Environmentalism is the new fascism. And just like with the original fascism a worryingly large proportion of the population seems all too eager to slip on that metaphorical black shirt and march (and fight) for a better future. Why?

Let me give you three examples which I think help illustrate the scale of the problem we’re facing.

Exhibit A

A recent letter to the Daily Telegraph from Daniel Carey-Dawes, Head of Rural Economy and Communities, Campaign to Protect Rural England.

It begins:

The shocking images of the devastation caused by floods across towns and villages in the Yorkshire Dales and the news that thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes in the Peak District clearly demonstrate the need for urgent action to tackle the impact of climate breakdown. With the floods coming just one week after Britain was baked by the hottest temperatures ever recorded it is obvious that instances of extreme weather are increasing at an alarming rate.

Exhibit B

Story in the Daily Telegraph headlined ‘Britain’s formal gardens could be changed forever by global warming, head of the National Trust warns’:

Britain’s formal gardens could be altered irrevocably by climate change, the head of the National Trust has warned. Hilary McGrady, said that at Ham House in Richmond, west London, just 10 per cent of their daffodil bulbs now flowered because the warming climate was causing a drought in the spring.

Exhibit C

Story in the Daily Telegraph headlined ‘Puffins being hunted and brought back to the UK despite Government efforts to save the species.’

Puffins are being hunted 100 at a time by trophy collectors who are allowed to bring the carcasses back to the UK, despite the government’s efforts to save the species. Campaigners and MPs are calling on Theresa Villiers, the new environment secretary, to ban the import of puffin trophies and push the international wildlife trade body to give the charismatic bird stronger protection. Websites offer grisly hunting trips for around £3,000, offering British people the chance to go to Iceland and kill a “bag” of puffins. The hunters boast of being able to shoot up to one hundred at a time.

See if you can work out what my three exhibits – and, of course, there are many thousands more where those came from – have in common.

Yes. That’s right. They are all fake news stories which have been given the gloss of credibility by their association with well-established and apparently trustworthy British brands.

Besides Britain’s arguably most respected Conservative newspaper (the Daily Telegraph), you have in these examples a charity (the CPRE) whose ostensible cause is to keep the English countryside looking beautiful, and another charity (the National Trust) dedicated to the preservation of England’s landscapes and historic buildings.

Further down in the puffin piece, you find guest appearances by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation, the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and three Conservative MPs. The Daniel Carey-Dawes letter, meanwhile, refers to claims widely circulated throughout the mainstream media, especially on the BBC, that Britain recently experienced the hottest June day ever and that flooding and the near collapse of a dam at Whaley Bridge in Derbyshire’s Peak District is the fault of “climate change.”

In the face of such overwhelming ‘evidence’, what possible reason could any casual reader have not to believe that world is indeed in the midst of an unprecedented environmental crisis wherein critically endangered species are being wiped out by callous, out-of-control, unregulated hunters, where extreme weather is endangering homes and lives, where not even the formal gardens in Britain’s world-renowned stately homes are safe?

This, my friends, is why we are in such trouble.

Every one of those stories is a lie.

Almost every word of every one of those stories is a lie.

But how many of the people who read those stories would be aware of this?

How many know that:

The ‘record-breaking’ heat was the product of a ‘compromised’ weather station in central Cambridge, whose readings have been distorted the Urban Heat Island Effect? Temperatures are NOT becoming more extreme? There is no evidence to suggest that the rainfall which swelled the reservoir above Whaley Bridge was unusually extreme. Far larger rainfalls have been recorded in shorter durations – the highest in five minutes (32mm) in Preston, Lancashire in August 1893; the highest in thirty minutes (80mm) in Eskdalemuir, Dumfriesshire in June 1953; etc? There is no evidence whatsoever to support the National Trust woman’s claim that a warming climate is causing drought in spring? (See table below) https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-temperature-rainfall-and-sunshine-time-series The puffin story – reproduced in the Independent and the Mirror – was just drivel? Only 100 shooting permits a year are given to foreigners by Iceland (mainly to hunt goose and reindeer, not puffins); the photo illustrating the piece was nine years old and showed a local hunt which culls 200 puffins yearly out of a puffin population of 8 million to 10 million (ie not one under any kind of threat).

So that’s just three out of the hundreds of environmental scare stories which appear across the world’s media every week – every one of them utter bollocks in almost every detail. And people believe them: of course they do! The mainstream media may be ailing but they are by no means dead. For a significant chunk of the population, they are still the trusted, go-to source for information: after all, you wouldn’t want to be one of those crazies who gets their information from all those partisan news sites and blogs on the internet, would you?

This is a major problem.

It cannot be said often enough that virtually the entire environment industry is a fraud.

All those stories you read about anything from climate change to species extinction to threatened reefs, glaciers and atolls – they may sound superficially plausible because they are delivered with passion and urgency and “expert” testimony in apparently respectable media outlets. But they are like elaborate edifices which look magnificent from a distance only to be revealed, on closer examination, to be crumbling facades riddled with woodworm and dry rot, botched with poor materials and third-rate workmanship.

And rather than allow these cathedrals of lies to collapse – as they should have done long ago – the environmental alarmists have propped them up with a succession of jacks and anchors and wedges and flying buttresses.

Worse, I see few indications that this is about to change because the penalties for lying are non-existent.

Daniel Carey-Dawes isn’t going to lose his job at the CPRE for his mendacious propaganda letter to the Telegraph. He’ll probably get a pat on the back because the charity has long since been hijacked by doctrinaire greenies.

Nor is the CPRE going to get a rap on the knuckles from the Charities Commission which, ditto, is fully on board with environmental scaremongering.

Nobody in the mainstream media is going to hold up the National Trust’s silly new boss to ridicule for her nonsense story about spring droughts because with Christopher Booker gone there’s hardly anyone left in the mainstream media with the knowledge, let alone column space, to counter the greenie narrative.

Meanwhile, Britain is now in the hands of a Conservative administration which has decided that achieving Net Zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 is a desirable goal. All those lying experts you read in the lying newspapers will serve to feed this false narrative.

What will it take, I wonder, to restore a sense of perspective?