The rise of the skeptics — Brexit shifts the ground: Boris promoted, DECC gone

Don’t underestimate the Brexit effect. The landscape is shifting.

The Paris agreement just became less likely. The UK Dept of the environment will submerge, and Boris Johnson, the outspoken skeptic and Brexit figurehead, has been promoted to foreign minister.

James Delingpole says: Britain’s New Prime Minister Drives A Stake Through The Heart Of The Green Vampire

Britain no longer has“the greenest government ever.” This is good news. Very good news. The agonised screeching of all the usual suspects in the Environmental movement will be enough to sustain many of us in lols for weeks and months to come.

Five years ago, could we imagine an “infamous climate denier” like Boris rewarded in any Western Government? There were closet skeptics in the cabinet, but that’s not the same. In Australia, Tony Abbott once said climate change was “crap” and somehow still managed to become PM, but once he was, his official line was the permitted global warming story. ( He pandered, but in the most sensible possible way. And because he did not flagrantly add to the climate slush fund they still called him a “denier” but he rarely said anything openly skeptical.).

To have Boris in such an influential position is new ground. No more pandering.

He is unapologetically, absolutely a skeptic: Here’s Boris in 2013 explaining why Brits were installing swimming pools:

For more than 20 years now, we have been told that this country was going to get hotter and hotter…

That’s what they said: the BBC, and all the respectable meteorologists

They [home owners with pools] thought they were doing the sensible thing and getting ready for a Californian lifestyle – and they were fools! Fools who believed that the global warming soothsayers really meant what they said or that they had a clue what the weather would be in the next 10 years.

A lot of fence sitters have just been offered a ladder on the skeptic side of the fence. This makes it so much easier for people to “come out”.

The UK Dept of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) will be folded

Yesterday the GWPF said Let’s scrap DECC. Today it’s happening.“The UK’s Energy and Climate Change department is to be merged with the business department, according to people who have been briefed on the plans.”

Business will get control over energy and climate policy. Greens will cry. The Business portfolio has other agendas. It’s existence does not depend on whether we can change the weather.

What about Theresa May?

I confess to being skeptical. (Boris for PM!) How could any sensible person campaign for Remain? But not only has May appointed Boris, but her right hand man on UK Steel and climate policy type stuff has called the Climate Change Act a “unilateral and monstrous act of self-harm”. Furthermore, Paul Matthews looked at her voting record in detail and suspects she may be a quiet climate policy skeptic.

James Forsyth in the Spectator, says May is serious about Brexit:

Theresa May has shown real intent. She has demonstrated that she really is serious about this. She has appointed three leavers to the key Brexit-related jobs in government. David Davis will be Secretary of State for exiting the EU, Liam Fox gets the International Trade job and Boris Johnson the Foreign Office.

The David Davis appointment is particularly striking. He resigned, unexpectedly, from David Cameron’s shadow Cabinet. Putting him in charge of these negotiations, shows Tory MPs that May isn’t interested in any backsliding on the referendum result for everyone thinks that Davis would walk if she attempted that.

The rise of the skeptics

The nice thing about Brexit (apart from sticking it to Big-Gov) is that it is a decisive win for skeptics, and in so many ways.

As Michael Bastach notes:

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.” Some 62 percent of those voting to stay saw environmentalists as a “force for good.”

Keep track of the British transformation at the GWPF.

h/t Bulldust, Pat.

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