Lord Deben, the scandal-ridden chair of the Climate Change Committee, has once again displayed his flexible standards. Deben’s consultancy company, Sancroft, published an article about “Learning from Qatar” in the context of the controversy around the World Cup. Deben’s firm advises football clubs to reduce their human rights risk and “create positive change on social issues”. It argues clubs should be vigilant in their supply chains to mitigate human rights concerns. However, Sancroft clearly hasn’t taken its own advice. The environmental advisory company takes money from gas-selling Qatari ministers…
This raises another issue of transparency. After revelations of Deben’s history of dubious business links, the Climate Change Committee tightened its declaration protocols. Despite this, Deben has yet to declare his Qatari connection to the committee, as he does on the Lords’ register, only mentioning his role for Sancroft broadly. It’s hardly a model for transparency. Guido wonders why an environmental adviser wouldn’t want to disclose fossil fuel funding…
Co-conspirators may remember when the Mail on Sunday revealed that Lord Deben, Chairman of the independent Climate Change Committee, took more than £600,000 from ‘green’ businesses into his family company, Sancroft International. Lesson learnt, you’d have thought. Maybe not…
Deben’s latest addition to the House of Lords’ register of interests shows ‘Greencoat Capital Ltd’ is a client of Sancroft. Greencoat Capital (now Schroders Greencoat) happen to describe themselves as “a specialist manager dedicated to the renewable energy infrastructure sector.”
Apparently Sancroft is only advising them on “sustainability“, so it’s all above board. Surely not a conflict of interest for their chairman, who also still happens to be Chairman of the Climate Change Committee…
During his appointment hearing for the chairmanship, Deben said of his role with Sancroft:
“…almost everything that it does has no connection with the Committee on Climate Change, but there was one thing that I felt we ought to disengage from, and I said that. In that business [Sancroft], no one identified anything that they thought was a conflict.”
Admittedly that was ten years ago, though…
French MPs are starting to wake up to the fact that a 16-year old who wanders the world peddling miss-truths, telling people the end is nigh, and calling for the destruction of the global economic system as we know it may not be the best authority to blindly and uncritically rely on. Thunberg was invited to speak in the French Assemblée Nationale today, some French Deputies actually organised a boycott. Unlike British MPs who are happy to just fawn over someone who speaks casually about decimating the global economy…
Guillaume Larrivé, presidential candidate from centre-right Les Republicains wrote:
“I call on fellow MPs to boycott @GretaThunberg in the National Assembly. To fight climate change intelligently, we do not need apocalyptic gurus, but scientific progress and political courage.”
Fellow Republicains MP Julien Aubert said:
“I respect the freedom to think … but do not count on me to applaud a prophetess in shorts, “Nobel Fear Prize”. The planet yes, green business, no.”
Thunberg’s response was that she had “never met a climate activist who was in it for money.” Evidently she didn’t have the time to meet John Gummer when she was last in the UK…
Not content with just banning porn and plastic straws, Theresa May has decided to add a £1 trillion – that’s £1,000,000,000,000 – economic black hole to her “legacy” with her new policy to force the UK to have ‘net zero’ emissions by 2050. Philip Hammond has already warned that the cost “is likely to be well in excess of a trillion pounds”. Blows the row over tax cuts into insignificance…
The problem is that no-one has any idea how much it is actually going to cost. The Climate Change Committee (CCC), chaired by scandal-ridden Lord Deben, has put out a figure of £50 billion every year. BEIS’ preliminary estimate puts the cost a full 40% higher at £70 billion per year – these are just back of the envelope calculations. The Treasury wants to do a formal review of the costs but this will take months, not days. The fact that an outgoing Prime Minister is trying to bind the country with a commitment this vast without even doing a proper costing first is the height of irresponsibility…
Worse, a huge proportion of the costs won’t fall on the Treasury itself but directly on ordinary people. The plan laid out by the CCC relies heavily on expensive changes in consumer behaviour. Energy bills will rise, drivers will be expected to switch to more expensive green cars. This is fine for people like John Gummer who’ve had their snouts in the trough for years. For a pensioner struggling to get through the winter or someone who depends on a van to run their small business, these changes will be very costly indeed…
Businesses will also bear a huge part of the cost – it will effectively spell the death knell for serious manufacturing in the UK. Businesses will simply move their factories, emissions – and jobs – overseas at an even greater rate. May’s Government has already done a great job helping to drive car manufacturing out of the country with their ban on new petrol cars from 2040. May’s latest genius idea should finish the job…
Whitehall insiders are laying the blame squarely at the door of May and her dour Business Secretary Greg Clark, who have been gripped with a desperate desire to rush through something to give them some semblance of a legacy in their last six weeks in office. If May wants to leave a responsible legacy behind for her successor, she won’t lumber them with one of the most costly and damaging policies in the history of the UK…
Greg Clark was busy launching the Climate Change Committee’s new report this morning calling for a legally-binding target of zero net emissions by 2050. In the BBC’s view there’s just “one controversial recommendation” in the report: to turn down thermostats to 19C in winter – literally a matter of life and death for some elderly people trying to get through winter. Why is Greg Clark trying to kill off Tory voters?
Clark was also particularly effusive about the Committee’s chair, John Gummer/Lord Deben, opening his speech with:
“Everyone knows that when you appoint John Gummer to chair this important committee you are going to get rigour, you are going to get passion, and you are going to be challenged.”
What Clarke also knows is that when you appoint John Gummer, you get conflicts of interest worth over £600,000 with his family business, Sancroft International, raking in hundreds of thousands from “green” companies. Companies that Gummer’s own Committee lobbies the Government to hand billions of pounds of subsidies to.
Somehow Clark forgot to mention this, but that’s really no surprise as it’s just the latest in a long line of his BEIS Department whitewashing the whole affair. Whatever the pros and cons of renewable energy itself, the deeply corrupt industry that has sprung up to shuffle taxpayer subsidies from one gravy train to the next is a scandal of global proportions…
