Energy firm recruits children as 'climate cops'

LAST WEEK'S Sunday Times carried a large advertisement for the German-owned energy company npower, inviting children to "save the planet this summer" by becoming "climate cops". A picture showed a sleeping dad, with a notice on his head warning in a childish scrawl that he had been found guilty of "climate crime" by "falling asleep with the tv still on". For more "interactive games and fun downloads", readers were invited to contact npower's Climate Cops website. This explains in comicbook format how children can spy on their parents, relatives and neighbours to catch them out in seven "climate crimes", such as leaving the TV on standby, putting hot food in a fridge or freezer (as is recommended by hygiene experts) or failing to use low-energy light bulbs.

Children could record these offences in a "climate crime case file", while teachers are offered a full "learning resource" pack for use in schools, including a PowerPoint presentation and posters for classroom walls. When my colleague Richard North asked the Advertising Standards Authority how they squared this with their rules prohibiting "marketing communications" which "undermine parental authority", they replied (as he records on his EU Referendum blog) that they had "considered you (sic) objections but do not feel it have (sic) breached our Codes on the basis you suggest".

My own advice to children tempted to become "climate cops" is that they might begin by looking at npower's own record as operators of 13 fossil fuel power stations, Its coal-fired Aberthaw power station in Wales, for instance, emits more CO2 in two months than is notionally saved in a year by all the 2,000 wind turbines now disfiguring Britain's countryside. If merely going to sleep in front of the TV is a "climate crime", why haven't the directors of npower put themselves behind bars long ago?