FINALLY! BUSINESS FIGHTS BACK AGAINST CORRUPT ECO-FASCISM

Here’s some good news from America. A Big Oil company – Chevron – is taking legal action against a group of environmentalists for fraud and extortion: aka greenmail. The sums involved are eyewatering: $19 billion (billion with a B).

Phelim McAleer has the details:

Chevron is suing lawyer Steven Donziger and a number of activist environmental groups in a civil-racketeering suit, claiming that his landmark $19 billion award against the oil company in an Ecuadorean court was the product of a criminal conspiracy.

Ironically, much of the company’s evidence comes from footage shot for "Crude," an award-winning pro-Donziger documentary that premiered with much publicity at the Sundance Film Festival.

In an eight-year suit in Ecuador, Donziger and his environmentalist allies argued that the oil company had wantonly polluted the pristine Ecuadorean rainforest, creating vast areas of poisoned land and causing huge spikes in cancer and other diseases.

The case drew vast media coverage, with pieces in The New York Times, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker; a sympathetic "60 Minutes" piece featured the poor and sickly Ecuadorean peasants. And celebrities like Daryl Hannah embarked on some cancer tourism, hugging natives before taking her Chevron-powered jet back to Hollywood.

An Ecuadorean court found Chevron responsible for massive pollution and awarded the rainforest communities (and lawyers) $19 billion. It was hailed as one of the most significant environmental victories in decades.

It’s fitting that Phelim McAleer should be reporting this story because, of course, he visited similar territory in his documentary FrackNation. Like Crude, Josh Fox’s anti-fracking movie Gasland was feted at Sundance and lauded by the usual Hollywood suspects.

The fact that many of the claims made in Gasland – and exposed by McAleer – were either exaggerated or untrue appeared to bother the film’s many admirers not one jot.

The polite explanation for what’s going on here is "noble cause corruption." We saw some of this in the Climategate emails too: if you’re sincerely of the opinion that the planet is in imminent danger because of man’s selfishness, greed and wanton depletion of scarce resources then you’ll consider any means justified in trying to prevent it.

You’ll lie, you’ll fiddle with the data, you’ll bully, you’ll smear, you’ll abandon the scientific method — not because you’re a bad person (or so you persuade yourself) but because you’re a person so good that you’re even prepared to sacrifice even your personal integrity for the higher cause of saving the world from The Greatest Threat It Has Ever Known.

This is why I wrote Watermelons – and also my forthcoming book The Little Green Book of Eco Fascism (US version published by Regnery; UK version by Biteback). I wanted to answer the question so commonly asked by people of a professedly neutral persuasion on environmental issues: "But why would Greenpeace/the scientists/Josh Fox/the WWF/NASA/the CRU/Friends Of The Earth/the British Antarctic Survey/the BBC/the Guardian make this stuff up?"

What really troubles me about this question is not the difficulty of answering it (as I show in Watermelons, the question is both easy and tremendous fun to answer) but the cultural assumptions behind it.

For many decades – certainly since at least my 70s childhood when I was trained, as all kids are, to think of the World Wildlife Fund as the lovely panda-saving outfit which really, really cares about the tigers and the snow leopards and the rest – we have been brainwashed into accepting that anyone waving the flag for the cause of "environmentalism" must perforce be on a higher moral plain and therefore incapable of acting dishonestly or dishonorably.

It troubles me because those few of us who are prepared to research and speak the truth on these issues face an uphill struggle in getting our message across. This is why, unfortunately, the usual response of big business when subjected to greenmail by environmentalist pressure groups is to cave in and try to buy them off – in much the same way as the Anglo Saxons did when they tried warding off the Vikings with Danegeld.

Big business is risk averse and can see no point going into battle with the one hand tied behind its back, even when it has right on its side. Which, after all, is the public instinctively more likely to trust: a dirty, great Big Oil company or an apparently grassroots protest organization comprising principled, skinny, bearded vegan blokes and cute-looking activist girls who aren’t in it for the money but because they just want to make the world a better place?

What encourages me about the Chevron case – and indeed, the success of Phelim McAleer’s and Ann McIlhenny’s pro-fracking movie – is that the tide appears to be turning. Finally, business is standing up for the right of business to do business.

Finally, people are starting to come round to the idea that maybe all those Greenie activists out there aren’t quite as representative of our interests as they tell us on their posters and in their press releases.

Since when was it in our interests to have our energy bills continually driven up by eco-taxes and renewable energy subsidies, not to mention the legal costs organizations like Chevron have accrued trying to fight off this $19 billion claim? How exactly is our economic welfare increased by the $1 billion being squandered every day (yes, per day) combating the largely illusory problem of "climate change"?

As I note in Watermelons – and it really can’t be said often enough – the Greenies are not our friends. I’m not saying they are intrinsically bad people; I know that in many cases that they are motivated by the highest of ideals.

The problem is that the consequences of their noble lies and their warped ideology invariably involve economic recession, higher prices, constrained freedom, thwarted aspirations and widespread human suffering. I don’t call those results good. I’d say they’re downright evil.

For the record, however, eco-shysters like Steven Donziger are in fact morally disgusting.  Reading Phelim McAleer’s article linked above will turn your stomach.  Let’s wish Chevron every success in bankrupting Donziger and the Big Enviro groups he represents.

British writer James Delingpole is the author of such "fantastically entertaining" books as 365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy, and Welcome To Obamaland: I’ve Seen Your Future And It Doesn’t Work