On one hand while they say “Failure is not an option in Copenhagen” it appears that some things aren’t going so well internally. Perhaps a bit too much wining and dining?
As WUWT commenter “par5” points out: “Becker has left office with immediate effect after not presenting sufficient documentation for expensive restaurant bills, according to reports in the Danish media. One bill for 39 people allegedly included 37 bottles of red wine, and Becker was given a formal warning in March over travel expenses.”
http://www.rechargenews.com/business_area/politics/article195681.ece
From the COP15 website:
Denmark’s chief climate negotiator resigns
Thomas Becker, right hand of incoming COP15 president Connie Hedegaard, has been relieved of duty with immediate notice.
With less than two months to go to the UN climate conference (COP15) in Copenhagen, Denmark’s chief climate negotiator Thomas Becker has resigned from his position as deputy permanent secretary in the Ministry for Climate and Energy.
According to Danish news agency Ritzau, Becker confirms his resignation but declines to comment or give any reason for his resignation.
“Of course it’s sad that a key person in the climate negotiations has chosen to resign his position. However, it is a purely administrative matter which I therefore do not have any comments to,” says Connie Hedegaard, Minister for Climate and Energy and incoming COP15 president, according to Danish public service broadcasting network DR.
DR on Friday quoted the ministry’s Permanent Secretary Thomas Egebo as saying that “Thomas Becker has been relieved from duty with immediate notice after disagreements of a non-professional nature, matters that the ministry and Becker look differently upon”.
Becker has been instrumental in Hedegaard’s international climate diplomacy, and according to Ritzau he conceived the idea of bringing COP15 to Denmark. From 2004-2006 he was chairman of the Subsidiary Body of Implementation under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
As of Monday, Becker will be replaced by Steffen Smidt, deputy permanent secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Smidt is an experienced diplomat and has participated in international climate negotiations for a number of years.
h/t to WUWT reader John Ratcliffe
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“Becker has left office with immediate effect after not presenting sufficient documentation for expensive restaurant bills, according to reports in the Danish media. One bill for 39 people allegedly included 37 bottles of red wine, and Becker was given a formal warning in March over travel expenses.”
http://www.rechargenews.com/business_area/politics/article195681.ece
Ha! “Thomas Becker has been relieved from duty with immediate notice after disagreements of a non-professional nature, matters that the ministry and Becker look differently upon”.
Sure, I believe, thousands wouldn’t. There are people and organisations of whom it can be said “only when they deny a thing do you know it’s true”.
Maybe he saw the light for what it is, an oncoming train in the tunnel. Or maybe he was a little free with expense accounts. Either way, it doesn’t look good. Like Hamlet said, something’s rotten in Denmark.
….One bill for 39 people allegedly included 37 bottles of red wine,….
The Danish drink so little?
Life must be great on the AGW/MMCC/AAM/UN/IPCC gravytrain eh? Expenses and travel with great incomes,self important busybodies furiously sucking at the public teat.
I wonder how much money is being spent each year on nonjob gravytrain beaurocrats alone? All the endless meetings and travel expenses, all the puffed up egos pretending they are actually doing something usefull while syphoning off ever more cash in a self perpetuating circle of ever more beaurocrats taking ever more cash to talk to themselves and preach nonsense to the rest of us.
If tens of thousands of parasites depend on perpetuating the global warming nonsenses it seems likely that they wont be keen on anything that might derail that gravytrain will they?
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of Tums.
tokyoboy (22:20:36) :
“….One bill for 39 people allegedly included 37 bottles of red wine,….
The Danish drink so little?”
I spill that much! hic!
Senior bureaucrats are the same all over the world, as are the politicians. They are often in it for the money & power. An added attraction is that bureaucracies tend to promote incompetent brown-noses, in the hope they will actually do some good work. It is the squeaky wheel in these organisations that gets onto the promotional fast track, not the diligent worker trying to make a difference. They take us for fools with their explanation for his “resignation” so soon before the climax of his professional life. If he has been naughty, he should be sacked, not given the easy option of resigning. No doubt he got a financial golden parachute too.
Here’s a story about red wine and Pamelas passed out under her computer station from too much of the red stuff.
