Amber Rudd, energy and climate change secretary, gave a speech on the benefits of remaining a member of the European Union saying: “The global deal in Paris is in the UK’s interests and frankly we wouldn’t have got it without being part of the EU.” She also warned that UK energy bills would rise by £500m a year if we left the European Union.

This link  from CarbonBrief, provides more background.

At the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) in 2009 a proposal was announced whereby developed countries were to raise funds of $30 billion from 2010 to 2012 with a goal of $100 billion per year by 2020 and of establishing a Green Climate Fund to help developing countries cut carbon emissions.

Amber’s concerns relate to the follow-on from this in Paris, in 2015, where the COP21 UN climate change agreement was concluded and the goal of raising $100 billion per year from taxpayers was confirmed.

Does Amber seriously think the UK government would struggle, without the help of the European Union, to negotiate a deal directly with the UN on Climate Change requiring us to give them a large amount of our taxpayers’ money? We would of course then be in the position of deciding the actual amount and not having the EU decide this for us.

It must be remembered that our government has a proven track record of expertise in this regard. They have been giving away massive amounts of our money with alacrity for years, notably to the EU and also as aid to various countries. They appear to be rather good at it!

However, the real question here is not would we be able to strike this deal but would we want to.

The report on Amber Rudd’s speech does not tell us why she thought energy bills would rise by £500m a million a year without the help of the European Union but it must be remembered that any ‘help’ they provide comes out of our taxes. If we left the European Union we would pay directly and not have the European Commission taking their commission on the deals we made.

At the Paris conference some countries announced that they were likely to be meeting their climate objectives outside the carbon tax based mechanism being proposed.

Regarding the whole basis for this discussion, climate change, it should be noted that Justice Burton, in October 2007 in the UK High Court, ruled that the film An Inconvenient Truth contained nine counts of scientific inaccuracy and that distribution of the film to school children without the explanations of error would be in breach of section 406 and 407 of the Education Act 1996 regarding the political indoctrination of school children. The court ordered 77 pages of corrective guidance to be issued to any school where the film was shown.

Regarding Mr. Gore’s statement (in the film) predicting that a sea level rise of up to 7 metres will be caused by melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland in the near future, Justice Burton said: “It is common ground that if indeed Greenland melted, it would release this amount of water, but only after, and over, millennia.”

That was in 2007. Since then sea level rises, where they have occurred, are best measured in millimetres not meters. This is against all predictions. So apparently Justice Burton was correct.

In other words, time is on our side and we are not faced with the kind of emergency that calls for urgent, ill-considered action involving the expenditure of vast sums of taxpayer’s money to the detriment of our economy, infrastructure and ultimately our standard of living. Instead we could plan for our energy future with due care and diligence.

In the light of this it might be prudent to have the UK conduct its own independent investigation regarding climate change. Concerns have been raised regarding the structure of the IPCC as it was and a number of eminent scientists resigned from this body and distanced themselves from it. Given the vast sums of money involved with this enterprise I believe this would help to allay public concerns.

Then, once agreement is reached on the significance of the climate problem and realistic time-scales have been appraised, we could decide on a policy to deal with it in our own uniquely innovative British way.

In particular, new developments in electricity generation technology such as nuclear fusion, which shows promise and may possibly herald a new age of cheap, clean abundant energy, could be factored into the decisions made.

Do you want to see important decisions affecting large, expensive developments to our infrastructure Made in Britain by people we can hold to account if they get it wrong?

Vote to LEAVE the European Union on June 23rd. Let’s take back control.