Northern Ireland’s environment minister announced today he has banned the local broadcast of British government ads on climate change and denounced their energy-saving message as “insidious propaganda.”
Sammy Wilson has repeatedly raised eyebrows since winning the environment post in Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government last year. The hardline Protestant, a leading light in the Democratic Unionist Party, argues that global weather patterns are naturally cooling, not warming—and humanity should invest in coping with God-driven climate change, not trying to slow down a man-made problem.
His latest fight is against the central government in London, which funds an “Act on CO2” campaign encouraging the public to reduce their use of electricity and fossil fuels. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, but the Catholic-Protestant coalition in Belfast has autonomy in many areas.
Wilson said the British ads 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 40 feet of water.”
He said the ads, which have been running on British television stations including in Northern Ireland over the past year, represented “an insidious propaganda campaign” peddling “patent nonsense.”
Wilson said he had already written to the British government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change warning it not to distribute any more pollution-fighting ads in Northern Ireland.
In a brief statement, that London-based agency confirmed it had received the letter and would stop running TV ads in Northern Ireland pending legal advice.
In Northern Ireland’s fledgling government, individual ministers control their own policy patch—even when others in the four-party coalition oppose their decisions.
Catholics and Protestants from other parties said Wilson’s TV ad ban must win majority backing from Northern Ireland’s legislature to become legal. Wilson said he did not need any authority but his own.
Wilson won no support Monday from outside his own conservative party, which is Northern Ireland’s top vote-getter. Others called for his resignation.
