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Happy days! It appears the UK now has a full suite of environment and energy ministers who actually accept that dangerous climate change is being driven by human activities and needs to be tackled.
What? You say that should be the minimum qualification for such important roles? Well, you are right. But, given the recent occupants of these offices of state, we should celebrate good news where we find it. It was, however, weirdly tricky to establish.
A couple of days after the reshuffle that saw the sacking of climate change sceptic Owen Paterson as environment secretary, I contacted the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to ask the views on global warming of his successor Liz Truss. I also got in touch with the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc), as the departing Michael Fallon seemed to despise the green policies he oversaw, describing climate change as “theology” and wishing he could scrap “strong environmental and climate change commitments”.
Would the new ministers back the overwhelming consensus of scientists and governments that climate change is a real and present danger? Of Truss’s views we knew nothing. Fallon’s replacement Matthew Hancock was one of the 100 Tory MPs who wrote to David Cameron in 2012 demanding wind power subsidies were slashed. So I asked Defra and Decc: “Do the new ministers agree with the following statements made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?”
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia.
It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.
Continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate system. Limiting climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.
Increasing magnitudes of warming increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts.
It was, of course, a trick question in one sense. The IPCC is the most authoritative source of information on this issue and these statements had already been approved by every government on the planet, including the UK. So the obvious answer to my question would be a single word: “Yes.” But it took days and multiple prompts for Defra to respond.
Eventually, they did: “The Environment Secretary [Liz Truss] shares the government view on climate change.” OK, I thought, but that doesn’t actually answer the question. So I tried again. Back came Defra: “The government’s view is in line with the IPCC’s.” I was getting close. So I called up and asked: “So that must mean Liz Truss agrees with the IPCC?” Finally, it came: “Yes.”
Decc had responded much more swiftly. “The government’s view on climate change is in line with the IPCC’s and we have a diverse portfolio of policies to lessen the risk it poses to the UK and world - all Decc Ministers are signed up to that agenda.” Again, not a simple “yes”, but a pretty clear statement that Hancock and the other new Decc minister Amber Rudd agree with the IPCC statements.
Yet the inability to give the simple “yes” is telling. It betrays the Conservative party’s dilemma of understanding the reality of climate change but having to pander to those Tory supporters who think it’s a communist plot. Cameron hugged the husky then derided the “green crap”; George Osborne promised to be a “green ally, not a foe” then decided that saving the planet was going to “put the country out of business”.
These dilemmas are ugly and damaging to the UK’s fast-growing green economy but there is a word for them: it’s politics.
