Britain’s new Prime Minister drives a Stake through the heart of the green vampire

Incoming Prime Minister Theresa May has driven a stake through the heart of her predecessor David Cameron’s fluffy, faux-Conservative project by scrapping the Department of Energy And Climate Change (DECC).

Established in 2008, DECC was a hangover from the Gordon Brown era of woeful misgovernance. Its first Secretary of State was future failed Labour leader candidate Ed Miliband whose only significant political achievement also happened to be one of the most expensive and pointless in British parliamentary history: the drafting of the truly disastrous Climate Change Act.

Under the terms of the Climate Change Act – written by a green activist from Friends of the Earth called Bryony Worthington; endorsed by Cameron’s Conservative opposition and rejected by only five MPs – Britain is legally committed to more stringent “decarbonisation” targets than any other country in the world, at an annual cost of around £19 billion a year.

Miliband’s successors, under the awful Conservative/Lib Dem Coalition government were even worse. For some bizarre reason probably not unconnected with utter fecklessness, green delusion and a fatuous desire to virtue signal, Prime Minister Cameron decided to hand over the keys to DECC to his Lib Dem Coalition partners.

So began probably the worst appointments since some bright spark said: “I know. Let’s make Gaius Verres Governor of Sicily.”

Sure, DECC might have seemed on the face of it a nothing department which could safely be handed over to the losers, perverts and half wits the Liberal Democrat party tends to attract. What appeared to have escaped the Prime Minister’s notice is that any department with the word “Energy” in the title – effectively puts the people who run it in charge of a goodly part of the economy.

First, the job was given to Chris Huhne, an automaton-like, Westminster-educated, millionaire Europhile ex-City boy with at least five houses to his name and a zealous urge to carpet the British countryside with wind farms and solar arrays.

Then, when Huhne had to leave the job for a spell in prison – after being found guilty of perjuring himself in court while trying to evade responsibility for a speeding ticket – it was handed over to someone even more frighteningly useless.

Ed Davey’s only known point of interest is that he resembles the footballer Wayne Rooney. Oh, that and the fact that while in post he managed negotiate a deal described by one observer as “the worst I have ever seen” committing the British taxpayer to spend around three times the going rate for right to allow the French and Chinese to rip Britain off royally in order to build a nuclear power station using out-of-date technology at Hinkley Point.

Such is the way of British politics that this potato-headed oaf is now Sir Ed Davey.

DECC’s final incumbent as Secretary of State was Amber Rudd – now promoted to Home Secretary. She seems to be a fervent believer in ManBearPig. But this does not appear to be a view shared by her boss Prime Minister Theresa May. Nor, perhaps even more importantly, by May’s right-hand man Nick Timothy who is an implacable opponent of the Climate Change Act.

It’s not yet clear how much of DECC’s £5.7 billion budget will be saved now that it is being absorbed into the Business department BIS.

Here is what the Global Warming Policy Forum‘s Benny Peiser suggested it might save when he campaigned for its closure last year:

Furthermore, many unnecessary green expenditure items could be phased out altogether. Spending in areas such as Renewable Heat, Carbon Capture and Storage and on the Committee on Climate Change should all be scrapped.

Merging DECC into other government departments would bring the UK in line with other developed nations too. Australia recently abolished its Climate Commission, transferring its essential functions to the Environment Department.

Were the UK to introduce similar efficiencies along with the removal of wasteful spending, the Exchequer could save £380m by 2020-21, according to analysis by the Taxpayers’ Alliance.

It’s true that the most significant benefit its closure will bring lies not so much in saved costs as in the likelihood of reduced regulation. In Britain, as in the rest of the world, green taxes and regulations have added a significant burden to economic growth, as well as having a distorting effect on energy markets.

This is good news. Very good news. The agonised screeching of all the usual suspects in the Environmental movement will be enough to sustain many of us in lols for weeks and months to come.