by: Patrick Henningsen
With the current protracted recession still in play and a government budget deficit to reconcile, Her Majesty’s Government may be looking to trim some fat by giving its bloated £3.2 billion Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) the royal chop.
Such budget austerity measures for UK government spending should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following the political slate since the keys were exchanged at Downing Street this past June. It’s an all too familiar story in Westminster and the thing that all bureaucrats fear the most. When your departmental number is called, you realise that all the liquid lunches, expense accounts, canape receptions and conference junkets could soon come to an end. So it was only a matter of time before fiscal reality came home for a seat at DECC’s own annual gravy dinner.
The fact that Britain’s DECC is on the butcher’s block also signals that some ministers and policy gurus might be reconsidering whether the highly politicised global warming movement should be a top priority for the country, and evidence that some are now doubting the legitimacy of such a department. Policy makers are now weighing up the benefits of such a massive bureaucratic department which is steering a politcal agenda based solely upon what is now deemed to be highly questionable science by some- and outright fraud by others.
An article published on Sept 22nd in the Guardian, details the move brought on by the inevitable spending cuts pledged by Britain’s new coalition government:
“Climate change secretary Chris Huhne is fighting to defend his department’s funding and independence, fending off a suggestion that his civil servants should be moved to the Treasury to cut costs.”
“But when all government departments were asked to model the effect of 40% cuts over the summer, officials at DECC told ministers that cuts of that level to its £3.2bn budget would make it unable to stand alone as a viable entity. At that time it was suggested it merge with the business department, but that was never formally suggested to the Treasury. Instead the Treasury renewed a push to get Decc relocated.”
“The news came today as Huhne gave his speech to the Liberal Democrat conference. His pitch was that the government wanted to foster a “third industrial revolution” in low-carbon technology. But the techno-optimism of the speech sat awkwardly with the news that he has been forced to contemplate breaking up his department.”
Today’s announcement in the UK and recently events like the unravelling and near collapse of the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) in the US, where carbon trading prices have bottomed out at a rather lackluster .10 cents per tonne (see fire sale), have added additional momentum to the previously unpopular common sense, or climate realist cause.
What preachers of Anthropogenic Global Warming(AGW) and climate change are slowly discovering is that no amount of spin and political propaganda can cover up a lack of results over a long stretch. Money eventually runs out, people start losing interest and the gravy train always stalls as a result.
In the last 12 months radical climatism has certainly faltered from its lofty position in modern mythology… back down to Earth. The economic reality in any democratic nation is that taxpayers cannot back departments, much less policies, that do not deliver benefits to the public welfare. Here in the UK, we have a government department which is busying itself with an apocalyptic event… that is not even happening.
Skeptics have two things on their side: one is science and the other is mother nature. If science can rediscover its old backbone, it will simply present the data (what the UN’s CRU at East Anglia did not do) of what mother nature has really been doing all this time, namely, the data which shows that there has been no global warming since 1998.
Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker spelled out the current insanity behind UK government energy policy recently, “If all this sounds like pure lunacy, we must recall that two years ago, our MPs voted all but unanimously for the Climate Change Act. This commits Britain, uniquely in the world, to cutting its CO2 emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, at a cost of up to £18 billion a year, or £734 billion in total. This is what our politicians have made the law of the land, although in practice it could only be achieved by closing down virtually all our economy”.
There are numerous gov’t departments around the globe, including the UN’s own IPCC that have been erected in recent years to “tackle the climate change problem”. Although they market themselves as an environmental concern, they have their roots and structure firmly based around politics. Like East Germany stepped up to dismantle its greatest Cold War symbol, will Britain be the first EU country to bring down its “Carbon Wall”? Perhaps. It’s certainly clearer now in 2010, than it was back in 2006- that the whole concept of global warming is fatally flawed. Henceforth, any policies or budgets attached to it need to be discarded. There is no other sane alternative in such a policy debate.
History will demonstrate that no matter how popular an ideology might be at any one time, it cannot survive very long if it is divorced from the reality outside of bureaucratic rooms. In this case, the focus is on real science and cost vs benefit economics. If the UK falls out of love with AGW, expect more climate change bureaucracies around the globe to find themselves thin ice too.
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