No conspiracy talk in the UK: The new Conservative government has appointed Amber Rudd Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. ConservativeHome comments:
The charge often made against the Cameroons, that they do not in their heart of hearts believe in the modish causes they espouse, is not levelled at Amber Rudd. The new Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change is agreed, by admirers and detractors, to be a true believer in the science of climate change.
Her appointment was welcomed by the Ecologist, which warned she would face opposition from Conservatives such as Lord Lawson, Owen Paterson and Peter Lilley: “Rudd will have to fight a strategic, robust and constant rearguard defence against those who are ostensibly on her side.”
RTCC (Responding to Climate Change) agrees:
Her appointment over more hardline Tory candidates for the top post will be of relief to campaigners and environmentalists, given her unequivocal commitment to a UN climate deal and support for green investment.
In a Business Green interview last year, she said: “I don’t think you could get a cigarette paper between me and Labour on our commitment to getting a deal in Paris. We are all completely committed to it, whatever the outcome.”
But Rudd will face challenges — having to implement the Tories’ manifesto pledge to curb the growth of onshore wind farms, broker negotiations over a controversial nuclear power plant, and draw up the government’s fifth carbon budget to run through the next decade.
NewScientist reports on the reaction (paywall) of Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics:
“It’s reassuring to have a politician paying attention to reality rather than living in a fantasy world where the laws of physics don’t apply”
James Delingpole at the American conservative site Breitbart.com, on the other hand, is not happy:
For those country communities who’ve been unfortunate enough to have one of Britain’s 7,000 onshore wind turbines dumped, willy nilly on their doorsteps it’s an issue a lot more serious than mere dodgy personal aesthetics. I know. I hear their piteous cries almost every day.
It’s about: having your property values randomly trashed with no compensation; having cherished views blighted for at least the next 25 years (longer, probably, given that so few of these monstrosities seem to have had their decommissioning costs factored in to the contract); thousands of pounds from your own pocket wasted on often fruitless planning law objections and judicial reviews; disrupted sleep and health issues arising from intermittency and low frequency noise; obliterated bats, disturbed livestock, eradicated birdlife; communities divided between the “haves” (those landowners in on the scam) and the “have-nots” (everyone else who has to live with the consequences as the subsidised greedheads rake in their morally tainted profits).
Rudd’s statement, in short, is not a reasonable acknowledgement that wind farms are a matter of opinion and that there are two sides to the argument. It’s a slap in the face to reason, evidence and common decency.
And then he gets worse.
(h/t NewScientist 16 May 2015)
