Conflicts Of Interest At The Committee On Climate Change
By Paul Homewood
h/t Dennis Ambler
The Mail’s story, about how the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy cheated to claim govt grants, recalls another investigation by David Rose three years ago:
Other industries would stand accused of damning conflicts of interest but when it comes to global warming, anything goes…
The Mail on Sunday today reveals the extraordinary web of political and financial interests creating dozens of eco-millionaires from green levies on household energy bills.
A three-month investigation shows that some of the most outspoken campaigners who demand that consumers pay the colossal price of shifting to renewable energy are also getting rich from their efforts.
Vested interest: Lord Deben (John Selwyn Gummer) is chairman of the Committee on Climate Change
Enquiries by this newspaper have revealed:
- Four of the nine-person Committee on Climate Change, the official watchdog that dictates green energy policy, are, or were until very recently, being paid by firms that benefit from committee decisions.
- A new breed of lucrative green investment funds, which were set up to expand windfarm energy, are in practice a means of taking green levies paid by hard-pressed consumers and handing them to City investors and financiers.
- £3.8 billion of taxpayers’ money funds the new Green Investment Bank, set up by the Department of Business and Skills. One of its biggest deals involved energy giant SSE selling windfarms to one of the new green funds, Greencoat Wind. The Green Investment Bank’s chairman, Lord Smith of Kelvin, is also chairman of SSE. The bank says it ‘provided expertise’ to enable BIS to take a £50 million stake in Greencoat, which helped fund the SSE sale.
- The same bank’s chief executive, Shaun Kingsbury, is one of the UK’s highest-paid public sector employees. His £325,000 salary is more than twice the Prime Minister’s.
- Firms lobbying for renewables can virtually guarantee access to key Government policy-makers, because they are staffed by former very senior officials – a striking example of Whitehall’s ‘revolving door’.
This what they had to say about the Committee on Climate Change:
How half of key Climate Change Committee is in the pay of green business
No institution plays a greater role in dictating green energy policy than the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) – the body set up by Ed Miliband when he was Labour Energy Secretary through his 2008 Climate Change Act.
The Mail on Sunday’s investigation has established that four of its nine members have recently had or still have financial interests in firms that benefit from its rulings.
Last week, the CCC urged the Government not to water down its ‘fourth carbon budget’. This binds the UK to slash emissions of carbon dioxide to half their 1990 level by 2025.
The budget also says that by 2030, the CO2 emitted per unit of electric power must be less than ten per cent of what it is at present – a cut of more than 90 per cent.
Energy analyst Peter Atherton of Liberum Capital says this will need investment of between £361 billion and £393 billion. Such a policy would also cut emissions from the electricity industry by about two-thirds.
Amazingly, almost half the CCC’s members, whose decisions affect every UK citizen and the entire economy, have been paid by firms with green interests. They are all paid £800 a day for their part-time CCC work, except for chairman Lord Deben, who gets £1,000.
Dame Julia King, 59, is also a director of the Green Investment Bank, for which she is paid £30,000 a year on top of her £272,000 salary as vice chancellor of Aston University.
The bank, funded by taxpayers to the tune of £3.8 billion, has investment in offshore wind as a ‘top priority’.
The more the CCC’s rulings favour renewable subsidies, the better the bank is likely to do. She lives in a house in Cambridge, which she bought for £740,000 in 2002.
Lord May of Oxford, a former Government chief scientific adviser, is paid an undisclosed amount as a member of the ‘Sustainability Board’ of the global banking giant HSBC.
In the section of its website that deals with its ‘sustainability’ work, the bank lists its four biggest green business opportunities.
Top of the list is ‘low-carbon energy production such as bio-energy, nuclear, solar and wind’ – all directly affected by the CCC’s edicts.
A cross-bench peer, Lord May, 71, is an atheist, but his stated belief that climate change is more dangerous than nuclear war has made him suggest that religious leaders ought to persuade people to support the green cause. ‘Maybe religion is needed,’ he said in 2009.
‘A supernatural punisher may be part of the solution.’
Former adviser: Lord May is now paid as a member of HSBC’s sustainability board
As this newspaper revealed in January, CCC chairman Lord Deben, 74, was until recently chairman of Veolia Water UK PLC, which connects windfarms to the National Grid.
According to energy expert Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University, the drive to renewables means new grid investment will reach £25 billion by 2020. Deben has refused to state how much Veolia paid him. Company records say he resigned on November 12.
His spokeswoman said that this was because the firm was being merged with a sister firm.
He remains chairman of his family consultancy firm Sancroft, which advises companies on ‘global environmental policy’. When he took up his CCC post, he resigned as chairman of offshore wind firm Forewinds.
Prof Sam Fankhauser admits he is paid an undisclosed sum as a director of Vivid Economics, which offers business clients advice on how to respond to green Government policies – such as those set by the CCC
Sam Fankhauser, 49, is a professor at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Institute on Climate Change, funded by the radical green billionaire Jeremy Grantham – the world’s most generous donor to green activist groups.
Prof Fankhauser admits he is paid an undisclosed sum as a director of Vivid Economics, which offers business clients advice on how to respond to green Government policies – such as those set by the CCC.
The firm describes itself as a ‘thought leader’ on the ‘economics of climate change’, adding that it offers ‘insights that are not available elsewhere, allowing us to model the effects of policy on prices [and] profits’.
Other CCC members have spent their careers as academics in fields that help fuel green campaigns.
Sir Brian Hoskins, a fierce critic of climate sceptics, is a climatologist at Imperial College, London, where he is director of another institute funded by Grantham.
Jim Skea is also at Imperial, where he is Professor of Sustainable Energy, and was launch director of the Low Carbon Vehicle Project.
The up to date position is as follows:
Lord Deben
Little has changed since 2013. Deben is still Chairman of Sancroft International, which according to its latest accounts has net worth of £1.1 million.
In addition he is non exec Chairman of Valpak Holdings, who boast on their website to be “a leading provider of environmental compliance services”. Part of this involves steering clients through the bureaucratic jungle of the Carbon Reduction Commitment, the scheme introduced in 2010 which was the first piece of compulsory UK legislation to address energy use amongst medium to large non-energy intensive organisations.
Although he resigned as Chair at Veolia Water UK, the House of Lords Register of Interests shows he is now Non-executive Director, Veolia East & Central Europe.
Although this is a separate operation to the UK one, they are both part of the overall Veolia business, and therefore there must still be potential for conflict of interest.
Julia King
King is still a Director of the Green Investment Bank, for which she was paid £25000 last year.
She is also Director of Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult, a technology innovation and research centre for offshore wind, wave and tidal energy. Much of their funding is derived from the public sector, including the European Union, Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), Department of Business Innovation and Skills (BIS), Innovate UK and the European Regional Development Fund.
Sam Fankhauser
Fankhauser is still Director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and Deputy Director of the ESRC-funded Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, both at the London School of Economics, and a Director at Vivid Economics.
Lord May
Has now left the CCC.
Brian Hoskins
He is still Chair of the Grantham Institute.
Jim Skea
Still Professor of Sustainable Energy at Imperial College.
Corinne Le Quéré
She is Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
Add in the likes of Lord Krebs and Paul Johnson, perennial riders on the quango merry-go-round, and the idea that the Committee on Climate Change is “independent”, “objective” or “balanced”, as it claims, is laughable.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Truly a gravy-train for the sinecure-seekers and Snake-Oil Salesmen/women.
It is worse than i thaught.
Let’s be honest, the Green Blob is shot-through with corruption isn’t it? Top to bottom, left to harder left, politics, media, energy, activism, journalism, environmentalism, NGO’s, everywhere you look. Vested interests, partisan decisions, outrageous manipulation of peer review, of data, of deals, of laws, of cash. What a bunch of w*nkers they are.
+1 and they’ve been aided and abetted by elites who became wealthy under Capitalism and provide them funding and the UN which uses our money to destroy Capitalism. When will the people wake up to the subterfuge of AGW?
Plus not forgetting……Those <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/10/21/wikileaks-soros-stooge-trashes-climate-scientists-career-brown-nose-billionaire-hillary-donor/"shady organizations all funded by the likes of that black hearted zealot – Georg Soros.
Yeah, Soros and his Rottweiler mouthpieces set to calumniate, pillory, undermine and downright peddle lies about scientists who stand up and tell the truth about the mythical statistical methodology, the bent computer modelling and
sciencespecious alchemy underpinning the great green scam. which is unconscionable as it is fraudulent!Finally, and really extorting money via stiffing the taxpayers – to counter a chimera….and that’s where the politicians pour forth their egregious lies, lies, lies and more lies – it is widespread fraud without which, the great green scam would never exist. CO2 and the pathetic input from our human emissions is a harmless addition undetectable against the background – the fluctuating Temperature noise signal of an as yet unquantifiable dynamic system.
Where, simply put it is a Ponzi scheme on such a scale and which would have made old Bernie Madoff wet his pants with its possibilities for major embezzlement and a gift which keeps on giving.
Imho, the green scam has been a major though unnoticed, underlying cause of the west’s financial demise and its gamut is immense, it affects us all and has undoubtedly made the west poorer and if we are to set store in what the nutters would wish upon us – the future looks bleak – and oh …no, not much lecky = death, disease and for the old and those others unable to pay – very cold.
