It is impossible to take anything Adrian Delia does or says at face value and extremely difficult to engage with him on policy matters. It’s like opening your front door to a pair of American boys in their twenties wearing crisp which short-sleeved shirts, a tie and a big black badge on their left shirt pocket saying they’re from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints who want to have a chat about mortgage rates.
You know too much about him to take him seriously. He’s barely ever discussed any policy issues unless you consider generally disliking black people for there being too many of them as policy.
But not for the first time Adrian Delia posted this morning on his Facebook page about the greater emergency of global warming.
I say greater because the thrust of his comment is that with life as we know it coming to an end spending too much mental energy debating whether Joseph Muscat is corrupt or Adrian Delia is a poor replacement is a bit of a waste of time.
Hey, the Titanic is sinking. Leave those deckchairs alone. So to speak.
He ends his exhortation of this morning with a post-Marxist call to arms: “Let’s unite in the fight for survival before it’s too late. Make informed choices lose our greed, change our lifestyle & save our planet”. Punctuation marks have been replaced with little pictorials because we’re hip.
If the Nationalist Party has a climate change policy, it has not published it yet. And if Adrian Delia has changed his lifestyle to overcome what he calls in what these days passes for English “#ClimateEmergency” we don’t know in what way he’s done that yet.
Does Adrian Delia know his own carbon footprint and by how much he’s reduced it? Is he cycling to work? Are his office windows open to let in the breeze instead of air-conditioning? Has he dropped beef from his diet? Is he teleworking instead of flying for his international meetings?
Has he changed his office car fleet to electrics? Is the party he runs carbon neutral? Has he planted many trees lately?
Has he set policies to impose higher taxes on fuels? Has he drawn up a plan to reduce the energy share of the gas power station, maybe shut it down? Has he worked out consumer energy rates to purchase only energy from renewable sources from the grid? Has he drawn up an afforestation program to replace inefficient agriculture?
Is he proposing a freeze on any increase in dwellings in Malta? Is he proposing a freeze on the importation of private use vehicles? Is he proposing a freeze on pleasure boating? Is he capping the use of the harbour by cruise liners? Is he considering taxes on air travel?
Or has he woken up this morning and thought it was a good day to sip some tea and start preaching?