green organisations that we are near the climate tipping point and we 'must do something now'. If these scaremongerers are right we don’t have time to wait for fusion, and if they’re wrong we don’t need to worry if we wait for it to become a viable technology.  

New technology needs time to settle down, and even though the SMR concept is not entirely new – our nuclear-powered submarines have operated for decades with no problems – we must allow for time in adapting the designs. Besides, we need reliable, cheap energy now, not in ten years’ time. Fortunately the answer lies literally beneath our feet. There are billions of cubic metres of natural gas in the Scottish Midland shale, billions in the Bowland Shale in Lancashire, and billions more in the rest of the UK.

There has been opposition to fracking for gas, some from locals but mainly from bearded, cagoule-wearing socialists, those hairy chaps and chapesses who squat around the edges of our civilisation in a bid to take us back to the Stone Age, who wish to keep us in fuel poverty because all profit is bad, yo. 

We can't address the concerns of these amateur hermits any more than we can persuade them to have a bath, but for people who might live near fracking sites the Government should mandate compensation. Any damage caused by tremors – we don't expect any but we wish to reassure worried residents – should be compensated at three times the cost of repair. Furthermore, all houses within five miles of a fracking site should receive ten years’ free supply of gas for space heating, cooking etc, or an equivalent cash payment. 

Now let’s talk about a REAL climate concern: air pollution from transportation, starting with rolling out a programme to convert all heavy goods vehicles and buses, trains etc to hybrid electrical power and/or compressed natural gas fuel. This will cut CO2 emissions from those sources by nearly half, while reducing NOx and particulate air pollution but a similar amount.

As a bridge fuel, shale gas is natural, clean, cuts our CO2 emissions and will be good for our balance of payments while we build up the SMR fleet. Finally, we should establish a think tank of both environmentalists AND climate sceptics, people with legitimately different ideas and opinions.

For too long eco-fanatics, socialists, and teenage doom goblins have acted as self-appointed climate gatekeepers. Now is the time for the issue to be properly debated in public, time to stop the hysteria, time for a difference of opinions to be allowed to speak out and allow entrepreneurs and engineers to play a greater role.

There is our roadmap to the future. The UK will travel that road alone if necessary, but we will welcome those who understand that reliable, low cost energy is vital if we are to preserve our way of life if we move carefully to a low carbon future. 

There are countries who have representatives in this room whose emissions dwarf the UK’s measly one per cent, countries whose increases every day wipe out any yearly savings we might make. I won't name them, but I can tell you they rhyme with Bina and Chindia. Let them come clean and admit that they have no intention of banning coal and oil in their power stations, then do what we are doing, travelling into a clean and low carbon future without killing our people and economies and sleepwalking into backdoor global socialism.

Now, if you will excuse me I will stop here and decline to attend the rest of this talking shop. Like all its predecessors it will fail to come to any useful conclusions, and some of us have lives to lead."

THE RANTING BRUMMIE REVIEWS: "NO TIME TO DIE" (2021)

As I think has been well-established now, one of my guilty pleasures as a moviegoer is watching the James Bond movies and I have no intention of apologising for that. 

Thus, I watched as soon as I had the opportunity 'No Time to Die' directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, the latest film in the series, whose release has already been postponed several times and which finally meets the screens and its viewers this cinematic fall of the year 2021. 

The James Bond film series is approaching the age of 60. All Bond movies start from the same premises and have the same hero, but the way he looks and behaves and the structuring of the story have evolved over time. This says a lot about how cinematic entertainment was and is perceived and accepted in the movies of the big studios.

A lot has happened during these years. The hero evolved from the nonchalant and humorous commander in Fleming's books and played by Sean Connery to the complex and gloomy character in the last series, played by Daniel Craig. The original 007 had gone through the experience of World War II and was active during the Cold War. 

He was excused for his womanising as many things are excused to war heroes, and there was no room for moral doubt concerning his actions because he lived in an age when it was clear who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. Thee 21st century James Bond lives and acts in the turbulent era after the fall of communism and after the novels of John Le Carre were written. 

Today's enemies are not ideological, and screenwriters of such films (not just those in the Bond series) often prefer not to identify them politically, ethnically, or religiously. On the other hand, the romantic implications of the character are no longer devoid of substance. James no longer conquers but falls in love. From Bond the Don Juan we now (almost) get Bond the family man. 

One of the qualities of the script in 'No Time to Die' is that it manages to describe at this stage of the character's evolution a story that is acceptable by today's standards of the big studios and is somewhat credible in terms of character psychology. Craig's James Bond has been throughout this series and is in this film also a real character, not just a two-dimensional comics book figure.

What I liked about 'No Time to Die'? Daniel Craig. Action scenes, car chases and stunts that show ingenuity in a few moments (just when we thought we saw everything in this area) and use the landscapes spectacularly, especially in Italian villages. Humour and self-humour. The presence of Ralph Fiennes, an actor who can do anything on screen and I will like it. 

Also worthy of note is the stunningly good-looking Ana de Armas, a classic Bond-girl with a kick-ass attitude who I hope will survive until the next series. What I liked less? Rami Malek, an actor who constantly disappoints me and who plays a mediocre bad guy here. Lea Seydoux is OK, but her relationship with Bond lacks chemistry. The dose of melodrama introduced in the script towards the end. The scientific pretext, which is thin and I could not understand what they were brewing in those pools (not that it would be important).

'No Time to Die' honourably concludes the Daniel Craig chapter of the Bond epic. It's not the best Bond I've ever seen, but it's well above average. I look forward to the next reincarnation.

Overall Rating: 7/10