By Paul Homewood
Booker's column in the Telegraph today follows up David Rose's revelations about Gummer's undeclared income from his renewable cronies:
Awkward questions for climate change supremo
Last Sunday it was revealed that a small family company run by the chairman of the Climate Change Committee, Lord Deben (John Selwyn Gummer), had received payments of more than £600,000, mainly from firms involved in renewable energy and electric cars.
To grasp the full significance of this story we must appreciate just how astonishingly influential is the Climate Change Committee (CCC) in driving Britain's energy policy. It was set up under the Climate Change Act to advise the Government on how to meet its target of reducing Britain's CO2 emissions by 80 per cent.
Although the CCC likes to be called "independent" and its website boasts that its members are obliged to "act impartially and objectively", and must "avoid conflicts of interest", their record shows why they are all united in pressing the Government to go ever faster and further by every conceivable means, from promoting electric cars and "biomass" to offshore windfarms.
One CCC member is a director of an offshore energy firm. Another works for Drax, which receives annual subsidies of £700 million for converting its power station from coal to biomass. Deben himself, on becoming chairman of the committee in 2012, had to resign as chairman of the company building the world's largest offshore windfarm.
Yet, of all the payments reportedly made to the Gummer family's funds, the largest came from a firm heavily involved in electric cars, while others came from firms involved in biofuels and biomass (including Drax), as well as investors in offshore wind.
Deben insists that these payments were for work that didn't involve climate change issues. According to his lawyer 'allegations of conflict of interest and other improprieties are wholly false and misconceived"; and he "has, at all times, made disclosures in accordance with the advice he has been given by the House of Lords and the CCC.'
Make of this what you will. But now all this has been brought to light I know I am far from being alone in suspecting that we have not yet heard the end of this astonishing tale.
from Climate Change Skeptic Blogs via hj on Inoreader http://bit.ly/2GhLHof
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