Tuesday
Sep112012
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill More trouble for DECC
Sep 11, 2012 Climate: Parliament No sooner has DECC appointed Lord Deben to head the Climate Change COmmittee than one of its ministers finds himself in a spot of who-is-he-working-for-anyway bother.
Minister Greg Barker has been holding meetings with an eco-company called Air Products. Unfortunately it turns out that Air Products is a client of one of his DECC advisers.
Oh dear. DECC seems to be staffed by the corrupt and advised by the dishonest, doesn't it? It really is time for a clean sweep of both ministers and officials.
Update on Sep 11, 2012 by
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill
The noise on Twitter is that Air Products is closely linked to AFC Energy, which is chaired by Tim Yeo. It seems the two companies are working on a project together.
Reader Comments (34)
Couldn't agree more.
I'm not sure Air Products is best described as an "eco-company". They are a well-established provider of industrial gases, including oxygen for hospitals, nitrogen for purging, etc. Been around for a long time.
can second that....Air Products used to be a company that supplied gases for medical use - Oxygen, N2O, etc. Has it morphed into a Deben non-company?
You wouldn't think there was such a thing as the Committee on Standards in Public Life (the Nolan Committee). Under 'Integrity', it says that "Holders of public office should not place themselves under any financial or other obligation to outside individuals or organisations that might seek to influence them in the performance of their official duties."
Have any of these people read it?
Simply for information, Air Products is major industrial gases company. It doesn't surprise me that it has fingers in eco projects (I'd be more surprised to find any large industrial company which doesn't), and it's stretching it a bit to describe it as an 'eco-company'.
It seems to me that if DECC insist on using outside advisers for all this pointless CC stuff, it is going to be pretty difficult to find anyone of any 'repute' (I use the term advisedly) who doesn't also provide, or hasn't at some point provided, similar services to large companies. Where should the line be drawn?
Energy from waste. The best use of embarrassing politicians.
Clearly this is a major Big Oil conspiracy project. They have seeded DECC and other departments with cuckoos to make it look like such noble people as Tim Yeo and Lord Gummy could have higher priorities than saving the planet for future generations.
/sarc
Why do we kid ourselves, that the DECC is any different to any of the other branches of our feeble government, they're all in the clutches of vested interests in one way or another - that's how the EU works.
As others have said, most of us who've worked in labs over the last decades will hae come across the bottled gas products of Air Products. No idea what the corporate shenanigans have been recently though.
I suppose if the world is warming we were bound to end up with Hot Air products.
Jar of worms.
There is a difference between say DECC and the Department of Health. The difference is that people have been getting sick for ages, and are still now.
DECC is a department about the future, with nothing literally to work on.
Tim Yeo and Lord Deben - are they originally from Chicago?
Air Products is a worldwide supplier of industrial gases and equipment, specialty and intermediate chemicals, and environmental and energy systems.
www.airproducts.co.uk
My mind is having its own sceptical take on life this morning for some reason.
Under normal circumstances if you were looking for someone to advise government in a particular field you would seek out someone with the expertise and the contacts and the enthusiasm for that subject.
Sitting round this table we all agree that with climate change those rules do not apply.
But why?
There is no point in bitching about either Yeo or Deben and their conflict of interest. Even if they dumped all their connections — financial and otherwise — they would still be climate change enthusiasts because it was that enthusiasm that led them into those connections in the first place.
We know (or we think we know) that the science on which they are basing their belief is getting iffier by the day and we would very much like someone like Lord Lawson or Peter Lilley to be heading up these committees but from an objective point of view, why is that any better?
I'm wearing my kevlar jacket and my tin hat so don't worry that your broadsides will cause lasting damage!
Mike Jackson
You're right, you can take off the tin hat.
As Delingpole says in his latest piece - 'Is this really the best that Cameron's Coalition can do.........Shove opposing ministers together like rats in a sack,let them fight it out to see who wins ?'
'Dave' let it be known that he'd had enough of 'Huskies and Windmills' but instead of showing any sort of leadership he just altered the odds slightly.
I suspect that 'er indoors' might have let him have only so much rope.
AFC makes alkaline fuel cells following a technical breakthrough about 5 years ago which reduced the amount of precious metal catalyst needed. The fuel is hydrogen. Air products makes and transports hydrogen but you would best make it from methane by a reforming process.
I don't know if CO2 poisons catalysts. CO adsorbs preferentially so you might need a separation stage and AP knows bout this.
Mike Jackson,
I wouldn't want Lawson heading a committee any more than Gummer. It's arse first policy making in that the policy is decided and committees work in support of that policy. Lawson advocates a particular direction. Gummer clearly has an interest in certain other directions. They should be at most giving evidence to committees as lobbyists not running them.
Maybe I've got the wrong idea of what the committees are for. Committees are not part of the government they are part of Parliament. Shouldn't they be holding government to account? Instead they are picking over how best to meet the obligations of the Climate Change Act and other requirements even though the scientific basis for them is weakening and the consequences of the legislation are potentially ruinous, both economically and environmentally.
toad
Cameron has his own conflict of interest and I don't envy him.
