Northern Ireland bans climate ads -- WTF?

Northern Ireland's Environment Minister, Sammy Wilson, has banned an advertising campaign promoting efficient use of electricity on the grounds that the central thesis of the campaign is "patent nonsense" and "insidious propaganda." Even if it were true, since when are either attributes grounds for censorship? What's the real problem?

From the BBC's coverage of the story:

Calling for his removal, the Green Party said Mr Wilson made "a laughing stock out of Northern Ireland."

Sammy Wilson argued that the Scottish executive had objected and stopped the adverts being broadcast. However, the Scottish executive told the BBC the reason it did not run these adverts was because they are already running their own climate change adverts.

He argued that they were "giving people the impression that by turning off the standby light on their TV they could save the world from melting glaciers and being submerged in 40ft of water".

He said that was "patent nonsense".

Mr Wilson said he had written to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to say that the advertising campaign Act on CO2 "was not welcome".

He explained that he did not believe in its message that "man-made greenhouse gas emissions are the main cause of climate change" and that the campaign was contrary to his personal views.

He told DECC: "I do not wish for climate change messages to be promoted by other Whitehall departments here."

Wilson would be correct, of course, if the ads actually did tell people that "by turning off the standby light on their TV they could save the world from melting glaciers and being submerged in 40ft of water." But do they? Of course not. They're online here. All they do is tell people they can reduce their carbon footprint, save money and save energy. And I think it reasonable to note that objecting to such messages is an odd thing to do if you're a minister of state, let alone environment minister.

Should he resign? Let's leave that to the Northern Irish. If they are content with an environment minister who thinks he has a better grasp of climatology than several thousand climatologists, well then, good luck to them. They'll need it.

More like this

Remember how David Bellamy claimed that his TV career was ended (something that happened in 1994) because of an article he wrote in 2004? Now Johnny Ball is making similar dubious claims of persecution: But his bookings have dropped by 90 per cent over the past year and the 72-year-old has blamed…
Sipping from the internet firehose... This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup (skip to bottom) Top Stories:WGMS Report, X-Prize, Opportunity Cost Melting Arctic, Arctic Oil & Gas Claim, Earth Hour,…
Interesting article Why the BBC should stand up to its climate campaign critics about whether the BBC should be campaigning on climate change. They have a charter, so they can go all lawyerly and examine whether they are acting in accordance with it. But the same question applies to scientists. […
Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another Week in the Planetary Crisis Information Overload is Pattern Recognition November 18, 2012…

As an Irishman I feel obliged to point out that Sammy Wilson is the environment minister for Northern Ireland, not the whole of Ireland.

Sammy Wilson is a member of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a party which has its roots in the evangelical protestant churches in Northern Ireland and which was until last year led by the notorious (Dr)Ian Paisley, so his views will not be surprising to anyone familiar with NI politics.

The DUP is the same party that has recently tried to introduce creationism into the NI school curriculum.

http://stormontwatch.blogspot.com/2007/07/dup-dinosaurs-target-darwinis…
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/09/does_the_dup_also_believe_in…

nuff said!

Just in case people are confused by the Union Jack behind Sammy Wilson, he is the DUP environment minister in the Northern Ireland executive.

Ireland (the republic, or south) has a Green Party minister of the environment at the moment, John Gormley.

what can you say! WTF!

Your title is extremely misleading. Ireland is not "banning climate ads." Nor does it have anything to do with "censorship" as you state.

By taking government out of a discussion, the discussion actually becomes less biased and less prone to censorship. This move is actually closer to the opposite of censorship. It's never good for the one entity that has a monopoly on the legal use of force to pick sides in a scientific discussion. There simply shouldn't be any government voice one way or another... and that is what he's trying to accomplish.

It's actually refreshing to see someone in a political position monitor the insanely abusive use of funds, taken by force from the populace at large, for advertisements that are at best not very helpful.

Over half of environmental scientists already clamor for billions of dollars taken from taxpayers without their consent. They obtain these funds by doing research that bolsters the current popular political viewpoint.

I don't think that we can take the blame for this one! Sammy Wilson is environment minister in the Northern Ireland Executive. He, and his party, put great emphasis on being British, and not being Irish.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sammy_Wilson

His party, the Democratic Unionist Party is probally the only example of a right-wing American-style party on this side of the Atlantic. It pushes the usual anti-gay, anti-choice buttons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Unionist_Party

Northern Irish politics is a bit 'different' to the mainland, but this one takes the biscuit. You really have to wonder who thought it was a good idea to have a climate change denier as the environment minister in the first place.

Eddie Mair interviewed him on PM on Monday night http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/pm/ . Lets just say that he didn't really help himself.

ULSTER SAYS NOOOO!

That photo of this bozo and the flag is worth a thousand blog posts ...

He explained that he did not believe in its message that "man-made greenhouse gas emissions are the main cause of climate change" and that the campaign was contrary to his personal views.

