GWPF Newsletter: Britain Declares Independence

Brexit Has Significant Implications For Energy & Climate Policies

In this newsletter:

1) Peiser: Brexit Has Significant Implications For Energy And Climate Policies
The Daily Caller, 24 June 2016
 
2) UN Boss: Brexit Means Rewriting Of Paris Climate Agreement
EurActiv.com, 22 June 2016

3) Brexit Brings Chaos to Europe’s Green Energy & Climate Goals
MIT Technology Review, 24 June 2016
 
4) Brexit Campaign Leadership Dominated By Climate-Sceptics
EurActiv, 24 May 2016
 
5) Brexit Is A More Impressive Achievement Than The French Revolution 
The Daily Telegraph, 25 June 2016

Full details:

1) Peiser: Brexit Has Significant Implications For Energy And Climate Policies
The Daily Caller, 24 June 2016
Michael Bastasch

When British voters chose to leave the European Union Thursday night, they weren’t just voting against Brussels’ immigration policies, they were also voting against Europe’s growing list of green mandates.
 

 

The EU’s allowance of millions of refugees and open borders policy did play a large role in the “Brexit” vote, but it was also a repudiation of global warming policies Brussels has imposed on the U.K.

“The decision by the British people to leave the European Union will have significant and long-term implications for energy and climate policies,” Dr. Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Forum, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Conservative pollster Lord Michael Ashcroft surveyed 12,369 Brits voting in Thursday’s referendum and found 69 percent of those who voted to leave the EU saw the “green movement” as a “force for ill.”

“By large majorities, voters who saw multiculturalism, feminism, the Green movement, globalisation and immigration as forces for good voted to remain in the EU; those who saw them as a force for ill voted by even larger majorities to leave,” Ashcroft wrote.

Britons have been struggling under high energy prices for years, in part due to rules passed down from EU bureaucrats. Environmentalists opposed leaving the EU for precisely this reason. The Brexit vote signals the U.K. is lurching right, and will likely reject heavy-handed climate policies.

“It is highly unlikely that the party-political green consensus that has existed in Parliament for the last 10 years will survive the seismic changes that are now unfolding after Britain’s Independence Day,” Peiser said.

Prime Minister David Cameron announced his resignation after the vote, since he supported the staying in the EU. Cameron was one of the main forces behind the so-called “green consensus” in Parliament, which supported green energy subsidies and energy taxes to pay for them.

“The British people have voted to leave the European Union and their will must be respected,” Cameron said Friday. “The will of the British people is an instruction that must be delivered.”

Cameron’s government did begin to cut back subsidies for solar panels and push for hydraulic fracturing. Conservative Party lawmakers voted against more handouts for wind power as well as to bring down the costs of electricity. Green taxes cost U.K. residents $6.6 billion every year.

Brits also paid some of the highest energy costs in Europe, thanks in part to green taxes added to their electricity bills.

The man that may take Cameron’s place is not committed to keeping the U.K.’s “green” image.

Ex-London Mayor Boris Johnson, who was the face of the Brexit movement, could take Cameron’s place as prime minister in the coming months. Johnson is a global warming skeptic, and even criticized alarmist claims that human emissions caused England’s unseasonably warm winter.

“It is fantastic news that the world has agreed to cut pollution and help people save money, but I am sure that those global leaders were driven by a primitive fear that the present ambient warm weather is somehow caused by humanity; and that fear – as far as I understand the science – is equally without foundation,” he wrote in December.

“There may be all kinds of reasons why I was sweating at ping-pong – but they don’t include global warming,” he wrote.

Johnson is unlikely to revive the “green consensus” in Parliament. That doesn’t mean Johnson won’t keep in place some EU environmental rules, but the regulatory regime will probably be less onerous than the one Brussels had in mind.

“But perhaps the most important aspect of the EU referendum has been the astonishing self-determination and scepticism of the British people in face of an unprecedented fear campaign,” Peiser said.

2) UN Boss: Brexit Means Rewriting Of Paris Climate Agreement
EurActiv.com, 22 June 2016
James Crisp

A vote for Brexit in the UK referendum on EU membership (23 June) would mean that the COP21 agreement would have to be rewritten, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change said today (22 June) in Brussels.
 

Michael Bloomberg at today’s press conference. UN boss Christiana Figueres stands to the left of Bloomberg, and is flanked by Šefčovič and Klugman. photo: James Crisp

Christiana Figueres, one of the architects of the historic deal struck last December to limit warming to no more than two degrees above pre-industrial levels, said the international pact, “would require recalibration”.  It is currently in the process of ratification.

“From the point of view of the Paris Agreement, the UK is part of the EU and has put in its effort as part of the EU so anything that would change that would require a recalibration,” she said at a press conference.

“In principle, it is actually, historically, we say, as humankind, we are moving towards larger and larger tents of collaboration […] rather than in the opposite way.”

Full story

3) Brexit Brings Chaos to Europe’s Green Energy & Climate Goals
MIT Technology Review, 24 June 2016
Richard Martin

The departure of the EU’s second-largest economy could have unsettling implications for the Paris climate accord.

U.K. voters’ decision to exit the European Union sent shock waves through world markets today, including the energy sector. The consensus from policymakers, clean-energy advocates, and analysts was that while “Brexit” will not completely derail the EU’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions under the Paris climate accord, it will certainly throw a spanner in the works.

Under Prime Minister David Cameron and his predecessors, Britain has been a leader on energy policy and support for renewable energy. Several features of EU-wide energy policy in the last decade—including breaking up power monopolies that controlled generation, transmission, and distribution—have been modeled in part on U.K. legislation.

