Climate activist Greta Thunberg speaking on the Pyramid Stage during the Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm in Somerset. Picture date: Saturday June 25, 2022.
INTERNATIONAL climate activist Greta Thunberg condemned the British government as “out of touch with reality” today as she joined protesters in London against the Rosebank oil field.
Campaigners gathered outside the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero against the proposed plans for the new site off the Shetland coast.
The plans were originally expected to get approved before parliamentary recess this month but have been delayed over climate concerns.
Ms Thunberg said that a decision by Energy Secretary Grant Shapps to approve oil and gas explorations at Britain’s largest site would be “deliberately destructive.”
The Swedish activist said: “How can the British government even consider pressing ahead with new drilling when we can see what the burning of fossil fuels is doing to the climate and to people?
“The extreme weather events being experienced around the world right now is just a taste of what’s to come if we don’t get off fossil fuels.”
Just Stop Oil paint the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero
{Wow, what an nut Shapps is, that takes some effort} The Secretary of State for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, Grant Shapps, has been ridiculed after his latest political stunt spectacularly backfired.
After campaigners from the climate protest group Just Stop Oil sprayed orange paint onto the department for energy security and net zero’s headquarters in Westminster on Wednesday after its decision to issue more than 100 new oil and gas licences in the UK, Shapps decided to invoice the Labour Party for the damage to the building.
The Tory minister drew on a familiar baseless Tory attack line, posting a ridiculous letter on Twitter and claiming that Just Stop Oil was the ‘political wing of the Labour Party’.
The Tories have repeatedly tried to claim, incorrectly, that Just Stop Oil funds the Labour Party. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak previously made the claim which was fact checked and proven to be false by organisations such as Full Fact which wrote to the Prime Minister asking him to prove his claim.
Image of InBedWithBigOil by Not Here To Be Liked + Hex Prints from Just Stop Oil’s You May Find Yourself… art auction. Rishi Sunak, Fossil Fuels and Rupert Murdoch appear.
After examining the climate voting history of the entire new Tory cabinet (via the website TheyWorkForYou), gal-dem can report that every single person has either generally or consistently voted against climate change measures. Surprisingly, while some of the cabinet members had expressed that climate change is man-made and an urgent issue in press interviews or online, they still voted against any mitigation or adaptation policies, and often looked to unviable solutions such as carbon capture.
The most worrying appointment is Jacob Rees-Mogg as business, energy and industrial strategy secretary. The climate denialist will now oversee the government department responsible for energy and climate change. Climate organisers are deeply worried about what this will mean for the UK.
The new home secretary, who ran for leader this summer, accepted £10,000 from a leading climate sceptic to support her campaign. She also argued that the UK should suspend its legally binding commitment to net zero by 2050 and blamed the energy crisis on our green commitments. This is, of course, false. The current energy crisis is due to the UK’s dependence on fossil fuels, the wholesale prices of which have surged.
Unsurprisingly, Braverman almost always voted against measures to prevent climate change.
Trade secretary Kemi Badenoch met secretly with a US think tank that has taken millions of dollars from climate denial groups. She also claimed it would be “irresponsible” for Britain to follow climate science. Badenoch met representatives of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which campaigners say has a long track record of “distorting” climate science.
Yet Badenoch dined with lobbyists in November while on an official visit to the US. The AEI has received more than £265 million in donations from climate denial groups since 2008, including almost £4 million from US oil giant ExxonMobil mScant details of the meeting were published by Badenoch’s department last week, as her Indo‑Pacific trade deal faced criticism for “making a mockery” of British pledges to tackle deforestation.
The AEI, which also met with Liz Truss in 2018 when she was trade secretary, has sown doubt over climate change science. It described the landmark 2021 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as “alarmist” and “deeply dubious”.Benjamin Zycher and Peter J Wallison, senior fellows at the AEI, played down its findings by claiming that “we don’t understand all the elements in the complex climate system—the effects of clouds alone are understood poorly”.
The think tank also separately criticised Cop 26, the annual UN climate conference hosted by Britain in 2021. One of its authors claimed that delegates spread a “false narrative” that urgent action is required. Badenoch also gave a speech at another US think tank, the Cato Institute, during her official visit.It was founded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, one of the top funders of climate denial in the US. Cato is “focused on disputing the science behind global warming,” according to Greenpeace US. The minister gave a speech promoting free trade at the institute’s headquarters in Washington DC in which she hinted that some climate change policies could “impoverish” Britain.“We can and should solve it by using free trade and investment to accelerate the technological progress that will protect the planet. We must protect the planet in a way that does not impoverish the UK, the US or, let’s be honest, any other country,” she said.
Grant Shapps appointed by Sunak as Secretary of State for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is a regrettable move.
The outgoing chair of the UK Government’s statutory climate advisers has been left “extremely disappointed and increasingly concerned” that neither the Tories nor Labour are prioritising a move to net zero.
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Lord Deben was asked on Times Radio, whether he was “surprised” by the lack of enthusiasm for the climate crisis by both major parties at Westminster, giving the scale of the challenge to tackle it.
In response, Lord Deben said: “Well, I don’t think I’m surprised, I’m just extremely disappointed and increasingly concerned because it seems to me that it is the priority.
“There is nothing more important than securing the world for our children.
“And indeed, I may be quite old now, but it’s securing it for me, because this is changing so fast that we are going to make the world an impossible place for us to live in the way in which we have lived up to now.”
It appears that Sunak has assembled a cabinet of facilitators of climate destruction – like Rishi Sunak himself and Grant Shapps – as well as some outright climate-change deniers like Suella Brverman. Still being a climate-change denier is ridiculous or insane and most definitely shows defective judgement.