Desperately trying to put off a decision on a 2030 decarbonisation target, but beset by the serried ranks of woolly-jumpered Lib Dem backbenchers, who are all demanding that he take the UK back to the 17th century, Ed Davey has decided to do what climate secretaries always do. He is going to give a speech bashing global warming sceptics! Nice one. That will please LibDem MPs, earn him nice write-ups in the Guardian and the Independent, and distract attention from the fact that he will be unable to give them what they want.
...some sections of the press are giving an uncritical campaigning platform to individuals and lobby groups.
This is not the serious science of challenging, checking and probing.
This is destructive and loudly clamouring scepticism born of vested interest, nimbyism, publicity seeking contraversialism or sheer blinkered, dogmatic, political bloody-mindedness.
This tendency will seize upon the normal expression of scientific uncertainty and portray it as proof that all climate change policy is hopelessly misguided.
It's alright Ed, we know you can't get a decarbonisation target through Parliament. Get over it.
It's funny to read the specific terms of the rant that Davey's speechwriters have crafted for him. As readers at BH know, ministers in DECC meet two kinds of people only: energy giants and green campaigners. Both these groups are of course are massive vested interests and the latter are the publicity seekers par excellence. So it takes the kind of chutzpah in which those ministers specialise for Davey to label his critics in this way. Particularly as he is going to deliver his speech at a meeting attended by a bunch of those same vested interests.
You can imagine how this sort of thing comes together. The speechwriters will be spectacularly uninformed on the global warming debate or what it is that sceptics are doing or saying. Their work will be based on what they read in the Guardian last week; probably Nuccitelli et al. They probably know that they know little or nothing, but there is a simple political requirement for a distraction. So we can watch and snigger and move on to something more important.