UK Environment Minister David Miliband starts off his YouTube promotion of the UK’s new climate change bill with a lie. He says the bill, if passed, will constrain every future UK govenment on carbon emissions. The Right Honorable Member is misleading the world. It is a central British constitutional principle that no Parliament may bind its successors. Any future government can repeal any Act.

Meanwhile, UK Conservative Party leader David Cameron has been praised by Al Gore. Gore also added to his litany of half-truths by praising Margaret Thatcher:

“With her training and background in chemistry she was ahead of the game, and when the scientists gave her the briefings she was able to ask molecule by molecule (what it meant). And she did,” he added.

What does Mrs Thatcher think now? Here is my summary of her section on global warming in her last book, Statecraft:

First, she stresses that she was initially skeptical of the arguments about global warming, although she thought they deserved to be treated seriously. She points out that there was “rather little scientific advice available to political leaders from those experts who were doubtful of the global warming thesis” (451). However, by 1990, she had begun to recognize that the issue was being used as a Trojan horse by anti-capitalist forces. That is why she took pains in her Royal Society speech in 1990 to state: “Whatever international action we agree upon to deal with environmental problems, we must enable our economies to grow and develop, because without growth you cannot generate the wealth required to pay for the protection of the environment” (452). In fact, Thatcher makes it clear that she regards global warming less as an “environmental” threat and more as a challenge to human ingenuity that should be grouped with challenges such as AIDS, animal health, and genetically modified foods. In her estimation,
All require first-rate research, mature evaluation and then the appropriate response. But no more than these does climate change mean the end of the world; and it must not either mean the end of free-enterprise capitalism. (457)

Would Mr Gore agree with this, I wonder?