So dangerous the councils to leave us all in the dark

THE greenies like to tell us that if we don't cut carbon emissions we're all going to die.

James Delingpole, councils turning off street lamps, street lamps, climate change, combat climate change, Archie WellbeloveCivilisation depends on the development of illuminated cities [ALAMY]

But I doubt that message was of much help to Archie Wellbelove, an 18-year-old student who was killed two years ago near Leamington after being hit in the dark by a taxi. Partly to blame, said the coroner, was the council's decision to switch off the street lights to combat climate change.

He isn't the only victim of this misguided policy. According to the AA, at least five pedestrians and a cyclist have died since 2009 for similar reasons. In the same period, in areas where street lights had been switched off, road deaths increased by 39 per cent, while casualties rose by 20 per cent.

Is this really a sign of progress? Well I'm sure there are lots of environmentalists out there who would tell you "yes". A bit like Stalin who said: "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs," they'd no doubt argue that these unfortunate personal tragedies are the price you have to pay for tackling the far greater, potentially more life-threatening menace of climate change.

Personally, though, I'd say it was anything but progress. As Matt Ridley argues in The Rational Optimist, one of the great measures of an advancing civilisation has been the development of illumination. First came flickering, smelly, tallow candles then gas lamps then the glories of electric lighting.

It is one of the reasons why even the poorest household in Britain now has a better standard of living than even the mightiest medieval king or the wealthiest 19th-century US robber baron. Unlike them we don't have to struggle to get all our business done before dark, avoid night-time travel or spend our evenings shrouded in sepulchral gloom.

Road deaths went up by 39 per cent

All we have to do is press a magic button on our walls or twist a knob by our steering wheel and - hey presto! - it's daytime 24/7. At least that used to be the rule till the greenies took over.

And this development is really quite recent. At university in the 1980s I remember that one of the favourite campaigns of Lefty activists was for better street-lighting.

Looking back, I realise those earnest students had a point. As people learned during the blackouts of the war and as we're relearning now, dark streets are a recipe for chaos: it's easier to get lost, you're more likely to trip, it's a licence for muggers and rapists and yes, it leads to a lot more car accidents.

Today it would be a brave student who campaigned for better street-lighting. They'd be written off as wicked climate deniers, hopelessly addicted to the decadent luxury of nocturnal illumination, too selfish to mend their ways for the sake of the polar bears and the melting ice caps.

Anyway, if our ancestors managed to cope in the Dark Ages, why shouldn't we? But these attitudes, I would suggest, owe more to ignorance than they do to scientific reality.

Across Britain at least 750,000 street lights have been turned off or dimmed by councils in the name of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

However even if we extinguished twice as many, even if we were to get rid of the lot the difference it would make to climate change wouldn't even be measurable. Especially not with China building new coal-fired power stations at the rate of one every five days.

What's really going on, in other words, is the equivalent of the destruction of all those glorious Victorian park railings during the Second World War. It was vital for the war effort, a credulous public was assured.

The iron could be melted down and to make tanks and Spit-fires. Except of course it couldn't. It was an utterly futile gesture dreamed up to give everyone the warm feeling they were doing their bit.

The modern green movement is very keen on these grand, futile, self-sacrificial gestures: biofuels that chop down rainforests, use up agricultural land and clog up your car engine; flickery yellow, mercury-filled eco-bulbs that don't work as well as the old incandescent ones; wind turbines that ruin the landscape and slice-anddice wildlife.

Environmentalists don't seem very interested in the practical consequences of their policies, they're far too busy enjoying the sense of moral superiority it gives them.

By rights these yogurt-weaving loons ought to be confined to the margins of our society. But unfortunately in the two decades since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit they have very successfully infiltrated our system, especially at the local government level.

Due to something called Local Agenda 21, town councils all over the world have been hijacked by groups of dedicated environmental activists on a mission to force "sustainability" on the rest of us whether we like it or not. So: more restrictions for car drivers, more compulsory recycling in half a dozen different coloured bags and less street-lighting.

They have no problem getting these measures past their less ardent colleagues, first because even the least ecofriendly local councillor loves being seen to be green and second - especially where turning off street lights is concerned - it's a cunning way of saving money behind a fig-leaf of environmental righteousness.

But here's something green crusaders should bear in mind. The people killed because of the reduction in street-lighting are real. But the people whose lives are threatened by "manmade climate change" exist solely in the greenies' warped imaginations.