EU Referendum


Climate change: the insolence of office


20/11/2012



Guardian 243-eds.jpg

In an extraordinary outburst, recorded by The Guardian, we see WWF-UK chief executive David Nussbaum call on David Cameron to "take control" of the chancellor, George Osborne; energy minister, John Hayes, and other Conservatives known to be sceptical of renewable energy and climate change targets.

Who is this man, one might ask, that he feels entitled to makes such demands of a prime minister? Cameron himself, as leader of an unelected coalition, might lack a certain legitimacy, but I don't remember Mr Nussbaum even putting himself up for election.

Despite his own lack of legitimacy, though, we get Nussbaum saying: "It's time for Cameron to be the prime minister he told us all he would be and deliver on his earlier promises". Then, placing himself in a superior position to ministers of the Crown, he then presumes to criticise them as a "rogue pack".

Thus does Nussbaum say: "His lack of vocal leadership on climate change and energy is jeopardising some of the most promising green shoots of recovery. The UK needs significant investment in green infrastructure, yet he is letting a rogue pack within his party play politics with such an important issue".

Such is the arrogance of this organisation that it has the temerity to announce that Osborne and Hayes have "significantly" undermined investment confidence in the renewable energy sector. Ministers are even accused of "playing politics" with climate change – as if the WWF never played politics, and then without troubling first to get elected.

Methinks the WWF is getting above itself, and needs to be taken down a peg. Everywhere you look, these days, you find front organisations for the WWF (alongside Friends of the Earth), infiltrating civil society in a way that we haven't seen since the Communist Party – whose tactics the Greens are emulating.

So powerful are Green groups now becoming that we really need a inquiry to expose the extent of their infilatration. With that, we urgently need to see limits placed on the access they have to government, afforded by the number of front organisations they are able to field, all singing to the same hymn sheet.

Nussbaum's insolence gives the game away. He has overstepped the mark and has become a threat to what little democracy we have remaining.

COMMENT THREAD