Climate change

From the moment that the Sunday Times caught Tim Yeo offering to advise energy companies for cash, it was clear that his chairmanship of the energy and climate change select committee was untenable. Yet he’s coming to this conclusion slowly. It has taken him until now to decide he’ll “step aside,” apparently under pressure from Labour members of the committee. Committee chairmen are elected nowadays, so what other members of the committee matters in a way it didn’t used to. And Yeo, who took £140,000 from various commercial interests last year, will now have become an embarrassment to the green movement more generally. Those who regard renewable energy as a massive racket will see in him

Now that it has become commonplace for the press to entrap MPs and peers, why don’t our legislators try to turn the tables? I suggest that ministers sidle up to journalists (secretly filming them the while) and offer them honours. They should hint that the honour is conditional on favourable coverage, and agree to meet again in six months. In between, they should track what the journalists write, and then, when they have trapped their victims, expose the pattern. Another trick would be for politicians to get friends to pretend to be businessmen offering journalists money or freebies to place products in their stories and features. These tactics would get

The failure of the Earth to warm since the start of the century has been a talking point for global warming sceptics for many years, but it is only in the past few months that the mainstream media have started to pay attention too. In recent weeks the Economist, Channel Four News, and even ultra-green writers like the Telegraph’s Geoffrey Lean have sat up and taken notice. And on top of the pause, a series of recent studies of how fast temperature will rise in response to carbon dioxide emissions has produced estimates that are decidedly un-scary. Together with the plateau in global temperatures these estimates have a profound impact

Not that anyone has noticed, but the Kyoto Protocol expired on 31 December, with  carbon emissions up by 58pc over 1990 levels – instead the 5pc cut the signatories envisaged. All that fuss for worse-than-nothing. Kyoto has not been replaced, because a new era of climate change rationalism is slowly taking root. As Nigel Lawson predicted, the hysteria of the last few years is cooling. There’s no point legislating for change that’s not going to happen. No point taxing the poor out of the sky (or off the roads) if it won’t make the blindest bit of difference to the trajectory of global warming. To be sure, countries responsible for

A couple of weeks ago the great global warming bandwagon coughed and spluttered to a halt in Doha, the latest stop on its never-ending world tour. The annual UN climate conference COP18 is no small affair. This is a bandwagon whose riders number in the thousands: motorcades of politicians, buses full of technocrats and policy wonks and jumbo-jets full of hippies travelling half way round the world, (ostensibly) to save the planet from the (allegedly) pressing problem of climate change This is despite the fact that nobody seems able to point to any great problems caused by the modest warming of the globe at the end of the last century

Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, is to drop his normally conciliatory voice to attack the Tories at the Lib Dem party conference in Brighton. So what? you may well ask. The mild-mannered Alexander is unlikely to strike the fear of God into his listeners, assuming that anyone beyond the conference hall will be listening, or indeed that the conference hall is full: Brighton being lovely at that time of year. Besides, bursts of splenetic outrage at one’s coalition partners have become a feature of conferences, particularly since last year’s unhappy AV referendum. There is, dare I say it, a suggestion that they are choreographed for the TV

The environmental movement hasn’t responded well to the setbacks it has suffered seen since the failure of the Copenhagen climate conference.  The #endfossilfuelsubsidies campaign — trending worldwide on Twitter this morning — is the latest example of their descent. To be clear, fossil fuel subsidies are not a good idea; that is why governments like ours don’t offer them. Fossil fuels are huge cash cows for every western government.  When someone fills up their car with petrol, around sixty per cent of the pump price goes to the Exchequer. When an oil company drills in the North Sea and extracts a barrel the amount that the Treasury gets varies but

Here’s a U-turn that we can all welcome: felling the wind farms. Matt Ridley described, in a Spectator cover story some while ago, how George Osborne has turned against them. Today, the Observer has more details, saying that Osborne is:     As Ridley argued, wind farms are a ‘monument to the folly of mankind’, representing the triumph of ideology over reason. We could not afford them in the boom years, and we certainly can’t now. The subsidies make a small number of rich people even richer, and a huge number of companies are doing very well from the renewable energy racket. But if you apply rational analysis to it — ie,