Is Sir Humphrey Appleby In Charge of Climate Change Policy?
This post was originally published on TalkClimateChange - and earned a mention in the WallStreetJournal Blog.
Fans of the British Television Series “Yes Minister” will be familiar with the trials of Government Minister Jim Hacker at the hands of dastardly civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby, frequently demonstrating the futility of promoting progress in a government bureaucracy. A typical exchange between the confounded Hacker and slippery Sir Humphrey plays out as follows:
Hacker: When you give your evidence to the Think Tank, are you going to support my view that the civil service is over-manned and feather-bedded, or not? Yes or no? Straight answer.
Sir Humphrey: Well Minister, if you ask me for a straight answer, then I shall say that, as far as we can see, looking at it by and large, taking one thing with another in terms of the average of departments, then in the final analysis it is probably true to say, that at the end of the day, in general terms, you would probably find that, not to put too fine a point on it, there probably wasn’t very much in it one way or the other… As far as one can see, at this stage.
(see a clip from Yes Minster at the bottom of this post)
The program provides a fascinating insight into the process of top level government – which many politicians have described as shockingly realistic.
This weekend, in a script that looks made for Hacker and Appleby, similar goings on have been observed within the real halls of power at Whitehall following an announcement by the National Audit Office (NAO) claiming that Britain’s carbon emissions may be 12% higher than officially stated.
As Jim Hacker once said, “The Prime Minister doesn’t want the truth, he wants something he can tell Parliament!” And so it seems that the British Government have been using two separate systems for measuring Co2 output. The 40 page NAO report claims that "There are two different bases on which the government reports emissions: that required for the UN, and the environmental accounts prepared for the Office of National Statistics … [which are] more comprehensive as they include aviation and shipping emissions.”
Consequently the environment minister, Phil Woolas was able to proudly announce last week that "UK greenhouse gas emissions have fallen by 16.4% since 1990. We remain on course to nearly double our Kyoto Protocol target over the 2008-12 period."
Happily, Sir Humphrey is usually able to help his minister out of a tight spot, saving him from humiliation with his mastery of bamboozlement. Explaining that a Government’s position is “the best explanation of past events that cannot be disproved by available facts”, Sir Humphry would surely have approved of the complex explanation of the British Government’s current climate change policy, which reads, “The UK has a Kyoto target of 12.5% reduction in all greenhouse gases by 2012, an EU target of reducing 20-30% of CO2, three domestic goals ranging between 20-60% of CO2 and is in the process of drafting a new climate change bill.”
Any last words of advice from Sir Humphrey?
“Almost anything can be attacked as a failure, but almost anything can be defended as not a significant failure. Politicians do no appreciate the significance of significant. "
Further Reading: The Guardian
Clip from Yes Minister, courtesy of the YouTube and the BBC:
