Thread by @WillHayCardiff

[Important thread]
Boris Johnson has just announced his new cabinet.
For all his bluster about taking climate change seriously he has appointed an impressive number of people who seem to not really acknowledge it as a problem at all.
walesonline.co.uk/news/politics/…

Monmouth MP David TC Davies has been made a minister in the Wales Office, and assistant government whip.
He will be responsible as whip to help implement policies to ensure there are net-zero emissions by 2050.
However he has not had a great record on clime change...

Mr Davies has a long history of denying man-made climate change despite the overwhelming consensus of leading experts around world stating the opposite.

In 2013 he said in a parliamentary debate that it "is not proven that the carbon dioxide that has gone into the atmosphere is responsible for the relatively small amount of warming that has taken place since industrialisation."

In 2016 he signed a letter calling on the government to delay setting the fifth carbon budget as recommended by independent advisers the Committee on Climate Change (the leading authority on global heating).

He has used his regular column in the South Wales Argus to speak out against action on the climate emergency. In 2018 he used it to speak out against renewable forms for green energy and accused the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of being “alarmists”.

These views are not new and have been going on for over a decade. In 2010 Davies attended a meeting of climate science deniers in the UK parliament called “Climate Fools Day”.

In a parliamentary debate to ratify the Paris Agreement in 2016, Davies repeated the debunked trope that the climate has always been changing.

But it is not just David Davies...

In a 2017 interview the Leader of the Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg said he thought humanity should adapt to, rather than mitigate, climate change.

In the same interview he cast doubt over the effectiveness of humans’ ability to change the climate for future generations, misrepresenting a recent report from the UN’s expert body, the IPCC.

Chris Heaton-Harris - Minister of state in Dep Transport has regularly voted against measures to tackle climate change.
He has also previously been vehemently anti-wind farm.

Matt Hancock - Secretary of state for health and social care also has a record of voting  against measures to combat climate change.

During his time as energy minister, Hancock was criticised for  hiring a private jet  to fly back from Aberdeen to London after signing a deal on climate change with the President of Mexico.

He has also taken donations from Neil Record , a funder of the UK’s leading climate science denial lobby group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
TBF, he has also spoken on the record supporting action on climate change.

Nadhim Zahawi - Parliamentary under secretary of state in the ministry for business and industry has huge links to the oil industry.

He has received more than £1m from fossil fuel companies (all declared and legitimate). He spent much of his parliamentary career working as chief strategy officer for Gulf Keystone Petroleum.
He also owns shares in Genel Energy, an oil and gas exploration and production company.

Grant Shapps - Secretary of state for transport
Mr Shapps was strongly criticised for a report produced by a group he chaired that claimed that lights could go out next Christmas due to the UK’s commitment to phasing out coal.
Experts quickly discredited the claims.

This is not to mention Boris himself!
Mr Johnson has previously argued that recent mild winters had "nothing to do with climate change".

In his Telegraph column he wrote in 2015 "Whatever is happening to the weather at the moment, he said, it is nothing to do with the conventional doctrine of climate change.”

A report also revealed that First Corporate Shipping, co-owned by Terence Mordaunt, a director of the Global Warming Policy Forum, the advocacy arm of the climate science denial campaign group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, had donated £25,000 to his leadership campaign.

A massive thank you to @DeSmogUK for all their assistance with this. The work they do is very important and they need your support