Chris Stark says No to Net Zero Name

Chris Stark thinks if they just change the term "Net Zero" but keep the same policies, then everything will be fine.

Outgoing Chief Executive of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), Chris Stark has been doing interviews with the BBC and the Guardian before his term finally comes to an end on the 26^th of April.

In his Guardian interview he seemed to suggest that all that was wrong with the Net Zero agenda is the name. He said, “Net zero has definitely become a slogan that I feel occasionally is now unhelpful, because it’s so associated with the campaigns against it.” He went on, “It’s the culture warriors who have really taken against it,” said Stark. “A small group of politicians or political voices has moved in to say that net zero is something that you can’t afford, net zero is something that you should be afraid of … But we’ve still got to reduce emissions. In the end, that’s all that matters.”

This is the language of a true zealot. What about the economic, and social wellbeing of the country Mr Stark? Net Zero policies are far more dangerous than climate change is ever likely to be.

He went on to say. “If it [net zero] is only a slogan, if it is seen as a sort of holding pen for a whole host of cultural issues, then I’m intensely relaxed about dropping it,” he said. “We keep it as a scientific target, but we don’t need to use it as a badge that we keep on every programme.”

According to Stark, we should just keep on with the same old immiserating policies, but just change the name and everything will be fine.

Stark also had this to say about heat pumps, “This is a remarkably sensible technology that we’ve known about for a long time, a straightforward technology to put in your house to keep it warm, or to keep it cool in the summer. But in this country, they’ve taken on a totally different totemic role, as a technology that is being somehow forced upon the populace. I think that’s very dangerous.”

He omitted to mention that when giving evidence to the House of Commons environmental audit committee in July last year, he admitted that his own flat still has a gas boiler and “heat pumps are a very difficult thing to put in there.”

Well, the Government was trying to force heat pumps upon the populace, just a bit more slowly than before. It is understandable that we are more than a little sceptical when the high-priest of climate change cannot overcome the difficulties of heat pumps and keeps his own gas boiler. Do as I say, not as I do is not a very convincing message.

Stark also claimed that tackling the "climate crisis” was not a massive change, “he world that we’ll have in 2050 is extremely similar to the one we have now. We will still be flying, we’ll still be eating meat, we will still be warming our homes, just heating them differently,” he said. “The lifestyle change that goes with this is not enormous at all.”

However, his own Climate Change Committee has said that nearly 60% of emissions reduction will come from what they euphemistically call “behaviour change.” Their energy plans call for a halving of per capita energy consumption; they want our homes to be cooler; they want to shift the cost of electricity subsidies on to gas, to make heating our home more expensive; reduce our car miles, even though they are supposed to be zero emissions EVs by then; they also want to ban airport expansion and impose guilt taxes on flying and cut our meat and dairy consumption. Again, his interview rhetoric is not in line with what he writes in CCC policy papers.

The Guardian article also claimed that low-carbon technologies “are cheaper or becoming cheaper than fossil fuels” which is untrue. Existing renewables technologies have all just had their subsidies indexed upwards with inflation, so their costs have gone up even though gas prices have fallen. The prices on offer for offshore wind in AR6 are some 66% higher than last year’s AR5 auction, so the cost of new renewables has gone up too.

As Tim Worstall put it in on the Adam Smith Institute blog yesterday, the cost of Net Zero has gone up considerably with increasing interest rates, so the cost-benefit equation for Net Zero has altered. The move to positive real interest rates has hit the cost of renewables hard because they are capital intensive projects. If the cost of (pretending to) deal with the (alleged) climate emergency has gone up, yet the supposed benefits have stayed the same, then in a rational world that should prompt a re-evaluation of the whole project. There is no way out of this logic. The logic was that it is cheaper to prevent climate change, rather than adapt to it. But the costs have changed, so the policy balance should change too. Maybe we should consider adapting to climate change rather than pressing ahead with Canute-like mitigating actions?

In his BBC interview, Stark moaned that Rishi Sunak’s decision to delay the ban on new petrol and diesel cars and weaken the targets to phase out gas boilers had “set us back.” But his disappointment was expressed in terms of how other countries have perceived Sunak’s speech as the UK being less ambitious on the climate than it once was. However, while the Climate Change Act remains in place and the CCC’s carbon budgets continue to be treated as holy writ, then there is no backing away form Net Zero, even if they do change the name. No doubt they will enlist the nudge unit to produce some catchy phrase to scare us all into compliance.

It is not the name “Net Zero” that is the problem Mr Stark, it is the Malthusian policies of energy scarcity and economic decline that are the problem. You can change the name, but if you do not change the policies, then we remain on the road to serfdom.

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