Climate change

Amber Rudd isn’t a flashy politician; her office at the Department for Energy and Climate Change has almost no personal touches. She has a poster on the wall for the new Edinburgh tram (she was a student there). Her one concession to vanity is a framed ‘Minister of the Year’ award from this magazine: awarded for uprooting the legacy of the Liberal Democrat energy policy and being (in the words of the commendation) the ‘slayer of windmills’. It was, perhaps, an exaggeration: she hasn’t brought down any of Britain’s 5,215 onshore wind turbines. But she has been busy pruning back the green subsidies that her department had become used to

Reading the Sunday newspapers, you could be forgiven for thinking an earth-shattering agreement was reached in Paris – one which outdid even the Kyoto Protocol in the way of binding agreement across the world on climate action. The deal was heavy on political will and ambition (or at least expressions thereof) but as many experts are now queuing up to say, offered little in the form of hard targets and binding commitments around reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This is of course a pragmatic approach to doing policy at the global level, particularly given the extreme variation in capacity and priorities between countries operating at vastly different levels of development. If the

Niall Ferguson wrote a piece recently comparing Europe’s situation to that of the Roman Empire during its late, decadent, sexual pervert days: Here is how Edward Gibbon described the Goths’ sack of Rome in August 410AD: “ … In the hour of savage licence, when every ­passion was inflamed, and every restraint was removed … a cruel slaughter was made of the ­Romans; and … the streets of the city were filled with dead bodies … Whenever the Barbarians were provoked by opposition, they ­extended the promiscuous massacre to the feeble, the innocent, and the helpless…”. Now, does that not describe the scenes we witnessed in Paris on Friday night?

The delegates who will gather for the star-studded Paris climate summit include celebrities, presidents and perhaps even the Pope. Among other things, they will be asked to consider the formation of an ‘International Tribunal of Climate Justice’, which developed countries would be hauled before for breaching agreed limits on greenhouse gas emissions. That the proposed body will seek to be ‘non-punitive, non-adversarial and non-judicial’ does not reassure. A tribunal, if it is worthy of the name, ought to be all those things. Does the threat of climate change really justify such a system? It is disturbing to think how many world leaders and policymakers might casually answer ‘yes’. Barack Obama,

Last night’s episode of Question Time saw David Dimbleby relocate to Cardiff to join Charlotte Church, Charles Moore, Stephen Crabb, Labour’s Stephen Kinnock and Plaid Cymru’s Leanne Wood for a Welsh debate. While questions were raised about the future of Plaid Cymru after a lacklustre election result, the first topic on the agenda touched on whether Jeremy Corbyn could still be Prime Minister now he has said that he would never, ever use a nuclear weapon. With Kinnock struggling to defend Corbyn’s comments while also sticking to his own views supporting nuclear weapons as a deterrent, it fell to Corbynista Church to praise the Labour leader’s comments as ‘commendable’: ‘I think that it’s commendable. I think that if nuclear warfare