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
