The Global Warming Policy Forum welcomes the decision by the new Government to abolish the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

Both the GWPF and its chairman, Lord Lawson, have been calling for this much-needed rationalisation for several years.

As the new government under Theresa May focuses on the much more important issues of economic growth, international competitiveness and leaving the European Union, the decision will provide vital savings. It is hoped that the abolition of DECC will also encourage a new emphasis on cost-effective policy-making.

“Moving energy policy to the new Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy should give ministers a fresh impetus to ensure that the costs for consumers and businesses are driven down, not pushed further up,” said GWPF director Dr Benny Peiser.

The newspaper The Independent” calls this a “…plain stupid’ and ‘deeply worrying’ move“, see below:

The decision to abolish the Department for Energy and Climate Change has been variously condemned as “plain stupid”, “deeply worrying” and “terrible” by politicians, campaigners and experts.

One of Theresa May’s first acts as Prime Minister was to move responsibility for climate change to a new Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy.

Only on Monday, Government advisers had warned of the need to take urgent action to prepare the UK for floods, droughts, heatwaves and food shortages caused by climate change.

The news came after the appointment of Andrea Leadsom – who revealed her first question to officials when she became Energy Minister last year was “Is climate change real? – was appointed as the new Environment Secretary.

And, after former Energy and Climate Change Secretary Amber Rudd announced in November that Britain was going to “close coal” by 2025, Ms Leadsom later asked the coal industry to help define what this actually meant.

Former Labour leader Ed Miliband tweeted: “DECC abolition just plain stupid. Climate not even mentioned in new deptartment title. Matters because departments shape priorities, shape outcomes.”

Greenpeace said it was concerned that the new Government did not view climate change as a serious threat..

John Sauven, the campaign group’s executive director, said: “The voting record and affiliation with climate sceptics of key cabinet appointees are deeply worrying.

Full story here

No, what’s deeply worrying is that organization like Greenpeace have had so much power that they have effective infilitrated the government with activists. As far as I’m concerned, they have reaped the results of their years of overreaching alarmism, and the pushback we are seeing is the direct result of pushing too hard for things like the need to take urgent action when slow change would do. Perhaps if there had been some real investigative work done over Climategate, rather than the CYA whitewash job we saw from Muir Russell, DECC might not have got the total axe. Then of course, there is the added cost DECC was forced to reveal:

Closure of DECC is well deserved and well past due in my opinion.