I live on a narrowboat, which means I have learned the difference between real things and official things. Real things are damp ropes, diesel fumes, swollen lock gates, frozen mornings, low batteries, rising mooring fees, and the sound of rain on the roof at three in the morning. Official things are the words people use when they want you to obey before you have had a chance to think.
That is why I have never trusted the modern climate religion. I do not mean that the weather does not change. Of course it changes. Anyone who lives close to water knows that better than most people in offices. I mean that climate change, as preached by politicians, broadcasters, NGOs, councils, corporations, universities, and all the respectable people with the same respectable opinions, has become something much bigger than science. It has become a test of moral cleanliness.
You are not asked to look, think, compare, doubt, remember, or ask who benefits. You are asked to confess. You must say the words. You must agree that there is a crisis, that ordinary people are guilty, that less freedom is responsibility, that higher costs are virtue, that control is care, and that anyone who hesitates is selfish, stupid, corrupted, or dangerous. That is not inquiry. That is ritual.
I have watched this happen slowly. First it was recycling, then carbon footprints, then net zero, then heat pumps, then low traffic neighbourhoods, then smart meters, then meat, cars, flights, wood burners, diesel, farming, boilers, and whatever else they decide to moralise next. Every ordinary part of life becomes a sin. Every comfort becomes suspicious. Every practical objection becomes evidence of bad character.
And the people who push it always seem to live at a distance from the consequences. They do not understand what it means to heat a small boat in winter. They do not know what it means to rely on an old engine, a gas bottle, a stove, a generator, a towpath, a cassette toilet, and a battered van to get through the week. They speak about “transition” as if people like me are just variables on a spreadsheet. They say “sustainable” when they mean expensive. They say “behaviour change” when they mean obedience. They say “misinformation” when they mean speech they cannot control.
That is what I object to. Not weather. Not nature. Not clean rivers or less waste or looking after the land. I object to the conversion of practical life into a moral courtroom. I object to being told that my doubts are not doubts but sins. I object to being treated as polluted because I do not kneel in front of the approved story.
People think religion disappeared because churches are emptier. I think it simply changed clothes. The pulpit became the television studio. The priest became the expert panel. The confession became the public apology. The heretic became the “denier.” The sin became carbon. The indulgence became the offset. The pilgrimage became the climate march. The sacred text became the report no ordinary person has read but everyone is expected to invoke.
The cleverest part is that they call this secular and rational. That way, anyone who notices the religious structure can be dismissed as irrational. But look at how people behave. Look at the panic when someone says the wrong thing. Look at the public shaming. Look at the way people compete to prove they care more than others. Look at the way disagreement is treated as moral contamination. If this were only about facts, people would argue facts. Instead they police belonging.
I live outside enough to see it. Not outside society completely; nobody does. But outside the smooth institutional corridors where people absorb the same language until they mistake it for reality. On the cut, things are cruder and clearer. Your batteries either hold charge or they do not. Your stove draws or it does not. The lock opens or it does not. Nobody can power a kettle with moral superiority.
That is why I distrust grand programmes designed by people who never have to live under them. The same class that cannot keep waterways dredged, roads maintained, hospitals functioning, housing affordable, or councils solvent now claims it can manage the temperature of the planet if only it is given enough money, power, surveillance, and permission to reorganise everyone else’s life. Forgive me if I am not eager to hand them the keys.
What bothers them most is not that people like me are ignorant. It is that we are not impressed. We have seen too many schemes, too many slogans, too many emergencies that always require the same solution: more authority for them, less independence for us. Climate is perfect for this because it is too large for any ordinary person to verify directly and too sacred for any ordinary person to question safely. That makes it politically useful.
Once something becomes sacred, it stops being examined in the normal way. It becomes protected. The language around it hardens. Certain jokes become unacceptable. Certain questions become suspicious. Certain people become untouchable and others become unclean. The issue is no longer just whether a claim is true. The issue is whether saying it aloud threatens the order that has been built around it.
That is why “denier” is such a revealing word. It does not simply mean wrong. It means wicked. It places you outside polite society. It says you are not merely mistaken about atmospheric models or policy costs. You are morally diseased. You are refusing salvation. You are endangering the children. You are one of the damned.
But I do not accept their right to damn me. I do not accept that the people who fly to conferences, buy imported virtue, live by abstractions, and outsource every inconvenience have a deeper moral claim on the future than those of us who live carefully because we have to. My life is already small, local, weathered, repaired, reused, and limited by physical reality. I do not need a committee to teach me restraint.
This is not a rejection of responsibility. It is a rejection of false authority. Responsibility begins with what is near: the water under the hull, the towpath, the neighbour whose rope has slipped, the lock paddle left open, the rubbish someone has dumped by the bins, the engine oil that must not go into the canal, the winter coal shared with someone short of money. These things are real. They do not require slogans.
The modern world is full of people trying to turn their preferred political order into morality itself. Once they succeed, disagreement becomes heresy. That is what has happened with climate politics. It is no longer enough to care for nature. You must submit to the whole worldview: the guilt, the fear, the language, the taxes, the restrictions, the contempt for ordinary people, and the permanent expansion of expert rule.
I will not submit to that. I will listen to evidence, but I will not perform belief. I will care for the world I can touch, but I will not join a ritual of public obedience. I will live with weather, water, mud, smoke, rope, rust, and winter, and I will trust those things more than the polished voices telling me that freedom is selfish and compliance is virtue.
Perhaps that is what living on a narrowboat has given me: not escape, exactly, but distance. Enough distance to see that the sacred has not vanished. It has moved into politics, media, science-language, institutional speech, and respectable opinion. The gods have new names now, but the machinery is old. There are still sins, heresies, priests, confessions, purity tests, excommunications, and punishments for saying the wrong thing.
And if saying that makes me a denier, then so be it. I have been called worse by people who know less about weather than my roof does.