Nigel Lawson: klimaatconferentie Kopenhagen vernederende ervaring voor Europa

Nigel Lawson was minister van financiën onder Margaret Thatcher. Thans is hij het meer bekend als een van de leidende klimaatsceptici in Groot Brittannië. Hij is voorzitter van de Raad van Toezicht van de denktank de 'Global Warming Policy Foundation' (GWPF), die zich inzet om de klimaathysterie in Groot Brittannië en het daaruit voortvloeiende geldverslindende energiebeleid, onder meer gericht op grootschalige inzet van windmolens, te bestrijden 

Onder de titel, 'Lawson bats for China in climate debate', rapporteert Andrew Moody in de 'China Daily':

Former UK chancellor warns Europe, US against setting up trade barriers to developing nations.

Nigel Lawson believes it is wrong for the West to use environmental concerns as a weapon to beat China.

"It is wrong in two ways. It is wrong morally because it is asking them to slow their development down," says the former British chancellor of the exchequer who is now well known as a leading climate change skeptic.

"It is also wrong in practical terms because it is quite clear they are not going to do it (reduce carbon emissions sufficiently). China is not abandoning coal. It is going ahead with its coal-fired power stations."

He is best known as one of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher's key ministers in the 1980s but since the publication of his book An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming four years ago, he has also found notoriety as a bete noire of the Green Movement.

Some in the environmental movement refuse to engage with him, saying that he is recycling the arguments of the American oil industry and other vested interests. He insists, however, that by going against what now seems a majority view he is not part of some new "Flat Earth" movement. "You have to analyze what you mean by majority opinion. I think it is the majority opinion of the political classes in the West. It is not, however, the majority opinion of the public as whole. All the opinion polls show a high degree of skepticism among ordinary people, who often have more common sense than the political classes," he says.

Lawson says he has been recently talking with the 88-year-old renowned British-born American physicist Freeman Dyson, who is on the advisory board of his think tank, The Global Warming Policy Foundation, which he founded in 2009. Dyson was over from the United States to mark his 60 years as a member of The Royal Society, the 350-year-old British scientific body. "He says the only thing that is certain about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is that it is very good for plant growth and that the warming effect is extremely uncertain," he says.

Lawson does believe that China is unfairly lectured to on climate change and thinks the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in 2009 was something of a debacle when no international agreement could be reached. China, India and other developing countries felt the terms too onerous.

"It certainly was an accident. It was a great macho thing for the European Union, which was then not in as shaky a state as it is now, to show world leadership," he says. "They set these hugely ambitious objectives and it was a great humiliation for them that they brought on themselves."

Lees verder hier.

De vernedering op het internationale diplomatieke toneel is nog tot daar aan toe. Dat waait wel weer over. Maar het welvaartvernietigende decarboniseringsbeleid is nog steeds van kracht. Dat is van een gans andere orde. Dat beleid berust op twee hoofdargumenten: de vermeende door de mens veroorzaakte opwarming van de aarde en de uitputting van fossiele brandstoffen. Beide argumenten zijn niet houdbaar gebleken. Het decarboniseringsbeleid dient derhalve zo snel mogelijk te worden beëindigd. 

Voor mijn eerdere DDS-bijdragen, zie