Anti-EU campaigners appear to be aligning themselves with climate change sceptics who are on the wrong side of scientific evidence, the former energy and climate change secretary Ed Davey has said.
In a letter to Matthew Elliott, the head of the Vote Leave campaign, Davey says the group will be guilty of attempting to take the UK “to the fringes of the international community” unless it distances itself from Ukip and the former chancellor Nigel Lawson.
Davey highlights the group’s links with political figures who hold “extreme views” on global warming. Specifically he cites:
- Lord Lawson, founder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, who has dismissed claims of a link between floods and global warming. “There’s been bad weather before,” Lawson said in 2014. “And anyhow, climate change is a global phenomenon, and you don’t attribute local things like this necessarily to some global picture.”
- Owen Paterson, a former environment secretary, who has described warnings about global warming as exaggerated.
- Douglas Carswell, Ukip’s sole MP, who has described the Climate Change Act as fatuous.
Davey writes: “The campaign you lead, Vote Leave, seems ready to ally itself with climate change deniers who are on the wrong side of scientific evidence and international consensus ... If you will not unequivocally distance yourself from both Ukip and Nigel Lawson, it will be clear that your campaign wants not only to take Britain to the fringes of the international community but do so by holding fringe views.”
He concludes his letter by saying Britain can best meet global challenges through co-ordinated action with its EU partners, a point previously made by Barack Obama and China’s Xi Jinping.
The Liberal Democrat former cabinet minister writes: “Vote Leave now has an urgent duty to tell the British people whether is stands on the side of science and international cooperation, or whether it indulges extreme views that would not only isolate Britain from Europe but from the entire international community.”
The letter is timed to coincide with the UN climate change talks under way in Paris.