‘The green agenda’ just another reason to deconstruct the Westminster claque, to bin the UN and get out yesterday – away and out of the Brussels Empire of doom
Autos that are not used frequently undergo “Parasitic Battery Drain.” These are very small draws of energy that go unnoticed if the auto is started and used a couple times each week. Over enough time the battery is depleted.
A society’s wealth can be thought of as the energy in the battery. If the £156 B in gold bars stored in former canteen under London were to be carried off overnight, folks would be astounded. However, when wealth is drained away slowly few notice.
The government and quasi-government climate/green/sustainable committees remind me of this. The salaries, expenses, and such seem excessive (to me) but likely are not out of line, and may be less than, such earned in London’s main businesses.
[The problem with this analogy is that taxes and fees are generating the money that pays the drain. Opportunity costs to the individual and to society are what’s foregone.]
I recognise the PBD problem and suffer it 6 monthly, so installed 100 quid-ish solar panel Batt standby system in/on shed. That works…its a modern lossy thing though and as one would expect
Experienced the blow out of Civil Service Depts to Agency status and the money did rise a lot. It struck me as with much in UK/EU as out of control and service did not suddenly become high quality. It immediately initiated process/procedure overhaul and on many processes that didn’t need that…enter Consultants various.
Now look at a BBC salary…oh, better not
The “Military-Industrial Complex” was the rogue-elephant haunting the corridors of Washington (and still is?)
Now it’s joined by the Politico-Greeno-Alarmist-pseudo-Scientific Cabal” (I need a convenient acronym, please.) It is alive and well in Whitehall, Westminster & Brit Academia obviously.
With colluding, rotating-door postings between the parties, it is no surprise that they have a perfect monopoly for running-up the price of electricity and lining their own pockets egregiously, laughing all the way to their respective banks.
It’s the Greenblob as Owen Patterson described them.
P.S. Sir Humphrey will be smiling in his grave ……………
Each and every one of these scamsters has their snouts in the trough.
They are of the same ilk as the disgraced Tim Yeo- who should be in clink for (alleged) perjury.
15 years ago I met a FoE group near the HoC. They told me how wonderful the new EU windmill virtual power station would be. I told them it could never work and why: no Grid inertia. At best we could with pump storage cope with 20% renewable energy.
However, I was to underestimate the cunning of the Mafia for whom windmills are a property play, the stupidity of the politicians, led by John Prescott, and the arrogant corruption of the academics who jumped on the gravy train.
No professional scientist can accept IPCC fake physics. No engineer can accept the windmill fiasco. Indeed, I am working hard to prepare for criminal prosecutions for Corporate Manslaughter as we enter the new Little Ice Age and potentially 100s of 1000s of excess deaths per year as the power grid becomes too expensive for the old and poor, all to enrich ignorant pigs with snouts in various toughs.
I leave my greatest criticism for people like Le Quere, May, Krebs etc. who have shamelessly chucked away academic rigour for opportunism. However, as this scam collapses, only the true idiots are left to hold the baby when anyone with a bit of scientific nous melts away in the darkness, e.g. people like David King from whom we have heard remarkably little recently.
Perhaps it was the drubbing he received in Moscow in 2004 when he was shown up by real atmospheric scientists……..
Well said, AlecM! …….
“No professional scientist can accept IPCC fake physics. No engineer can accept the windmill fiasco. Indeed, I am working hard to prepare for criminal prosecutions for Corporate Manslaughter as we enter the new Little Ice Age and potentially 100s of 1000s of excess deaths per year as the power grid becomes too expensive for the old and poor, all to enrich ignorant pigs with snouts in various toughs.”
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs tells us that the hierarchy is founded on (wo)mankind’s fundamental survival requirements: Food, Water, Shelter, Warmth… I submit that any modern gov’t shd make it their top national priority to facilitate the distribution/provision/staisfaction of these needs in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. (this does not have to be by nationalization.)
Any gov’t that doesn’t shd be thrown out. If I were back in UK, I would start a ‘Stop Feeezing Grannies’ party (if someone else doesn’t beat me to it!)
Ironic that Lord Deben is waving a hat that says “Buck the System- Fix the Food chain”, which of course, is already happening under the Greening of the Globe and incremental CO2 good news story. Oh wait.. he’s on the other side of that tea towel.
These scamsters are of the same ilk as “Trougher” Tim Yeo.
Swine with snouts in the subsidy swill.
They should be in jail.
The GIB is mentioned “£3.8 billion of taxpayers’ money funds the new Green Investment Bank, set up by the Department of Business and Skills. ”
but The GIB is in the news as it is to be sold probably to Australian Macquarie ” closes in on £2bn Green Investment Bank deal Financial Times-9 Oct 2016
“The UK Green Investment Bank is so important because it is a pioneering, … of a “Royal Mail” situation where the state sold at too low price.”
