Yes, obviously, I’m joking but only slightly.
The actual topic of Sandel’s programme was very nearly as pointless, irrelevant and out of date: climate change.
I’ve just had a glance at the BBC page promoting this programme and it feels like something some starry eyed eco-activist who’d just had a tofu burger with Al Gore dashed off about 20 years ago:
Most climate scientists think the world is getting warmer and that humans are at least in part responsible. Almost every country in the world has pledged to make efforts to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere in order to prevent dangerous “interference with the climate system”. But exactly how to do this raises interesting questions about fairness.
No it doesn’t raise interesting questions about fairness because the premise on which it is based is entirely specious. Every one of the assumptions on which Sandel’s philosophical musings rest is at best heavily contested, at worst disproven.
Stuff like this, for example:
The inhabitants of The Maldives – made up of more than 1,200 islands, most of which are no more than one metre above sea level – are already feeling the effects of climate change. They are victims. But they didn’t cause the problem. Should those countries with historical responsibility for emissions be obliged to compensate The Maldives?
No one who has done even the merest scintilla of a modicum of homework on this subject is remotely worried about the effects of climate change on the Maldives because the Maldives are doing just fine.
Yet rather than row back from its relentless climate change propaganda in the light of evidence, the BBC continues to pretend that it’s a major problem – not just in obvious places like the regular eco-scare newsbulletins of its house green activist Roger Harrabin but even on programmes where it really ought to have no relevance like this episode in its Global Philosopher series.
Sometimes people tell me that for all its faults the BBC is a marvellous institution which we’d miss fearfully if it were ever to leave us.
Read the rest at Breitbart.