Ed Miliband set to make 12,000-mile round trip twice in two weeks

Ed Miliband is set to make the identical 12,000-mile round trip twice in two weeks – to attend a climate conference to discuss reducing global C02 emissions.

Energy secretary Miliband flew to Brazil ten days ago to meet up with PM Sir Keir Starmer and Prince William in Rio de Janeiro before they all flew onto Belem where the COP30 climate summit is taking place.

Mr Miliband then flew back to the UK last Sunday – but the Net Zero zealot is set to return to Brazil, making an identical trip again, this Saturday.

While in Brazil the first time he was spotted dining out at a luxury rooftop restaurant with views over Rio above the £1250 a night five star hotel he was staying at – with fellow eco campaigners.

By the time he has returned to Britain for a second time his four-leg plane journeys will have cost the taxpayer an estimated £22,000 – and created some six tons of CO2 emissions.

This amounts to the average annual carbon footprint for a whole household in the UK across an entire year.

A source at the Department for Energy, Security and Net Zero justified Mr Miliband’s globe trotting double trip, saying: ’It’s a lot easier for everyone to meet in person – trying to organise a summit of this scale on Teams or Zoom just wouldn’t work, it would be chaos.’

But the Tories said he should focus on reducing people’s bills rather than flying thousands of miles to spread the word on climate change.

Claire Coutinho, the shadow energy secretary, said: ‘It is beyond parody that Ed Miliband is flying halfway across the world and back not once, but twice, all while lecturing the rest of us in the name of saving the planet.

‘While Ed jets off again to the forest-thinning climate jamboree in Brazil, closer to home it’s ordinary Brits who are suffering thanks to his policies which are pushing up everyone’s energy bills.’

Mr Miliband’s first jaunt to Brazil saw him dining in luxury – with fellow eco zealots who had also flown long haul to be there.

The Daily Mail spotted him enjoying dinner on the top floor of the Tivoli hotel – the city’s newly opened and only five-star hotel.

Sitting alongside him at the dinner table – which had fabulous views over the city’s night time skyline – were former Extinction Rebellion (XR) cheerleaders who had previously campaigned against air travel.

The radical group famously brought chaos to UK roads and airports in their blind obsession to impose their views on ordinary people trying to go about their daily business.

With him was former XR lawyer Tobias Garnett, who led a successful court challenge against the Metropolitan Police five years ago when it tried to ban the group from staging disruptive protests in London.

Mr Miliband and Mr Garnett are thought to have spent four nights at the £1,250 a night hotel – which is sold out to COP30 – and at least four other members of his staff were believed to be staying there pushing the bill even higher when their flights were added.

Also with him was Rachel Kyte – the UK’s special representative for climate – and who is working jointly with the Foreign Office and who the Daily Mail has been told will spend almost three weeks in Brazil at taxpayers’ expense.

Previously Ms Kyte praised an eco-activist who glued herself to the pavement outside Shell’s London HQ.

And earlier this year it emerged she had flown the equivalent of three times around the world while in the first nine months of starting the job the previous September.

The majority of Ms Kyte’s flights were business class and cost taxpayers a total of £38,769.

When the distances of every leg of Ms Kyte’s travel – all of which was on official business – are added up it equates to a little under 76,000 miles, according to website Air Miles Calculator, roughly three times the length of the equator.

The busy itinerary, which saw the 60-year-old visit a foreign country every month between October and May, means her personal carbon footprint for the air travel could be as much as 15 metric tonnes of CO2.

In an interview with The New Statesman in 2021, Ms Kyte said: ‘Having worked internationally for years, and with family on the other side of the Atlantic and friends spread across the world, the carbon footprint wrapped up in my social and professional identity is a source of deep discomfort.’

While talking to Cleaning up Podcast in 2020, Ms Kyte said of her career: ‘For a long time, I had been on a plane every Sunday night and on a plane many days during the week and I have to say I had angst about that kind of flying from a climate perspective.’

On Sunday, ahead of the official start of the summit the Daily Mail spotted Ms Kyte enjoying dinner with three other people at the riverside Caso do Saulo restaurant – where the menu which draws heavily on the local Amazonian region, was named by National Geographic as ‘superb’.

Ms Kyte is thought to be tee total but the three course meal she enjoyed was more than £60 which may not seem much but is equivalent to a third of the monthly wage of an average person in Belem.

Officials have refused to reveal how many people the UK is sending to the junket in Belem but a quick scan of the official agenda for the government’s pavilion at Cop30 shows a delegation of at least 19 not including Mr Miliband and his team.

Ms Kyte is the only senior government figure attending the event for the two-week duration, but Climate Minister Katie White will also be flying out and attending the conference from Thursday to Monday.

Her round trip will also create three tons of CO2 emissions and Mr Miliband is due to return to Belem this coming Saturday – less than a week after he flew back from Brazil and his team are expected to accompany him.

While in Belem last week, Mr Miliband insisted in media interviews of his green campaign that ‘giving up would be a betrayal’ and he intended to push forward with the Net Zero campaign and make Britain a ‘clean energy superpower’ by 2030.

In a cheesy YouTube video promoting the UK pavilion at COP30 Mr Miliband opened up by telling viewers ‘Bemvinidos’ or ‘Welcome’.

He went on to say: ’In Britain we are sprinting to clean energy because we believe it’s good for energy security, lower bills, good jobs and growth, living standards and cleaner air for people today.’

Mr Miliband added: ’Don’t believe the doomsters and the naysayers because as we gather here in Belem we see countries from across the world taking action.’

He closed the video by urging people to ‘grab yourselves a coffee’ from the UK pavilion adding: ’We pride ourselves on it.’

Critics have said this could cost Britain as much as £50 billion a year.

The Department for Energy, Security and Net Zero refused to say how much the cost to taxpayers of ending the UK delegation to Belem would be.

Sir Keir Starmer flew to the summit last week to give a speech in which he vowed to go ‘full speed ahead in our mission to bring about the clean power revolution’.

The Prime Minister embarked on the 12,000-mile round trip to ‘show UK leadership’ despite the absence of other significant world leaders.

Instead a spokesperson said: ‘The UK government is at COP30 to tackle the climate crisis and protect our way of life by working with other countries.

‘That is why the Energy Secretary, alongside the Prime Minister and the Prince of Wales, attended the World Leaders Summit in Brazil last week. Any emissions from attending COP are dwarfed by delivering our agenda.

‘While back in the UK, the Energy Secretary continues to be the lead UK Minister for negotiations and remains in close contact with Minister for Climate Katie White, the negotiating team and Rachel Kyte who are at COP30.’

The spokesperson added the UK delegation’s carbon footprint would be ‘offset’ but was unable to say how.