Editorial: Climate commissioner role will be yet another waste of money by Stormont

​Northern Ireland does not need a climate commissioner, the deputy first minister has said.

​Emma Little-Pengelly is of course correct to say that money should not be diverted to such an office.

Yet the DUP politician said that she had to agree to such an appointment because it is a "legal duty" on the Northern Ireland executive.

It will cost at least £1 million pounds a year to run such an office, including multiple staff.

Ms Little-Pengelly cited the spending statement of last week by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and how all MLAs “will be aware of the difficulty and the financial challenge that we face in terms of the huge amount of work that we need to do to invest in our public services and the limited public funds that we have to do so”.

Ms Little-Pengelly was also right to note that there will be “some duplication” between the new role and the UK-wide Climate Committee.

All of these points are valid ones, but the ridiculous nature of mandatory coalition, and the obsession at Stormont – particularly among republican politicians – with quangos and binding rights, as well as the gleeful spendthrift approach to local finances (gleeful because Sinn Fein know that when the assembly's finances become unmanageable and key services undeliverable they can say that Northern Ireland is a failed society that should be dissolved in favour of an all-island state) leads to all sorts of wasteful expenditure such as this.

NI already has a fantasy carbon reduction target.

More and more politicians at Westminster accept that the UK cannot make a meaningful contribution to cutting such emissions, given that it is 1% of the global problem.

So if Britain can’t change things, NI is all the more unable to do so.

We must focus on urgent problems that we can in fact resolve.