Here is everyone’s favourite green Tory Tim Yeo back in 2009:

“The dying gasps of the deniers will be put to bed. In five years time, no one will argue about a man-made contribution to climate change.”

And here he was last night on the perils of man made climate change:

“The first thing to say is it does not represent any threat to the survival of the planet. None at all. The planet has survived much bigger changes than any climate change that is happening now. Although I think the evidence that the climate is changing is now overwhelming, the causes are not absolutely clear. There could be natural causes, natural phases that are taking place.”

Presumably he’ll be buying shares in Shell tomorrow…

H/T @mattholehouse

Team Osborne are kicking back at this morning’s Greenpeace fracking stunt. Occupying his constituency office seems to have backfired somewhat; a Treasury source tells Guido: “we are happy for Greenpeace to draw attention to the fact that George is fighting for cheaper energy bills for all”. Something of an own goal…

Across the street from George Osborne’s constituency office is a village green on a roundabout where teams of Greenpeace activists have constructed a huge mock-up fracking operation – presumably to show the Chancellor how safe the process can be. The drivers of the 4x4s passing the stunt will be reminded just how much shale energy will save in fuel costs. Tatton is set to become the Dallas of England sitting as it does atop reserves which will provide cheap energy for the UK’s future as we dash for gas…

Sacked Energy Minister Charles Hendry has not wasted any time cashing in on his expertise; he has just been announced as the chairman of the wind energy giants Forewind. The consortium comprising of four international companies -Scottish and Southern, RWE, Statoil and Statkraf – was awarded the contract in 2010 to build the huge “Dogger Bank” windfarm 125 kilometres off the Yorkshire coast.

Though Hendry has waited for the appropriate cooling off period of three months since leaving government, a look through his declared meetings while a minister leaves an unfortunate taste in the mouth: between June 2010 and October 2011 Hendry hobnobbed six times with the representatives of the companies that make up Forewind, and now he is their boss. It seems the revolving doors spin far more than the windmills…

Another nail in the husky coffin as Cabinet Office Minister Oliver Letwin concedes defeat to Nigel Lawson and accepts that the Kyoto Treaty is dead and nothing will be following it. Back in 2008 the two men made a bet, the details of which were published in a Standpoint interview:

Oliver Lewtin: I’d be very happy to have a wager, and I offer you a £100 bet that before either of us is dead, whichever is the first — our estates can pay — we will see a very substantial agreement on carbon reduction.

Nigel Lawson: But I don’t think I want the bet to be “in my lifetime” because I’d like to get the £100. I’m sorry it’s such a modest amount you’re prepared to wager — it shows how unconfident you are — but I would like to be able to collect before I die. So I think we should say “by the time Kyoto runs out”, because there is meant to be no hiatus; there is meant to be a successor to Kyoto. So “by 2012 we will have the agreement” — maybe I’ll die before then, of course —but 2012 is the acid test.

Oliver Letwin: On the same basis, Nigel, I’m perfectly willing to take that bet too. The reason I’m willing to take the bet is that I know that the only way it can be made to happen is if we try to make it happen and if we build up the moral authority to make it happen by taking the steps ourselves.

Letwin has apparently now agreed to settle the bet. Lord Lawson is on a bit of victory lap this afternoon:

“Oliver is one of the nicest people in politics, and one of the cleverest. It is, however, disconcerting that UK climate change policy - which makes no conceivable sense in the absence of a binding global agreement – has been based on the advice of someone so totally divorced from any understanding of practical realities.”

Well quite.

A serious contender for villain of the year has to be Tim Yeo. The conflicted chairman of the Energy and Climate Change select committee has time and time again flown the green flag this year, insisting that it is mere coincidence he makes over £100,000-a-year from his own renewable energy investments. Just because a conflict of interest is declared, it is still a conflict of interest…

Guido took particular interest in Tim Yeo’s taxi trouble over the summer. There was a distinctly whiffy smell lingering around Eco City Vehicles, an environmentally-friendly taxi company chaired by Yeo, and their wheeler deal to conveniently introduce an age limit for London’s taxis. The job earned Yeo some £440-an-hour, but when Number 10 started sniffing around he quickly resigned on the quiet. Guilty conscience?

