Last week, you may have seen a story in the Financial Times about a Drax executive quitting the UK’s climate committee after conflict questions were raised. Interestingly enough, many of those questions came from our very own Gossage columnist.
Rebecca Heaton quit the Climate Change Committee a week today, before the official end of her term. That’s following pressure from those who believed her position on the committee was untenable due to a conflict of interest.
Lord John Randall, an adviser on environmental affairs to Theresa May, has long rallied against Heaton’s appointment to the panel, noting that she was unable to be impartial as long as she worked for Drax.
Electrical Review’s Gossage columnist wrote all the way back in 2017 about how Heaton’s involvement on the committee may end up being an embarrassment, with a more recent column in April this year cementing those thoughts. You can read that column here.
So it seems while Gossage may not have led to the downfall of Heaton, our columnist definitely saw smoke before the flames long before others in the industry.
This editorial originally appeared on the Electrical Review Newsletter, dated July 8, 2021.