Change at the Top

摘要

The United Kingdom has brought the fight against global warming to the highest level of government. In a cabinet reshuffle last week, Prime Minister Gordon Brown chipped off parts of two existing departments to create a new Ministry for Energy and Climate Change. "I'm very much in favor," says David King, former U.K. government science adviser now at the University of Oxford. The U.K. has struggled to pin down a domestic policy that both reduces carbon emissions and ensures energy security at a low cost. But with the business ministry in charge of energy and the environment department handling climate change, policy was often pulled in different directions. King says the new ministry should improve cohesion, but he hopes the new bureaucracy won't slow the progress of legislation. Ed Miliband, a former minister in the Cabinet Office and younger brother of the U.K.'s foreign secretary, will lead the new ministry.