The folks over at Guido Fawkes have looked at Ed Miliband’s choice of climate SpAd. They are, Guido reveals, long-term advisers Tobias Garnett, Jonty Leibowitz and Eleanor Salter. And they are, as you would likely expect, drawn from political activist circles, not people with expertise in, you know, energy generation, distribution and markets. This news is no great surprise, of course, but it helps to explain an enduring fact of climate politics: why facts don’t matter.
Before becoming Miliband’s spad, Tobias Garnett was a human rights lawyer, and the coordinator of Extinction Rebellion’s legal strategy team. Of note, Guido observes, is a 2019 Guardian article, in which Garnett channels XR’s apocalyptic environmentalism to justify the group’s trademark obstruction of the public. Extinction Rebellion were merely “seeking to draw attention to what scientists have been telling us for decades”, claims Garnett, “the planet is warming, we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, we are responsible”. But Garret and XR’s understanding of “science” has always left quite a lot to be desired.
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