Tag: lucre

So even Tim “Trougher” Yeo admits he was wrong about climate change. (Well done young Matthew Holehouse for screwing this admission out of him.)

Here’s what he said in 2009:

“The dying gasps of the deniers will be put to bed. In five years time, no one will argue about a man-made contribution to climate change.”

And here, less than five years on, is what he is saying now:

“Although I think the evidence that the climate is changing is now overwhelming, the causes are not absolutely clear. There could be natural causes, natural phases that are taking place.”

We’re going to see a lot of this in the coming weeks and months: “the even though I’ve been proved completely wrong, I was right all along really” non-apologetic retraction from all those former full-time climate alarmists – eg the Met Office; Oxford’s Professor Myles Allen; even certain of my Telegraph blogging colleagues – who are now trying to escape from the collapsing edifice of the great AGW scam while trying to salvage as much professional dignity as they can muster.

Notice that weasel phrase “I think the evidence that the climate is changing is now overwhelming…” It’s the sort of technique you might learn in an advanced NLP class as a way of pulling wool over the eyes of the unwary. What the phrase implies is that there has been a long-running debate as to whether “climate is changing”, that Yeo has always been on the right side of it and that now he has been vindicated. Truly this a slimy trick worthy of the man they sometimes call “Trougher” and sometimes “Ebola”. As we all know here, there has never been a debate about whether the “climate is changing”. Not even Mr Thick the Thickest person on the planet; not even Mr Fossil Fuel, the most lavishly Big-Oil-funded denialist denialista; not a single person anywhere on earth ever in our lifetime has ever suggested that climate doesn’t change. Indeed, that has been the whole point that those of us on the right (ie my) side of the argument have been making all along. Climate change is a normal, natural and perpetual process which occurs, and has always occurred, with sublime indifference to man’s puny input.

Still, it’s good to see Yeo taking at least the first tentative step on the path to redemption. Admitting you were totally wrong about something, that you’ve been made to look an utterly despicable, greedy fool, that even the Conservatives in your constituency hate you, that no one trusts you as far as they can spit, that you’ve done immeasurable damage to your country’s landscape and economy with the abysmally counterproductive environmental policies you not only helped promote but from which you may have benefited financially: these are things no man would ever wish to admit to himself.

But it’s OK Tim. I can help. In the last two years, for example, you have earned getting on for £250,000 on top of your MP’s salary, from your various green interests. Imagine how much happier you’d be in your skin if you could divest yourself of that money which you have now realised is tainted money. Imagine if you’d been given a blood diamond by Charles Taylor; imagine if you’d produced a DVD called “Now Then, Now Then: the Very Best of Jimmy Savile”: you couldn’t, in all conscience, keep the profits from that, could you?

Well, Trougher, me old mucker, I’m afraid the same rules apply with your green business interests. Here’s the thing: that industry you’ve profited from simply WOULD NOT EXIST had it not been for that toxic combination of junk science and hysterical fearmongering to which you have made such a vocal contribution.

I know quarter of a million quid is small beer next to the profits being raked in by your mates in the renewables industry. But for some people out there it would make a real difference, especially the victims of the wind industry which the Committee for Climate Change (Prop: Tim Yeo) has done so much to encourage.

£50 buys someone a decent night’s sleep in a B & B away from the insomnia-inducing low frequency noise of a wind farm

£500 buys a sporting rifle which – not that I’m recommending such illegal behaviour, heaven forfend! – might be used to blast away at the nacelle of the nearest wind turbine

£30,000 pays for a QC to represent a local community at the wind farm planning appeal to which, of course, by rights they should never have had to be subjected. After all, it’s not as though the planning committee of their district council didn’t already turn down this application to plonk an industrial turbine in the middle of their cherished beauty spot on two occasions, once by 11 to 1 and second time by 11 to 0. But hey, that’s the situation we’ve got at the moment with Dave’s Greenest Government Ever: still committed to building more of the turbines which no one save scrounging landowners and principle-free renewable energy companies actually wants….

£50,000 pays for the subsequent judicial review.

£250,000 buys a bespoke resignation speech, written by top author James Delingpole, for when you finally realise that being a decent Tory MP doesn’t fit comfortably within your skillset and that there are careers more closely aligned to your moral outlook. I’m thinking, maybe rare-earth mineral mining in China. Growth industry. Really green!