The perverse fantasies of XR’s founder

If we don’t cut carbon emissions, your mother will be raped. This is the deranged prediction of Roger Hallam, the weird-beard co-founder of Extinction Rebellion. Eco-doomsters used to say the ice caps would melt and polar bears would perish unless we all went green. Now they’re upping the ante. Now they’re prophesising gang rape, murder and war if you don’t shrink your eco-footprint. Better get recycling.

Hallam’s nutty foretelling of an epidemic of rape appears in a piece of writing titled ‘Advice to Young People, as you Face Annihilation’. He’s a cheery soul, isn’t he? Apparently he wrote it when he was in jail for four weeks last year on suspicion of conspiracy to commit criminal damage. The whole thing is nuts. The world is a ‘gas chamber’ and ‘the gas which will kill you has been sent down the pipes in vast quantities for 30 years now’, says Hallam. Which is pretty bloody offensive. If climate-change alarmists could go just a few days without appropriating the horrors of the Holocaust to their moany middle-class cause, we’d be most grateful.

Then come the genuinely unhinged prophecies. Climate change, says Hallam, will ‘destroy the weather’ (what?) and ‘thus our ability to grow food’. And this means ‘the collapse of our society’. And after that? Brace yourselves. ‘This means war and violence, the slaughter of young men and the rape of young women on a global scale’, says our Welsh Nostradamus.

Remember that this apocalyptic dirge is aimed at the young. ‘This is what’s going to happen to your generation’, Hallam tells them. Then he goes full Mad Max:

“A gang of boys will break into your house demanding food. They will see your mother, your sister, your girlfriend, and they will gang rape her on the kitchen table. They will force you to watch, laughing at you. At the end, they will accuse you of enjoying it. They’ll take a cigarette and burn out your eyes with it. You will not be able to see anything again. This is the reality of climate change.

Okay, hold up. I don’t remember any of this appearing in the most recent IPCC report. ‘Increased risk of extreme weather… sea-level changes… gang-rapes on your kitchen table.’ Notice Hallam’s constant use of the word ‘will’. You will witness rape. You will be attacked with a cigarette. You will go blind as a result. And these people claim to be driven by ‘the science’. This drivel is pure fantasy. It’s the stuff of the Marquis de Sade, not IPCC science.

It might be tempting to write this off as just Roger being Roger. He’s famous for saying daft things. So much so that he reportedly no longer plays a formal role in Extinction Rebellion. When you’re even too bonkers for that eco death-cult, you know it’s time for a sit down and a rethink. And yet in truth, it isn’t only Hallam predicting murder and rape as a result of climate change.

Consider Cameron Ford, an activist with Insulate Britain, which is an XR offshoot. In a recent interview with Owen Jones, Ford spun all the usual Insulate Britain lines — we’re blocking roads to save the planet, ‘the next three to four years will determine the future of humanity’, etc etc. And then he went full Book of Revelation. ‘Societal collapse comes’, he said of the near future. ‘And then you see slaughter. You’ll see rape. You’ll see murder.’ There was no pushback whatsoever from Jones against these hare-brained, entirely non-scientific predictions. Everyone now just nods along with this End of Days hysteria.

Ratcheting up the doom, Ford then said: ‘And our friends and our siblings and our children — we will lose everything we love.’ You’re all going to die! This, of course, is bunkum on stilts. What’s ironic is that it was Ford who featured in that talkRADIO clash with Mike Graham that went viral, in which Graham said it is possible to grow concrete. He was mocked for days on end. And yet Ford can say something far nuttier — that slaughter, rape and murder will be the inevitable consequence of failing to enact certain green policies — and no one bats an eyelid.

Hallam and Ford are only expressing in more extreme terms the feverish sense of doom and gloom that is central to contemporary environmentalism. The planet is on fire, billions will die, we have five years to ‘save the world’ — on and on it goes, one wild, unscientific prophecy after another. The discussion around COP26 has felt like a competition of catastrophism, with observers all trying to outdo each other in the apocalyptic blather stakes. It reached its nadir when the Archbishop of Canterbury said climate change would cause ‘genocide on an infinitely greater scale’ than the Holocaust. He has since apologised for this shrill and perverse pronouncement.

All this climate apocalypticism has nothing to do with science. The delirious predictions of slaughter and gang rape and cigarette-burned eyes in a world ruined by carbon are really just the misanthropic prejudices of the depressed middle classes. This is the larger truth about modern environmentalism. It poses as a purely science-driven endeavour to save the planet, but in truth it is fuelled more by the existential dread of our morally exhausted elites than it is by climatology. Everyone needs to calm down. A gang of boys is not going to come to your house and burn out your eyes. It will all be fine.