I think we are seeing a coming-together of a lot of moral problems that modern life is posing. As I implied in my previous post, in the past we would have welcomed the Yeos and Gummers because of their enthusiasm and therefore knowledge. But it would have been understood by them as everyone else that that enthusiasm had to be tempered with a degree of objectivity.
I don't know what the membership of the Committee on Climate Change is but if it doesn't include at least a smattering of people with at least reservations about some of the more extreme prognostications than Gummer and his pals get a free run. I don't actually believe he's dishonest but he sincerely believes in what he believes in (long-time devout Anglican and now - as far as I know - devout Catholic so, one assumes, largely honest in his beliefs and the actions that flow from them) so without someone to keep him in check he will tell government what he believes to be true.
The trouble is, assuming that we are correct, there are a lot of people who are somewhat less honest ...
As for Cameron and his father-in-law. If you have a legitimate opportunity to make money you take it. Do you stop and think, "will this embarrass by son-in-law two, three, ten years down the line?" How would you know? What sort of legislation, or moral code even, do we have to consider to avoid ministers being in a position where their decisions may have unexpected adverse effects on the financial situation of their relatives?
Cameron may well be starting to suspect that he's been sold a crock but he'll want to be more than suspicious before he makes decisions that have the potential to upset the domestic apple cart. Well, wouldn't you? Supposing those suspicions turn out to be wrong. What then?
Gareth
I simply picked the names of two politicians (one extant, like Yeo; one retired, like Gummer) who are on the sceptical side of the debate. Look at the argument as I framed it rather than the examples.
As I have said before (and I realised the other day that even John Brignell at Number Watch appears to be confused), the Committee on Climate Change is not answerable to parliament. It is a creation of the Climate Change Act and its function is to advise government. The Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee (which is the one that Yeo chairs) is the one that supposedly has oversight of the DECC and is a parliamentary committee which reports to parliament.
How good a job it does is up to its membership. I would have actively discouraged Yeo from being its chairman simply because he is too close to one side of the subject. Parliament disagreed, taking the view presumably that I did in my 11.03 comment, that provided he shed his business interests his experience would be to the committee's benefit.
I could add that I might have been tempted to agree until he came out so strongly in favour of expanding Heathrow. You cannot be serious about CO2 reduction and call for an increase in air traffic.
"Oh dear. DECC seems to be staffed by the corrupt and advised by the dishonest, doesn't it? It really is time for a clean sweep of both ministers and officials."
Firstly if they are dishonest and corrupt then Inspector Knacker should be playing a visit - but they won't.
Secondly I don't believe a clean sweep is possible. Politicians and self-selecting by wearing the right coloured rosette and brown-nosing the right backsides to get themselves into these positions - they aren't there on merit. The Civicl Service seems to work in the same way, self-selecting for promotion, glory and of course honours for doing what is their well paid and well pensioned jobs.
This will only change when the system changes which is highly unlikely.
As the old saying goes, stop voting - it only encourages them...
Mike Jackson: the IPCC fraud has been used to promote a new politics, the amalgamation of Marxism and Corporatism, the basis of the Fabian EU. The psychopathic left uses 'CAGW' to get totalitarian control of the population. The psychopathic right has rent for windmills. Mafia-owned renewables' corporations, energy corporations, emissions' traders and reinsurance corporations control government.
Mike Jackson: the IPCC fraud has been used to promote a new politics, the amalgamation of Marxism and Corporatism, the basis of the Fabian EU. The psychopathic left uses 'CAGW' to get totalitarian control of the population. The psychopathic right has rent for windmills. Mafia-owned renewables' corporations, energy corporations, emissions' traders and reinsurance corporations control government.
AlecM
Saying it twice does not help to convince me. :-)
Cock-up beats conspiracy 99% of the time.
In your various manifestations you have produced an assortment of ideas, some of which I have sympathy with, others of which I find conceivable but far-fetched. yet others I believe to be largely the figment of an overheated imagination.
They all have one thing in common. We are still waiting for the empirical evidence — as indeed we are for CAGW.
Mike Jackson
MIGHT GREENPEACE CONSIDER RENAMING ONE OF ITS SHIPS 'SAMANTHA CAMERON' ?
Thus spake Geoffrey Lean in the Telegraph, the man Cameron used to turn to for 'climate advice' (FACT !)
The uxorious Cameron is not his own man where matters 'climatic' are concerned, or indeed much else.
'Trustafarian' Sam is one very strong-willed lady. She taught her husband what to say and how to say it.
No-one has any illusions about her father, the domineering Sir Reginald, either.
Unless and until Cameron can get rid of the 'beam' in his own eye, he will be unable to criticise the 'mote' in that of his ministers.
This 'legitimate opportunity to make money' may not be Cameron's doing, but he is in a position to at very least, scale it down.