More recently, though, the U.K. government has retreated from its support of clean energy, with severe cuts in subsidies for both rooftop and large-scale solar installations. A report released earlier this year by the U.K. Renewable Energy Association found that “repeated policy interventions of the Government are harming the UK’s position as a global leader, slowing growth rates, and are increasing the likelihood that legally binding 2020 renewable energy targets … will not be achieved.” Freed from its obligations under EU treaties and agreements, a new U.K. government could continue that about-face. The country’s renewable-energy targets for 2020 were in doubt even before Thursday’s vote, many believe, and departing the EU could make them unreachable.

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4) Brexit Campaign Leadership Dominated By Climate-Sceptics
EurActiv, 24 May 2016
James Crisp


Boris Johnson, a leading Vote Leave politician who has cast doubt on global warming.

Leading figures in the Vote Leave referendum campaign to take Britain out of the EU have links to a controversial climate-sceptic think tank and question the science behind global warming.

The group’s three leaders Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and figurehead Lord Nigel Lawson have cast doubt over man-made climate change, which is backed by most of the world’s credible experts…

Gove – who tried to stop climate change being taught in schools – and in particular Johnson are seen as Conservative leadership frontrunners should a Brexit vote topple UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who backs Remain.

There are so many influential politicians and donors that are both euro and climate-sceptic that it has raised fears over the future of UK climate policy if the UK votes for Brexit on 23 June…

A spokesman for the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign said, “They deny the scientific evidence on climate change, just as they deny the economic evidence that leaving the EU would wreck the UK economy and cost around 820,000 jobs.”

Vote Leave didn’t return requests for comment yesterday (23 May). But the Global Warming Policy Foundation did.

Director Benny Peiser said the foundation had no view on the EU referendum and was not involved in any shape or form in referendum activities. “So far as I know, our trustees are divided on the referendum debate,” he added.

Peiser said the foundation and its members had a broad range of different scientific and economic viewpoints on climate change.

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5) Brexit Is A More Impressive Achievement Than The French Revolution 
The Daily Telegraph, 25 June 2016
Andrew Roberts


A Leave EU supporter hold a Union Jack flag aloft 

On Easter Sunday, May 6 1867, the Reform League pressure group had a difficult decision to make. Would they obey the diktat of the Home Secretary, Spencer Walpole, and not hold a huge meeting in Hyde Park to call for Reform, or would they defy him?

Founded only two years before, they campaigned for the franchise for all ratepayers, as well as secret ballots and an equal numerical distribution of seats in parliament, the basis of our modern democracy. Yet the police were padlocking the gates to the Park, which in those days was surrounded by high iron railings.

The Prime Minister and Cabinet urged caution and predicted dire consequences if the meeting went ahead; the police were called out en masse, and there was a run on the pound. With 200,000 supporters of Reform marching towards the park, the decision was nonetheless taken by the League’s leaders simply to pull down the railings and allow the vast surge of humanity to hold their (in the event, entirely peaceful) meeting.

The role of bloody-minded insurgents willing to do the opposite of what they’re told by the authorities has long been central to great political events in British history

Spencer Walpole burst into tears under the pressure and resigned; 10 speakers addressed the crowds, and the Second Reform Bill was passed later that same year. The railings never went back up.

The role of bloody-minded insurgents willing to do the opposite of what they’re told by the authorities has long been central to great political events in British history, and the 17,410,742 people who voted to leave the European Union can certainly be ranked among their number.

Almost every single agency of the international Establishment was deployed to thwart them – the CBI, IMF, Bank of England, OECD, big business, Goldman Sachs, all but one party leader, the World Bank, Presidents Obama, Hollande and Abe, the EU Commission, two-thirds of the cabinet, the Treasury, The Guardian, Davos, The Times, and so on – yet over 17.4 million people told them precisely what they could do with their expert opinion.

It is the British people who have now sent Obama “to the back of the queue”.

In Melvyn Bragg’s fine novel about the Peasant’s Revolt, Now is The Time, one sees a template for the uprising of ordinary people that resulted in the Brexit vote, much as the pro-EU Lord Bragg might like to deny it. The huge groundswell of ordinary people’s opinion led rather than followed their own leaders.

Today’s insurgent leaders were themselves a ragbag bunch: a half-albino Classicist whose friends called him “the truffle-pig”; a German-born female Labour MP; a beer-drinking, cigarette-smoking man of the people; and an infinitely courteous intellectual with a razor-sharp brain, who had nevertheless been sacked as education secretary a few years earlier. It wasn’t much to set against the combined forces of the Establishment, yet they won.

Just as the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (founded in 1897) and its more militant offshoot the Women’s Social and Political Union (founded 1903) took on the Establishment and won, and as the Anti-Corn Law League had a generation earlier, so the Brexit movement enlisted armies of supporters across the country whose motives were traduced and posters defaced and supplications ignored, until the vote was taken and their voices finally had to be heard. 

The popular uprising campaign was therefore not like the Poll Tax riots of 1990 but much more firmly in the mainstream of the long British tradition of legitimate peaceful protest.

In this way, too, it was a more impressive achievement than the French Revolution, soaked as that was in blood. This popular uprising has toppled the established order without calling upon the tumbrel, the scaffold and the guillotine. It will secure its place in history as a result.

And when that history of the Brexit movement comes to be written later this century, there will be a number of people who are by no means household names but who kept alight the torch of British independence ever since it was so nearly extinguished by Ted Heath in 1973.

Michael Ivens, Douglas Jay, Alan Sked, Patrick Robertson, Jimmy Goldsmith, Bill Cash, Robert Oulds, Nigel Lawson, Rodney Leach, the McWhirter twins, Bill Cash and many others did as much to keep the popular insurgency alive over more than four decades as Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, who had the honour of lighting the blue touchpaper this year.

Their contribution should not go unmarked, even though not all of them are famous

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The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.