These floods which have devastated huge swathes of Emilia Romagna in north east Italy are a bad blow to those determined to impose Net Zero – at least in Italy.
Nearly all Italians (85%) think that the catastrophe was preventable, not of course by reducing man’s carbon footprint to zero, but by dredging river beds, securing river banks, and creating flood retention basins.
I live with my Italian wife, our six children in the countryside just outside Ravenna half a mile from a big river and a mile from the sea. Thanks to a simple quirk of fate, or miracle, the river did not burst its banks near us. My wife’s mother and brother in Forlì 20 miles away were not so lucky. They had half a meter of water in their house.
In all, 36,000 people were evacuated from their homes – most in an around Ravenna – of whom many remain so. Incredibly, only 15 people died.
But tens of thousands of businesses are out of action and vast areas of agricultural land turned into gigantic temporary lakes, rendered useless for the foreseeable future. In the Apennines, 30 miles from us, hundreds of landslides cut off towns and villages. More than 600 roads were completely or partially closed.
A farmers cooperative, near Ravenna, allowed the emergency services to divert water from a flooded canal onto 200 hectares of its land to save the city centre and its priceless Byzantine mosaics – at a cost, just for this year’s lost crop, of 1.3 million euros.
In Rome, meanwhile, climate activists tipped black dye into the Trevi Fountain because – they claim – fossil fuels are “the cause” of the floods – a view shared by only 25% of Italians.
Yet even the IPCC no less – the oracle of the man-made climate change movement – admits that getting rid of fossil fuels and achieving Net Zero will not bring down the global temperature – and so by definition will not stop such floods.
In its latest report – the Sixth Assessment Report - it states quite clearly that Net Zero will merely stabilise – not reduce - the global temperature, and not for 20 to 30 years. Conspicuously, the report always and only uses the words “limit” or “limiting”, never “reduce” or “reducing”, in relation to the global temperature.
So if, at best, the temperature is only going to stabilise, not come down, then electric cars, heat pumps, wind farms and all the rest of it will not stop extreme weather events. According to the IPCC.
But anyway, blaming climate change for the floods is a red herring that avoids blaming those who have failed to provide what really matters: adequate flood defences.
And in Emilia Romagna, that’s the Left.
The region has been the Italian Left’s national stronghold since the fall of fascism in 1945: governed first by the Partito Comunista Italiano; now by its heir, the Partito Democratico.
Many of its coastal areas, especially around Ravenna, are reclaimed river deltas and salt marshes, criss-crossed by two dozen or so rivers. The city was the last capital of the western Roman Empire and the remains of the port, which once housed the Roman fleet, are located in fields that are six miles from the sea.
But to appease the greens and the animal rights lobby, the Left-controlled region has failed to dredge the rivers which are chock-a-block with debris and plants - and the Coypu.
This giant rodent immigrant from South America has infested the region’s riverbanks where it digs huge tunnel networks that severely weaken them.
In 2015, the region financed 23 vital retention basins to be completed by 2022 but has only built 12.
‘Piove, governo Ladro!’ says a famous Italian proverb. Everything that goes wrong, even rain, is the government’s fault. It was a favourite catch phrase of Italy’s most famous communist thinker Antonio Gramsci, whose major contribution to Marxist ideology was to argue that the revolutionary aim must be to take over, above all, not the means of production, but of thought.
Well, the dominant thought right now is: sod Net Zero. As a friend who has lost “tutto” told me on Whatsapp: “They should just shove their electric cars up their ass!”.
Nicholas Farrell