This. Is. Fine.

"Catapult appointment" climate and energy minister Claire Courtinho's bad options. Lowercarbon Capital on the new climate tech funding environment. + how worried should we be about Orsted's wind woes?

Welcome back to Wicked Problems. We had a whole other thing planned for today but then, well, it is meant to be a newsletter, doggonit.

Claire Courtinho, 2019 intake Member of Parliament is…well if she¹ MPs were bottles of Syrah you’d want to leave it a few more years before uncorking, is now UK Secretary of State at the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero aka DESNZ or “dezz-nezz” ( “DEEZ-NUTS” has not caught on as acronymic pronunciation, despite our best efforts).

We wish her the absolute best. Because hooooo boy. She now may be Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s most trusted and loyal Cabinet colleague, going back to her years as advisor to him when he was Chancellor. But she’s been given what one super-smart Whitehall observer described to me as a “catapult appointment” - the first 2019 MP to join the full Cabinet, 500 days earlier than Sunak hi…