Renewable Revolution

Post-Brexit, UK Rearranges DECC Chairs

 

As the United Kingdom shuffles its government in the wake of Brexit, one of the first acts of newly-appointed Prime Minister Theresa May  was to abolish the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and fold it into a new Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy.   


The Independent published a story with reactions, which are all pretty uniformly negative “Plain stupid” is how Ed Miliband described the move and Green Party MP Caroline Lucas said, “To throw [DECC] into the basement of another Whitehall department, looks like a serious backwards step.”
 
WWF-UK CEO David Nussbaum was a bit more optimistic though, saying that the combination of business and energy departments “can be a real powerhouse for change, joining up Whitehall teams to progress the resilient, sustainable, and low carbon infrastructure that we urgently need.”
 
This is similar to a perennial business and sustainability question, of whether it’s better to have a dedicated executive-level sustainability officer, or to have an environmental ethos instilled throughout the entire business, so that those environmental concerns aren’t siloed. In the end, it depends on the degree to which sustainability can be integrated throughout the organization. If everyone is on board, then a dedicated person is redundant. If not, then that sustainability staffer is essential for making sure the issue remains a priority for the organization.
 
 So what about the new UK government? Things aren’t perfectly clear, but the signs indicate that this will certainly not be the “greenest government”. Carbon Brief dug up the new Prime Minister’s praise for the UK’s Climate Change Act back in 2008, but she has been silent on the subject since then. And Greg Clark, the leader of the new Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, has also said good stuff in the past, so there’s hope.
 
 But the newly appointed Environment Secretary is Andrea Leadsom who, according to an Independent headline, “backs fox hunting, selling off forests, and opposes climate change measures.” When Leadsom first became a Department of Energy minister in 2015, her first two questions were “is climate change real?” and “is hydraulic fracturing safe?” She is apparently “now completely persuaded,” and while it’s not clear in which direction she is persuaded on regarding climate change, the rest of the quote indicates that she thinks fracking is safe. And it seems that back in 2008, ALEC brought Leadsom to the US so that she could attend a conference where speakers called climate change “a huge, huge myth.”
 
It remains to be seen then, whether this DECC-demotion is indicative of a deprioritization of climate change in the UK or just a change in name with minimal impacts. In other words, we’ll have to wait and see whether they’re rearranging deck chairs or just throwing DECC overboard altogether.