Common Sense Victory: Irish politician bans TV ads about global warming!
DUBLIN - February 9, 2009 - Northern Ireland's environment minister announced Monday 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 hard-line 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 Act on CO2 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.