'Dave' also had the opportunity to stop us handing over £44 million a year to arch-greenie James Smith at the Carbon Trust, by winding up that iniquitous Quango, but he chickened out.
Now Smith uses OUR money to lobby OUR government for more 'offshore wind'.
You couldn't make it up.
It is more than high time that 'Dave's' cosy domestic 'apple cart' was upset.
We can no longer afford it !
Hi Mike; my ideas are firming up in a radical new way. It's all to do with the side-bands of water vapour, the split of convective and radiative energy loss which varies between day and night, and the effect of clouds which cause the real warming of the atmosphere. The latter have a hitherto unknown property which is to convert thermal IR to the 'atmospheric window' in the grey body IR they emit.
The goal is to explain the 'faint sun paradox', which is when there was liquid water when the sun produced 30% less energy. This is the only evidence the CO2 people have which is worth anything!
toad
I agree with you. I'm simply pointing out that Cameron has a problem and that it is a type of problem which is of relatively recent origin.
I think all sorts of things about Cameron but fundamentally I believe that he is an honest man who wants to do what is right for himself and his family and his party and his country. (Not necessarily, as Eric Morecambe said on one occasion, in the right order!)
Regrettably he is also, as I pointed out elsewhere recently, an example of "an a**e upon which everyone has sat except a man" (e.e.cummings), the sitters in his case being Goldsmith and Porritt inter alia who seized an opportunity which in his political naivete he handed them on a plate.
I have a lot of sympathy for the man but am coming to the conclusion (off at a bit of a tangent here) that it would be in his own best interests as well as the country's if he acknowledged the conflict of interest and resigned thus ensuring that if the family pressure is too much, doing right for his country was what he was putting first.
Certainly one thing that government could do and should have done long ago is to withdraw all government funding from organisations that use any part of their funds to lobby government — or at the very least to reduce their funding by the relevant amount.
But in a field as highly politicised and as highly charged (I used the word 'febrile' yesterday) as climate change there is going to be lot of dissembling, prevarication, denial, and bloodshed before politics is back on an even keel again.
AlecM
Thanks for that. Did I hear mention of the sun as a 'variable star' a couple of days ago? Where does that fit into the theory?
My concern is with some of the more way-out conspiracy theories. The Mafia I don't know about; the idea that the driving forces on both sides of the politics of AGW are psychopaths I find a little hard to swallow, I'm afraid.
See the very similar case of Ralf Linkohr, who had to resign as adviser to EU Energy commissar: http://archive.corporateeurope.org/RolfLinkohr.html
From the book "Europe on 387m euros a day", which you can read here: http://tinyurl.com/6llbtpr
This came up at prime minister's questions. Interesting how The Guardian and Labour MPs seem at last to have spotted that green sleaze is a great way to attack the Tories. (And best to stick with that important track, surely, rather than give place to the great certainties of conspiracy, with anti-greenhouse propaganda, which one poster seems to think are relevant to every single thread on Bishop Hill.)
Air Products are working on thermal electricity from waste, (as are other waste companies) essentially hitching generating kit to waste incinerators, and seeking subsidies for that, also environment/planning issues, so seeking ministerial support and understanding not unusual. Bit of a red herring I think.
Mike
Referring to your post at 9.04am:
For me it is not about their beliefs it is about the fact that they are influencing government to pursue policies that take money OUT of our pockets and INTO their pockets. This make them totally unsuitable for the positions they now hold and they know it.
Sep 12, 2012 at 1:16 PM | AlecM
If you want to discuss your theories, please take to discussion page. They are Off Topic on this post.
Dung
What I am trying to say in my last few postings is that they don't know it.
If you accept that they are essentially honest — and certainly in Gummer's case I have no reason to suppose he isn't; I'm less sure about Yeo — then they are in a position that ...say.... 50 years ago would have been considered quite normal.
Man has interests (global warming, model railways, whatever) and government makes us of those interests where ever Man has enough expertise to make it worth using him. Only in recent years has the question of serious conflicts of interest arisen partly, in my view, because this particular subject is so polarised and partly because of a general decay (I avoid the phrase 'moral laxity'!) in standards of behaviour across society as a whole.
AP are an Industrial Gas bottler, they consume hugh amounts of energy in doing so and energy costs are increasing due to green taxes, faced with this problem they have elected to follow the grant money paid out from those same high energy usage and increasing costs. They are doing what the lawmakers want them to do driven by increasing costs on one hand and free money in the other.
I would politely suggest a few minutes' googling Air Products would be beneficial. It is a huge industrial gas company, very similar to BOC before they were bought by Linde. They have a vast product range and industrial gases are used in just about every process, industry and service from glass to food to chemicals to steel to beer to hospitals to silicon chips and so on. They run huge amounts of gas through pipelines and, at the other end of the scale, provide lab-scale demands.
As such they will be in contact with just about any company which is a potential gas user so their involvement in projects like gasification or hydrogen is simply a couple of plays in an enormous business portfolio.