Emma Pinchbeck, the new chief executive of the UK’s Climate Change Committee, gave her first TV interview this weekend, to the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg. [emphasis, links added]
For a supposed expert charged with advising the UK government on how to get to Net Zero, she displayed an alarming ignorance of the climate debate.
As you might have expected, Britain’s chief climate bureaucrat is keen for us all to adopt a hairshirt lifestyle and to be ‘carbon conscious’.
In the interview, she made the usual recommendations to switch from gas boilers to heat pumps and from petrol cars to EVs, despite the extortionate costs involved in both.
She also wants us to buy ‘second-hand things’ and to avoid flying abroad for holidays. (‘Some flights are fine’, she added, when defending her 8,000 km round trip to COP29 in Azerbaijan, natch.)
Yet, aside from these lifestyle changes, Pinchbeck denied there would be any major costs in getting to Net Zero.
‘It’s clear for the macroeconomy’, she claimed, that the green transition is a ‘good idea regardless of climate change’.
She seems to have forgotten that this ‘transition’ will mean higher energy bills, risks of blackouts, trillions in costs to the public sector, and the leveling of entire industries.
When host Laura Kuenssberg raised the specter of job losses at the Port Talbot steelworks in Wales and the Stellantis / Vauxhall van factory in Luton, both tragic casualties of the climate agenda, Pinchbeck blithely dismissed the risks.
‘Change always brings winners and losers’, she said.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Pinchbeck, a former lobbyist for the renewables industry and head of climate policy for the WWF, would ignore the costs of green policies.
But what is perhaps most alarming is she does not seem to grasp the science of climate change, either.
As footage of flooding caused by Storm Darragh flashed on screen, she warned:
‘There are risks to us all from these kinds of weather events… If we don’t tackle climate change internationally, these impacts will get worse over our lifetimes… We talk a lot about the costs of tackling climate change, but we rarely talk about the costs of not tackling climate change.’
But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, usually held up as the bible of climate science, is clear that there is no proven relationship between man-made global warming and flooding.
Or in science-speak: ‘There is low confidence in attributing changes in the probability or magnitude of flood events to human influence.’
It turns out that the supposed experts who want to tell us how to live our lives, heat our homes, and power the economy are terrifyingly clueless about the agenda they are pushing.
Read more at Spiked Online
We shouldn’t expect anything different, a rational human being wouldn’t want or be appointed to this job!
Stupid Ill informed bureaucrat. Non science Overpaid.. Lyer. ‘Winnersand. losers forsooth’
Does anyone remember Screaming Lord Such of the Monster Raving Loony Party?
Forcing us to all Go Vegan and drive only Government/Globalists approved EV is the worst we don’t need Big Brother Period no way no how BIG BROTHER GO AWAY
Yes, there are always winners and losers based on economic changes. One example was the loss of the buggy and buggy whip industries as the automobile industry took off. But those were not forced on anybody by government diktat. Same with the typewriter business as computers and word processing software took over.
But what this dimwit is pushing is not organic but forced. And that forcing is very costly to the citizens of Great Britain (and Germany and California and anywhere else it is forced by government). Will the citizens continue to just accept this like sheep or will they finally rise up and cast off these government bureaucrats and politicians?