Britain’s New Energy & Climate Minister Sets Up Meeting With Nigel Lawson

Amber Rudd, [the new Energy & Climate Change Secretary], pledged to keep pressuring the Big Six energy suppliers to cut their bills and to do her best to win over climate change sceptics – both in and outside her party. Ms Rudd admits the Conservative Party has an issue with climate change sceptics – although she insists that Labour harbours just as many MPs who are sceptical. She has set up a meeting with Lord Lawson, Britain’s most high-profile climate-change sceptic, as the first part of her campaign to win over the doubters. “I will be having a conversation with him. I’m hoping to win him over, so great is my ambition. But we will see.” --Tom Bawden, The Independent, 5 June 2015

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In order to save money it is being proposed that the controversial Green Deal home improvement plan should be mothballed while some spending on nuclear decommissioning would be delayed. Overall, DECC’s £3.3bn annual budget is expected to be one of the biggest casualties in percentage terms of George Osborne’s latest austerity drive. The department has already lost the equivalent of one full-time minister following last month’s reshuffle and there are expected to be significant staff cuts as big projects such as the Green Deal and Electricity Market Reform are wound down. --Oliver Wright and Tom Bawden, Independent on Sunday, 7 June 2015 The European Union (EU) has said it is unlikely to enhance before 2020 its commitment to reducing emissions linked to climate change. The statement at the ongoing climate change negotiations in Bonn, Germany, has led to a war of words between the EU and the developing countries under the G77+ China grouping. India and China are taking the lead. --Nitin Sethi, Business Standard, 7 June 2015 Just months before the most important U.N. climate conference in years, Republican appropriators in the House of Representatives are taking aim at one of the Obama administration’s most cherished priorities – international climate change funding. An appropriations bill for the State Department and foreign operations, released Tuesday, excludes funding for three major climate initiatives – the Green Climate Fund, the Clean Technology Fund, and the Strategic Climate Fund – and also removes funding for the U.N.-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). --Patrick Goodenough, CNS News, 4 June 2015 Five of the world’s seven richest countries have increased their coal use in the last five years despite demanding that poor countries slash their carbon emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change, new research shows. Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan and France together burned 16% more coal in 2013 than 2009 and are planning to further increase construction of coal-fired power stations. Only the US and Canada of the G7 countries meeting on Monday in Berlin have reduced coal consumption since the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009. -John Vidal, The Guardian, 8 June 2015

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