An advisory body that spends its time urging the UK government to do even more to get to carbon net zero tried to “kill” a negative newspaper story with “technical language.”
The story, which follows a Freedom of Information (FoI) request by The Daily Telegraph, has prompted calls for the government’s climate watchdog to be dissolved. Socially conservative commentator and editor of the similarly placed TCW website Kathy Gyngell said it was “high time” the body was “disbanded completely,” while author Steve Milloy described the disclosure as further proof that “honesty is the death of the climate hoax.”
The FoI request revealed that Climate Change Committee chief executive Chris Stark told his team when asked to explain an alleged mistake by the body:
How’s this—kill it with some technical language.
The Telegraph notes that this comment from Stark, who currently earns more than £170,000 per year (€199,000) though is about to step down from his role, “raises questions about the transparency of the committee, which has been pushing the government to impose more radical net zero targets.” It just as equally highlights the need to be sceptical of all other such advisory committees—in the UK and across Europe.
Writer Renée Hoenderkamp said that Stark’s order serves as a reminder of the fact that one should not “assume anything you read is the truth: it’s most often what the government/civil service want you to read.”
Richard Tice, leader of Reform UK, formerly the Brexit Party, added that climate “zealots” pushing net zero policies “have led [to] billions of [pounds of] taxpayer cash being wasted.”
A spokeswoman for the climate committee rather amusingly told the Telegraph for its latest coverage of the story that Stark’s message was “written for internal purposes only.”