“Richard Branson calls for Government to protect Green Investment Bank”
Apologies for formatting [above], link is here:http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/10/21/wikileaks-soros-stooge-trashes-climate-scientists-career-brown-nose-billionaire-hillary-donor/
I re-quote Athelstan:
“And the vast PR Dept. for the Alarmist Mafiosi hoodwinked us proles — who fund their corrupt endeavours by way of taxation, voted-in by colluding Pols on the take — tells us that this is Pure, Science-is-Settled, unassailable fact. The Climate Scientists are Gods: we, the hoi-polloi, whose pockets are being picked, are hoodwinked into thinking that these Gods are omniscient, honest (wo)men of unimpeachable integrity.
The reality is that it is self-serving, mannipulated (sic) Science-Fiction, not Science Fact.
I repeat segments of Athelstan’s excellent contribution:
“…. set to calumniate, pillory, undermine and downright peddle lies about scientists who stand up and tell the truth about the mythical statistical methodology, the bent computer modelling and science specious alchemy underpinning the great green scam. which is unconscionable as it is fraudulent!
Finally, and really extorting money via stiffing the taxpayers – to counter a chimera….and that’s where the politicians pour forth their egregious lies, lies, lies and more lies – it is widespread fraud without which, the great green scam would never exist. CO2 and the pathetic input from our human emissions is a harmless addition undetectable against the background – the fluctuating Temperature noise signal of an as yet unquantifiable dynamic system.
Where, simply put it is a Ponzi scheme on such a scale and which would have made old Bernie Madoff wet his pants with its possibilities for major embezzlement and a gift which keeps on giving……”
Very well said, Sir!
I’d advocate that any readers hereof read “Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds”, published 150 +/- years ago(??) and just as true today as it was in yester-year. The pattern repeats and “(S)he who ignores History, does so at her/his peril)”
Ladies & Gentlemen: THIS IS A TOTAL SCAM ON THE TAXPAYERS, who fund this Ponzi-Scheme. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose!
I understand that the Mafiosi are also ‘wetting their pants” at the prospect of Carbon-Credit Trading, most (all?) of which relies on un-audited reporting (e.g., checking-out remote forestry sites in Papua New-Guinea? HaHaHa!) Clerks will be paid to sign-off on un-auditable Claims for hundreds of thousands (millions?) of Dollars, deposited to a bank in Cyprus, Cayman Islands, or Panama (if not all three!)
Follow the Money … this is the way the corrupt World works. It would well behove the Snake-Oil Salesmen/women to get real, lest the proletariat get antsy and do what the peasantry in France did …. over Weights & Measures scams in their case … in the 18th.Century. (I invite readers to concoct their own list of heads they’d like to see on spikes, if and when this Scam gets to Revolutionary reaction — well deserved IMHO, as we’re talking trillions of taxpayer $ here, misdirected to the pockets of those colluding in the Scam.)
OMG, has Ed Davey seen the light, now warning about blackouts … nah, he is just trying to protect all the tiny and useless “green” generators, which now may not get the subsidies they need to survive:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/10/24/britain-risks-sleepwalking-into-blackouts-under-ofgem-reforms-si/
It was The Idiot Davey who against the advice of his then Chief Scientist**, authorised the diesel scam to pull his windmill testicles out of the fire.
**The late David McKay warned him in May 2012 that the only way windmills could save any fossil fuel use was to install massive pump storage. Instead, Davey decided, allegedly using a cloud computer system devised by Siemens to keep up its windmill sales, to set up diesel parks hidden in quarries, also providing a useful income stream to government by using diesel standby plant in official buildings.
So, the windmills are the equivalent of the Easter Island Statues: there to show to the proles how powerful the public school educated but corrupt and technologically ignorant ruling caste how powerful is their juju, thereby justifying their hegemony.
It is called STOR – short term operating reserve – of instantly accessible diesels at anything up to 30 times the normal kwH rate. Booker uncovered a lot about these as the planning applications were submitted.
If Sir Phillip Green is considered unfit to retain his Knighthood because of alledged legal financial manipulations at BHS then surely Ed Davey should be stripped of his since his misdemeanour was orders of magnitude greater.
Reblogged this on Tallbloke's Talkshop and commented:
How obvious does it have to be before people realize they’re being taken for a massively expensive ride by the Greenblob, hiding behind their figleaf of ‘climate change’?
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
I’ll second “Old Brew’s” comment :
“How obvious does it have to be before people realize they’re being taken for a massively expensive ride by the Greenblob, hiding behind their figleaf of ‘climate change’?”
Reblogged this on TheFlippinTruth.
Prof Sam Fankhauser
Unkempt appearance with evidence he did not have time to use the razor that morning and the attempt to appear arrogantly intelligent. Yep, that’s a typical leftist professor. You can spot em a mile away.
Let’s see if the BeeB does a Panorama on this scam. Bets anyone?