And it didn’t end there. Perhaps Yeo’s most shameless moment of the year was when he used his position to lobby the government for more flights to China, the very same day that his company TMO Renewables signed a multi-million pound deal in – you guessed it – China. He still rakes tens of thousands from his positions at three renewable energy companies, despite remaining as chairman of the select committee that helps govern them. Don’t Yeo forget it…

Good news. It seems the glaciers are not melting. Eco-loons had predicted glaciers in the Himalayas would be gone by 2035, but with 100cm of fresh snowfall in November, the Times of India reports that “the abundance of snow on the mountains has rejuvenated nearly one thousand glaciers in the Himalayas. 

“While scanty snowfall and rising temperature in last decade had sparked the possibilities of fast shrinking of glaciers, good spells of snowfall in last three years have changed the trend with glaciers almost growing to their original size.”

It’s over! Rejoice!

A great piece of digging coming up in this week’s Speccie. Green businesses have been taking part in a scam known as ‘de-rating’, deliberately producing less energy than they are capable of in order to cash in on disincentivising government subsidies. With low-energy wind turbines given almost double the subsidy of their high-power alternatives in order to encourage new businesses to enter the market, owners of giant wind farms have been running their turbines at half capacity so they can trouser the top rate.

DECC are aware of the scam but have yet to do anything about it…

Yesterday the Guardian’s Paul Lewis, based on an “investigation” carried out by Greenpeace, put to anti-windfarm campaigner James Delingpole the following conspiracy theory:

• That Heaton-Harris and you were coordinating a secret plot also involving the Energy Minister, John Hayes.
• You attended a secret meeting with Heaton-Harris and Hayes to discuss the plan.
• Hayes’ comments published in the Daily Mail and Telegraph on October 31, 2012, which were initially intended as a speech to the RenewableUK wind conference, were carefully timed to coincide with you withdrawing your candidacy from the by-election and subsequent endorsement of the Conservative position on wind farms.

Last night it ran on the front page the headline:

• Minister “Linked” to Corby plan

On Twitter last night Guido got into a spat with Ian Katz, the deputy editor of the Guardian:

@GuidoFawkes Haven't seen any reason not to but will look forward to your post tomorrow with interest. Night, night

—
ian katz (@iankatz1000) November 13, 2012

Only one problem with the conspiracy theory is that it was – apart from Chris Heaton-Harris bragging about his links to Delingpole – demonstrably untrue. He and Heaton-Harris MP are both anti-windfarm campaigners, they are allies and they regularly talk to each other. No big deal, Delingpole is after all his constituent. However a plot involving the Energy Minister John Hayes would be worth a front page. Anyone following the issue would be aware that there is a policy shift going on and enthusiasm for the expensively subsidised windmills is much diminished in austerity governments all over the world. That shift was clearly signalled by the appointment of Hayes during the last reshuffle.

The idea that Hayes was in on a secret plot centred on Delingpole’s Corby campaign is demonstrably nonsense. Delingpole told the Speccie he was going to run in Corby on August 8, 2012, Hayes was only appointed as Energy Minister on September 4, 2012. The supposed plotters could not possibly know that would happen.

Delingpole told Guido when Hayes made the no-more-windfarms speech that he was pleased to be off the hook of running a time-consuming campaign destined to be unsuccessful at the ballot box – “I needed an excuse”. A pretty good excuse given the policy change was a complete victory as this blog reported on the day:

Even in the video recorded by Greenpeace, Heaton-Harris confirms “it was just fortuitous timing”, yet Greenpeace was still allowed to spin on the Guardian’s front page that there was a conspiracy in Corby “linked” to the Energy Minister. Readers might think it was a Guardian story, it wasn’t, it was put together by Greenpeace as a package for the cash-strapped, loss making Guardian – out-sourced like the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s Newsnight paedo story. John Sauven, Greenpeace’s executive director, says it was “their investigation”. If you outsource investigative journalism to a political campaign, this is what happens. Conspiracy theories replace evidence…

• There was no coordinated plot involving Hayes.
• There was no meeting of all three.
• The speech and Delingpole’s withdrawal from the Corby campaign were not “carefully timed to coincide”.

The Guardian has grudgingly changed the headline online this morning to “Energy minister denies collusion”. The wind has been taken out of the story…