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The Conservatives and climate change

Simon Wren-Lewis, in his mainly macro blog, points out that there is a big disconnect between Conservative party words and action on climate change. Their words are vaguely green, and imply that they take climate change seriously. Their actions are not in the slightest bit green.

In an earlier article, George Monbiot noted a part of the innocently titled ‘Infrastructure Bill’ currently going through parliament. Section (36, p39) is headed ‘Maximising economic recovery of UK petroleum’. Its principle objective is to do just that. Now it does not take a climate scientist to realise that trying to restrict our use of fossil fuels to avoid climate change requires leaving quite a lot of them in the ground. So this bill suggests that whatever the UK government says about climate change, the UK contribution in terms of limiting extraction of oil will be exactly zero.

On the whole, most people in the UK are not climate change deniers, so the Conservative party probably isn’t going to come out openly on that side of the debate.  But that won’t mean that they won’t behave like climate change deniers.