A chair for the wind tycoon

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
" Last week, I mentioned the curious fact that Tim Yeo MP serves as chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change while earning more than £140,000 a year working for firms that make money out of “green” energy. In the days that followed, everyone seemed to be piling in on this, with calls for Mr Yeo to resign. Perhaps they should also turn their attention to the role of John Gummer, now Lord Deben (right), nominated by David Cameron to be the new chairman of the Committee on Climate Change, set up under the Climate Change Act to advise on climate and energy policy.
The committee is described as “independent”, but it is packed with global-warming zealots, such as Lord May, the former president of the Royal Society, who turned it into a campaigning body on the issue. Lord Deben himself is chairman of Forewind, an international consortium planning to build the world’s largest offshore wind farm in the North Sea, and also president of Globe International, a body which co-ordinates responses to global warming by politicians across the world. (His predecessors in the post include Elliot Morley, before he was imprisoned for fiddling parliamentary expenses, and Stephen Byers, the former minister who was seen in a television documentary claiming that, as a lobbyist, he was now “a cab for hire”.)
Lord Deben still has to be confirmed as a suitable chairman for the Committee on Climate Change. But since the final say on this rests with Mr Yeo’s committee, one suspects that a possible conflict of interests will not prove an obstacle."