One might almost hope that the theory of gravity might also be contrary to his personal views and that he would be willing to step off a very high cliff to prove his point...

By Fernando Magyar (not verified) on 10 Feb 2009 #permalink

It's about time someone stood up to the bullies of the world. Man-made climate chnage is a manufactured crisis designed to gain totalitarian power and force global taxation on people. I wish someone would ban Al Gore's mouth. Environmentalists cause alot of problems. There is nothing wrong with saving energy and caring for the environment as long as it is done in a sane and responsible way, but creating a manufactured crisis is treason to me. As a matter of fact, the eco-terrorists who set fires to Hummer dealers should be charged with domestic terrorism and executed as if they were Islamic terrorists. in fact there is no difference. A terrorist is a terrorist.

@Gerry. Well, 'British and Irish' might be more accurate than 'British not Irish' though there are many variations.

Sammy is just one of the people we have to put up with in Northern Ireland because of our Power-Sharing Government. Minister positions are populated in proportion to Party Vote share, not by the majority party. Hence we have Ministers who act not in the interests of the people of Northern Ireland, but play solely to their vote base.

It should, however provide some relief knowing that Sammy is known a bit of an idiot over in 'Norn Iron'. He can't but help reinforce the image every now and them...

"He explained .. that the campaign was contrary to his personal views."

Says it all.

But I would add, that even if by some improbability it turned out that he was correct, and human CO2 emissions were not causing global warming, it still would be a good thing to keep one's energy use under control. There are still environmental costs associated with the extraction of the resources for energy, and the fact that they're nonrenewable.

Well, he achieved something that nobody thought possible. He has united the whole political spectrum of Northern Ireland.

When everyone in NI thinks you are a loon, the chances are you a loon!

By Donalbain (not verified) on 11 Feb 2009 #permalink

Devices on standby simply do not use any appreciable amount of electricity. It's simple physics. If they're doing nothing and aren't getting hot, then very little to no energy is being used. Red LED standby lights are NOT a cause of global warming.

This kind of nonsense IS doing damage to the overall environmental movement. It's dishonest campaigning which shifts the blame and the responsibility for energy wastage onto powerless consumers, making them think that just because they leave their TV on that they are personally the cause of climate change.

The real behavior changes that need to be made are in industry and manufacturing. Laws need to be passed mandating energy efficient devices. Devices which really do use 0.01W in standby mode, and which are as uncomsumptive and efficient as possible when in use.

Blaming people who are just trying to live their lives is the wrong answer. We are an industrial society, and climate change is an industrial problem. Our industry is what needs to change.

By ObsessiveMathsFreak (not verified) on 11 Feb 2009 #permalink

Well, while I disapprove strongly of such censorship, your pompous position on their viewpoint is awful.

They seem to be one of the few nations who are getting over the bunk that CO2 causes climate change.

There is frankly no lack now of scientists and climatologists who join the skeptics, saying "gee it's more likely to be cycles in the sun's output" and "gee humans just don't generate enough CO2 to make a perceptible impact". The planet has been warmer in the past, and had higher CO2 in the past, long before the industrial age.

I'm all for strongly held opinions. It's that smug superiority saying how those who disagree are uneducated fools that is truly insulting.

Despite the above, standby power consumption is in fact a significant component of residential power use, running at around 10 percent of the total by some estimates. (That link is to the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, hardly a hotbed of environmental extremists.)

Pointing the finger solely at the industrial sector is a really good way of letting people off the hook. The fact is that there's no way out without significant (though not necessarily uncomfortable) lifestyle changes on the part of First World people, and if a mild guilt is what it will take to get people to replace incandescent light bulbs with LEDs and turn their electronics off at the power strip, then so be it.

OMF, I think it's fair to say that the changes have to come at the industrial level, but for that to happen change must happen on the consumer level as well. It has to be a whole societal shift instead of a piecemeal one. You have to get the consumers on-side to buy more energy efficient products (even when they are more expensive) and start adding energy efficiency and carbon footprint produced to the bottom line of every cost-benefit analysis.

It's not blame, it's personal responsibility. And when I bother taking personal responsibility for recycling and putting out the compost, etc. then I start expecting that of the companies and industries around me. If I can take an extra 5 minutes a day to change my routine and seperate my garbage and turn off the lights, surely our industries can make policies and procedures that do the same on their larger scale. conversely, if I did not take extra time and effort to reduce my energy consumption I'd feel hypocritical trying to make someone else follow rules that I wasn't.

Thanks, Chris: you saved me the trouble of tracking down a good URL on phantom loads.

Seems there's enough blame to go around. Individuals have to stop wasting energy; industry has to start supplying clean energy; governments have to stop subsidizing dirty energy; and society as a whole has to rethink its slavish devotion to growth economies and unfettered free markets, which can't make the required transitions own their own.