Members of the CCC

By Paul Homewood

 

https://www.theccc.org.uk/about/

While John Gummer took £600k from green companies that stand to benefit from his advice to government, he is not the only member of the CCC who has a vested interest in climate alarmism and can hardly fulfil the Committee’s stated role of providing independent advice.

In addition to Gummer, there are seven other members, so let’s take a closer look at them:

 

Brown, an engineer by background, is up to her neck in work for low carbon, renewable and green related organisations. It is hard to see how she can have any sort of independent or objective view on climate change matters.

One position that sticks out is her directorship of the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult (OREC), a company established by the government, and limited by guarantee.

OREC gets most of its income in the form of grants from Innovate UK, in turn part of UKRI, an executive non-departmental public body, sponsored by BEIS.

According to Brown’s Register of Interests at the House of Lords, she is also a paid Board member for Innovate!

She is so immersed in the whole climate merry-go-round that she cannot possibly offer independent advice.

Nick Chater is an interesting one, as he has no background at all in climate change that I can see.

According to his bio, given by Decision Technology Ltd:

 Nick is Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School. He has over 200 publications and four national awards. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. Nick is on the advisory board of the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insight Team, also known as the ‘Nudge Unit’, and is the resident expert on Radio 4’s ‘Human Zoo’.

The Behavioural Insight Team was privatised in 2014, although still partly owned by the Cabinet Office. But what is interesting is how they describe themselves:

The Behavioural Insights Team exists to improve people’s lives and communities. We work in partnership with governments, local authorities, businesses and charities, often using simple changes to tackle major policy problems.

Over the last eight years, the Team has grown from a seven-person unit at the heart of the UK government to a global social purpose company with offices around the world. Our work spanned 31 countries in the last year alone.

Our mission remains the same. We generate and apply behavioural insights to inform policy, improve public services and deliver results for citizens and society. We have a track record of success across a range of policy areas, from healthcare to humanitarian aid, and we increasingly work to scale up our successful interventions.

https://www.bi.team/publications/the-behavioural-insights-team-annual-report-2017-18/

Social purpose company! Heaven help us all.

I think that original nickname of the Nudge Unit says it all. The whole purpose of the BIT is to persuade us plebs that what the government wants us to have is actually good for us.

And it appears that Chater’s role with the CCC is exactly the same.

How dare with serfs object to paying hundreds of pounds a year each, just to satisfy our Lords’ and Masters’ green obsession! We must be brainwashed to correct our unsocial attitudes!

If that is not bad enough, we serfs are actually paying him for the privilege.

 

It was, of course, the Priestley Centre which recently helped write that shamelessly dishonest paper, Recipe for Disaster, which purported to show that Britain’s fruit and veg industry was at risk from climate change.

That alone should see him barred from any influence on public policy.

 

 

This is the same Drax who would be bankrupt without annual subsidies from bill payers of £700m.

 

 

Le Quere is former director of the Tyndall Centre, for which she still works as a Research Centre member. The Tyndall Centre is regarded as extreme, even by climate science standards.

As with Piers Forster, she has spent so long working in the climate science industry that she can no longer claim to be objective or to see the wider picture.

 

 

 

Skea is a founding member of the CCC, and is another who has long been involved with climate governance, including being Co-Chair of an IPCC working group.

Most recently, he was co-author of the alarmist IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C, which was widely regarded as a work of fantasy.

 

Summing up

The Committee on Climate Change is stocked full of fully paid up, card carrying members of the climate industry elite.

They have been so bound up in climate alarmism for so long, that their views must now be set in stone, and they are unable to see the wider picture.

Their fanaticism certainly makes it nigh impossible for them to admit that they might be wrong, or that there might be a better way.

The CCC is supposed to offer independent advice to government on building a low-carbon economy and preparing for climate change, but this is plainly not possible given its current set up.