The rise of the skeptics — Brexit shifts the ground: Boris promoted, DECC gone, by Joanne Nova.

Don’t underestimate the Brexit effect. The landscape is shifting.

The Paris agreement just became less likely. The UK Dept of the environment will submerge, and Boris Johnson, the outspoken skeptic and Brexit figurehead, has been promoted to foreign minister.

Five years ago, could we imagine an “infamous climate denier” like Boris rewarded in any Western Government? There were closet skeptics in the cabinet, but that’s not the same. In Australia, Tony Abbott once said climate change was “crap” and somehow still managed to become PM, but once he was, his official line was the permitted global warming story. ( He pandered, but in the most sensible possible way. And because he did not flagrantly add to the climate slush fund they still called him a “denier” but he rarely said anything openly skeptical.)

To have Boris in such an influential position is new ground. No more pandering. …

The nice thing about Brexit (apart from sticking it to Big-Gov) is that it is a decisive win for skeptics, and in so many ways. As Michael Bastach notes: “Conservative pollster Lord Michael Ashcroft surveyed 12,369 Brits voting in Thursday’s referendum and found 69 percent of those who voted to leave the EU saw the “green movement” as a “force for ill.” Some 62 percent of those voting to stay saw environmentalists as a “force for good.”