Satire, you have to live it.
BFD
” John Nicklin (22:19:45) :
Maybe he saw the light for what it is, an oncoming train in the tunnel. ”
… or maybe they want to follow the IPCC lead and replace him with a railway engineer.
Here is a more detailed story about his drinking:
http://www.cphpost.dk/climate/91-climate/47167-climate-ministry-forced-to-reshuffle.html
According to DR News, Becker received a written warning from the ministry for overspending on travel and restaurants back in March. He was also questioned about buying 37 bottles of wine and 41 gin and tonics for 39 guests during previous trips to Bonn and Paris.
The March to Copenhagen has become the Parade on Mulberry Street. It has degenerated into a shakedown by the developing nations of the developed ones over so-called ‘carbon guilt’. No one is going to be happy about the results out of Copenhagen except the skeptics and what is accomplished there won’t change the climate appreciably even if CO2 were the great determinant of climate that the alarmists believe it is.
The damages from this hoax are huge and now include 47 bottles of red wine. The vast waste of money in this pursuit of the chimera of CO2 goes on and won’t stop until the demonization of CO2 is thoroughly discredited. I’m not holding my breath, but I am holding tight to an emptying purse.
=======================================
One of the Cruelest Things They Have Ever Done to Us!
I’m not going to tell you who they are, I’m going to let you figure that one out for your selves. What I am going to tell you is what they did.
They took away your 7Th Amendment. Oh, you still have it, you just don’t know you do. Let me tell you what they did. They created the bar association, that’s to bar you from entering. Then they appointed the Judges who work with the bar association to keep you at bay.
They also made you think you could not defend yourselves through advertising. You believed them and that’s how you lost your 7Th Amendment.
Please re-learn how to use the 7th Amendment and use it.
Here’s a link you may want to use to get an education.
Red Beckman Seminar
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5959251658237547562#
I’d give every politician an unlimited expense account if it would keep them from passing new laws.
So, this is the penultimate “Decider” conference, going to make decisions that affect billions, and we are supposed to believe it’s over a few bottles of wine?
Something is very wrong with this picture.
Clash of ideologies?
Non-negotiable vs amenable?
“Green belts wrapped around our minds and endless red tape to keep the truth confined. […] If you could flip a switch and open your third eye …”
Google the next line of the Song “Uprising” by Muse.
I nominate this as our WUWT theme song.
He’s just practicing for his next career as a Euro-MP!
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=euro-mp+%2Bexpenses+%2B+fraud&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=
No big suprise. After all this is just a microcosm of what the climate scare is all about. It’s just a chance for a bunch of meglomaniac busybody boffins to get in a dither about how smart and important they are. Not only have they scored a free lunch but it sounds like a well lubricated one.
“One bill for 39 people allegedly included 37 bottles of red wine, and Becker was given a formal warning in March over travel expenses.”
He clearly needed to be got rid of, as with such a frugal night of revelry he will be making the rest of them look bad.
A little irony perhaps?
Denmark’s top climate change negotiator forced to resign after failing to negotiate good deal on wine purchase!
Cassandra King – you’ve just decribed the expenses grubbing shenanigans of the entire EU!
Closer to home our own Prime Minister has just been ordered to pay back over £12,000 of “overclaimed” expenses. However, he won’t resign because he has no shame. Our ex-home secretary defrauded £114,000 out of the taxpayer yet she still has her ill-gotten gains and her job as a backbencher because she “apologised” to the House of Commons. Anyone in the real world would have been sacked and prosecuted. A private citizen is currently seeking a private prosecution to see the lady faces justice.
The politicians and institutions I’ve mentioned are all in the warmist camp. Since dishonesty and fraud (provable) is endemic in the European political system I’m not surprised they ride the warmist gravytrain. They’ve finally found a way of taxing the air we breathe…
:o/
“39 people allegedly included 37 bottles of red wine”
Lightweights.
OT. Does anyone know how I can get the Met Office’s Winter Forecast for the UK? Their site isn’t working right, never mind their predictions. I would have thought that it would have been issued by now as last year’s laughingly inaccurate one was issued in September. Anyone know?
No one seems to care about the climate, which appears to be cycling normally.