Sunday 7 February 2010

How much money has this government given to the climate change lobby?

Climate makes money move in mysterious ways

The British Government has been pouring millions of pounds into 'climate-related' projects all over the world

That is the headline to this article from the Telegraph it is an eye opener to the incredible amounts of money this government has given to climate related projects.

Here are a couple of extracts;

In all the coverage lately given to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its embattled chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, one rather important part of the story has largely been missed. This is the way in which, in its obsession with climate change, different branches of the UK Government have in recent years been pouring hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money into a bewildering array of "climate-related" projects, often throwing a veil of mystery over how much is being paid, to whom and why.

To begin with a small example. Everyone has now heard of "Glaciergate", the inclusion in the IPCC's 2007 report of a wild claim it was recently forced to disown, that by 2035 all Himalayan glaciers will have melted. In 2001 the Department for International Development (DfID) spent £315,277 commissioning a team of British scientists to investigate this prediction. After co-opting its Indian originator, Dr Syed Hasnain, they reported in 2004 that his claim was just a scare story. Some glaciers were retreating, others were not. There was no way they could disappear in a time-span shorter than many centuries.

Three years later, however, when the IPCC produced its 2007 report, it endorsed Dr Hasnain's claim without any mention of the careful UK-funded study which had shown it to be false

and

The trail into this tangled undergrowth began last December, when Dr Richard North and I were trying to track down 11 payments made by four separate government departments for projects involving Teri Europe, the London-based branch of Dr Pachauri's institute. We were struck by how reluctant the ministries often seemed to be to reveal how much they had paid under these contracts. What's more, why was UK taxpayers' money being used to fund these projects in the first place?

Why is this government giving so much money away?

Have a read of the whole article it certainly is an eye opener.

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