Global heating could bring benefits, according to one of Liz Truss’s new advisers.
As onlookers seek to read the environmental signals being sent by Truss’s new appointments, there has been particular interest in the ideas of Matthew Sinclair, who published Let Them Eat Carbon in 2011.
With the subtitle “The price of failing climate policies and how governments and big business profit from them”, the book sets out to tackle what Sinclair calls “the burgeoning climate change industry”.
In the book, he argues that climate change policies “push up electricity bills, make it more expensive to drive to work or fly away on holiday, put manufacturing workers out of a job – they sometimes even make your food more expensive”. He worries that the money directed towards climate change is going into the pockets of special interest groups around the world, into “dodgy projects” and “entire new organisations in the public sector”.
He does not dispute the science, and agrees that in the short term changes in global temperature are likely to be disruptive, but suggests that perhaps it may be best for humanity to simply get used to new temperatures, arguing: “There is no particular reason to think the particular balance of the ecosystem right now is necessarily the best for us.
“Current environmental policies in many countries will do huge harm to the economy while having little or no effect on carbon emissions.”
In his former role as director of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, a thinktank that is part of a rightwing network that promotes free-market capitalism around the world, he campaigned against green taxes. In a six-point plan to cut Whitehall spending, published in 2012, he said cancelling high-speed rail services could produce more than £750m in savings, and also proposed scrapping the Green Investment Bank, which was set up to address the shortfall in investment in the energy sector. He said this could save £2.7bn.
In 2016, he declared on the subject on insulation: “I worry about the health impacts of super-warm homes” and said it was his opinion that the UK has “pushed energy efficiency too far, too fast”.
Environmental campaigners have also expressed alarm that Truss appointed Jacob Rees-Mogg as business secretary, as he has a poor record on the environment.
In the past, Rees-Mogg has claimed that “climate alarmism” is responsible for high energy prices and that it is unrealistic for scientists to project future changes to the climate because meteorologists struggle to correctly predict the weather.
