Rishi’s Empty Rhetoric
Over in the Spectator, Fraser Nelson is inviting us to welcome a change in Rishi Sunak’s tone on Net Zero. His interest has been piqued by the PM’s speech at COP28, which he says shows that Sunak has “started the difficulty work of moving the UK climate agenda from fantasy to policy”. There will be no more precautionary-principle daftness, we are told, and attention is drawn to the Prime Minister’s claim that from now on decarbonisation will be pursued “in a more pragmatic way, which doesn’t burden working people”.
Nelson is quite correct that the whole drive for Net Zero drive a fantasy. It is the triumph of political posturing and bureaucratic trickery over rational decisionmaking. Even when the Climate Change Act was passed, the costs were double the benefits. Recent figures from the Climate Change Committee suggest that the ratio has risen to over 4 to 1, but even that result relies on the Net Zero cost estimate, a dodgy dossier of considerable disrepute [1,2]. A more realistic figure is likely to be 10 to 1 or more [3].
Yes, facing the threat of being one percent worse off, the whole political establishment (and Starmer is just as bad as Sunak) is agreed that we should adopt policies that will make us ten percent worse off instead. It is hard to express just how mad this is.
The result, namely wholesale deindustrialisation, has been predictable. What Nelson proclaims as a triumphant reduction carbon dioxide emissions is in fact just the result of the wanton destruction of manufacturing industry in this country. In the last two months, we have lost our last blast furnace and one of our six oil refineries. Our last aluminum smelter and last fertiliser factory are long since gone. Make no mistake, this is a civilisational threat. And there haven’t even been any reductions in emissions – we have simply exported them to China, while adding some new ones as goods are shipped from Shanghai rather than manufactured here.
Nelson’s idea that Sunak is changing direction is also hard to take seriously. There is a pronounced sense of déjà vu here of course, because we were told exactly the same thing in September, in the Prime Minister’s much-vaunted Net Zero speech. Heralded as a major change of direction, it has amounted in practice to nothing at all. The only concrete effect has been minor delays to a couple of bans and cancellation of a lot of other policies that didn’t exist in the first place.
Meanwhile, there has been a palpable intensification of the Net Zero madness. Offshore windfarms were awarded an extraordinary price increase of 66% plus inflation. In Parliament today, they are voting on the ZEV mandate, which will add up to £15,000 to the cost of a petrol or diesel car. A similar scheme to force people to get heat pumps will follow. For the Prime Minister to say, on the same day, that he is going do Net Zero without “burdening working people” seems utterly shameless to me.
So, if Fraser will forgive me, if I am to be convinced that a change of direction is taking place, I will need more than just another deluge of empty words from the Prime Minister. His speech looks to me like more distraction.
- Watkiss et al. for the CCC put the costs at 2 degrees of warming at around £12bn. The CCC itself puts the cost of delivering Net Zero at £50 bn per year. See P Watkiss et al. Monetary Valuation of Risks and Opportunities in CCRA3. Technical report for the CCC, Paul Watkiss Associates, 2021.
- The "dodgy dossier" nature of the Net Zero costings is documented at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/10/23/net-zero-target-relies-rise-windy-days/ and https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/09/25/parliament-misled-cost-net-zero-target-say-conservative-mps/.
- As well as the problems outlined in Note 2, the recent decision to give a 66% price increase to offshore windfarms, to around £100/MWh in current prices, around double the price assumed in the Net Zero costing, means that the bill to be paid may well be 50% higher.