Even a Travel Show Isn’t Safe From the BBC’s Smug Climate Change Bullying

It was Earth Hour on Saturday. I know, I know, you probably missed it too. All around the world smug weather-worriers dimmed their lights, lit a candle and said a little prayer for the planet as everyone else just got on with living. Still, a bare 24-hours later the BBC chose to show just how it can manage to shoe horn climate change into just about anything.

Yesterday, Caribbean with Simon Reeve, a three-part travelogue that documents his various movements around a resoundingly beautiful part of the world (presumably in jets spewing a trail of noxious burnt aviation fuel as they go), chose to alight on Venezuela and Colombia.

So far, so good, for a little docile TV wallpaper on a quiet Sunday afternoon. Except Reeves thought it would be a super to outline the fraught lives of the people he met and use them as a backdrop for his own enhanced platform of climate fretting.

First stop was the Sierra Nevada mountains of Columbia where viewers were treated to interviews with an Amerindian tribe called the Kogi. One of its members said this:

“How can [you] expect us to live when you come from the other side of the world and destroy mother Earth so that multinational companies profit? … river levels have fallen, the rains don’t come when they should, crop seasons are changing. Only when this stops can life carry on as normal.”

It didn’t end there. Further on some of the same members were transported down a mountain and mustered in front of a power station where they voiced disappointment that such an evil thing should exist.

“Before this was built, everything was normal. Building this here has harmed the Earth. It could kill everything here…. Mother Earth is in pain.”

Oh the horror. If “before this was built, everything was normal” means that before electricity “normal” saw people living an agrarian lifestyle in simple huts with no real tools, a limited lifespan, sickness, ill-health and a diminished future, then that would seem to be a pretty slim argument to mount against the existence of a power station.

As to the untested assertion that “Mother Earth is in pain” I guess that is a matter for conjecture. I will just have to wait for Mother Earth to call and outline her list of ailments.

Until then, that alleged pain is nothing compared to the excruciating agony of viewers forced to watch such earnest, dim-witted tosh – all dished out by the taxpayer-funded BBC.