So farewell, then, the Department of Energy and Climate Change. It’s merging with BIS into the new Greg Clark-led Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Hopefully that streamlining brings greater efficiency. Here are some of their greatest hits:

• Paying £600 to promote just one job advert on LinkedIn – which nobody clicked on.
• Running a photo contest about what climate change might impact in the average Brit’s “day-to-day life” – and choosing a photo of a dead zebra as the winner.
• Shelling out £1.3 million in bonuses – including nearly £300,000 to already well paid top civil servants.
• Spending £500 per day on printing – despite having run a “Think Before you Print” Campaign.

Take your hot air with you…

The Department for Energy and Climate Change has come a long way since the 2009 “Think Before you Print” campaign. Their own accounts reveal the department spent £14,516 on printing and binding alone in February – £500 per day. According to a DECC spokesperson, the heightened cost was due to the Oil and Gas Authority scanning their “licencing documents to ensure they had copies as part of their office move last month.” They could buy 37 iPads with one month’s printing expenditure…

You’d think after a year of subsidy slicing, the Department for Energy and Climate Change would run a very tight ship. Not so…

New figures show Amber Rudd’s department blew a total of £1,299,729 on “Non-consolidated performance related payments”, aka bonuses, in 2014-15. A whopping £284,586 was earmarked for just 108 “Senior Civil Servants”, meaning these departmental mandarins hooked themselves a median average of £9,800, with some payouts going as high as an austerity-busting £14,700. This is despite an average salary of £109,490 per year. The average private sector bonus for UK workers last year was just £1,500…

Osborne ally Amber Rudd is increasingly used as a telly spokesman on energy and Europe – she should know her stuff since her brother is Remain spinmeister Roland. Though speaking to Justin Webb on the Today Programme, Amber did Remain no favours:

JW: “Why is Vladimir Putin still a problem for us if we leave the EU?”

AR: “Because Russia exports a lot of gas to the rest of Europe, we access our gas through Europe and by 2030-“

JW: “Through Norway, most of it”

AR: “Yes, well Norway is in Europe…”

JW: “But it’s outside the European Union”

AR: “But inside the internal energy market…”

The UK is 49.5% sufficient in natural gas with Norway supplying 55% of imported gas. Russia of course provides a nominal proportion of UK energy…

Rudd went on to claim Brexit would cause a “massive electric shock” and then weaponised the spectre of Fukushima:

“The thing about the gas market is you don’t know what shocks and what changes there can be to it. In Japan, after the Fukushima incident the LNG market for gas went through the roof, because all had to go to Japan. You don’t know what shocks there are…”

Remain weaponises a second human tragedy in as many days…

How much would you pay for this website about why we should all “back climate action”? £4,000? £40,000? Well, according to a data dump from the Department of Energy and Climate Change, ministers blew a staggering £4.9 million of taxpayer’s money on the beta site, which only ran for three months. Surely some mistake?

Curiously, a DECC source is at pains to tell Guido that the department’s own numbers are wrong. For some reason they won’t give an actual figure, though they say the real cost will be a fraction of what they declared. It can’t just be a simple typo though, because the data also states that DECC originally wanted to earmark £9.1 million for the site to “promote the government’s climate change narrative”. It would be a bad enough mistake to get the £4.9 million figure wrong, how did they come to the £9.1 million one as well?

UPDATE: DECC now say the actual figures are £9,116 and £4,900. “Extra 0’s added due to admin error.”

Amber Rudd has hinted that she may be forced to back-peddle on her excellent plan to slash solar subsidies, telling the Commons today that it was “too early to say what the outcome of the consultation will be” and that she was “determined to identify the right level of solar subsidies to continue growth”. Rudd’s carefully worded caveats were made as she took oral questions for the first time since DECC announced it was consulting on plans to cut solar subsidies by 87%.

Rudd and Minister of State Andrea Leadsom are coming under sustained pressure over their subsidy plans. They faced kickback from all sides of the chamber today, while yesterday they received criticism from Boris.  Stick in there Amber…