Cosy Climate Consensus Collapses
Kemi abandoning the Net Zero 2050 target collapses the fragile Jenga tower of climate and energy policy.
A decade ago, the leaders of the three main parties, David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband signed their pledge (Figure 1) that effectively took climate and energy policy out of the democratic process.
Because all three main parties had agreed to cut carbon dioxide emissions and install “low carbon” energy systems, then there was in effect nobody to vote for who might take a different position. And so, the shaky Jenga tower of climate and energy policy had been built. The cross-party commitment to economic self-destruction was given extra impetus when in 2019 Theresa May decided to increase the pledge from an 80% reduction in emissions and set the Net Zero target in law.
The first block of the tower was removed in September 2023 when Rishi Sunak announced plans to water down some of the most draconian Net Zero measures. Even these mild proposals led to a complete meltdown of the green blob and he backed off making any more bold moves in the right direction. Nigel Farage removed more blocks when Reform became the only main party to fight the last election on a platform of scrapping Net Zero, but this was not enough to break the Westminster consensus or bring the tower crashing down.
Fast forward to last week and Kemi Badenoch made a speech where she abandoned the Tory Party’s commitment to Net Zero by 2050 by saying it is impossible to achieve without bankrupting the country (See Figure 2).
As she removed her Jenga piece, the rickety tower of Net Zero collapsed. Although to many of us this was a statement of the bleeding obvious, the reaction from the Green Blob has been predictably fierce, like a vampire reacting to the sunlight. Even her own side have criticised the move, with Sam Hall, Director of the Conservative Environment Network, saying her announcement “risks undermining the party’s environmental legacy.”
James Murray of Business Green argued that although Net Zero by 2050 is hard, it was wrong for Badenoch to claim hitting the target was impossible. According to him, there might be breakthroughs in nuclear, battery or carbon removal technologies that might enable deep decarbonisation. In other words, we can do it if we rely upon yet to be invented technologies from the realms of science fiction. Failing that, he thinks we could rely upon the thousands of pages of guff produced by the Climate Change Committee (CCC) who have apparently set out in painstaking detail how reaching net zero is entirely technically feasible. Trouble is, as we have seen, the CCC budgets are based entirely on fictitious assumptions. Never mind the quality, feel the width is not an argument. In James’ world, even calling for a debate on Net Zero risks eternal hellfire and damnation (see Figure 3).
If he is so afraid of even a debate, it shows he knows his side would lose because the Net Zero tower is built on the sand of untruths.
The Guardian have even fact checked Kemi’s speech, claiming Badenoch has cited no evidence to support her claim. They quote an echo chamber of experts from the London School of Economics, the Office for Budget Responsibility and the CCC, who have never been right about anything. Yet, they claim Net Zero will “only” cost less than 2% of GDP per year by 2040 and then miraculously save us money from then on. None of these representatives of the Far Wrong have been able to point to a single country, or even a town that has successfully decarbonised a modern economy. Many of their claims are based on the same faulty models and garbage data peddled by the CCC in the seventh carbon budget. There is not a single piece of empirical evidence to back them up. That is because the empirical evidence in Figure 4 (from Our World in Data) shows that the more we reduce emissions, the slower we grow. In other words, scarce and expensive energy kills growth.
A phalanx of other activists from Carbon Brief to the FT have been rolled out to claim that gas is the main culprit pushing up electricity bills. They base their arguments on the almost irrelevant fact that gas sets the wholesale price of electricity the vast majority of the time. However, as we have shown before, this ignores the fact that most renewables are more expensive than gas most of the time. Renewables Obligations subsidies cost us £7.6bn per year, Feed-in-Tariffs some £1.9bn and Contracts for Difference cost us £2.4bn in 2024. Then we have about £2.5bn in grid balancing and a further £1bn on backup through the capacity market. In addition, there £10’s of billions of extra spending on the grid is required to connect all these remote and intermittent power sources to the grid. This extra spending increases our electricity bills and has had a bigger effect than elevated gas prices since April 2019 as shown in Figure 5.
They also ignore the punitive carbon taxes placed on gas-fired generation through the Emissions Trading Scheme. They also never discuss decisions to reduce the supply of gas like the ban on offshore drilling or the fracking moratorium. It is Economics-101 that restricting supply increases prices and more supply would reduce them.
Now a Government report from November 2023 has been leaked to The Sun that apparently shows that a mad dash to Net Zero by 2050 risks crashing the economy and the poorest will carry the burden. Of course, this echoes what Net Zero sceptics have been saying for some time and is validated by the empirical evidence above that shows countries that cut emissions and energy use most grow more slowly or even shrink. Countries that increase emissions and energy use grow quickly. The Net Zero by 2050 mission is simply exporting emissions and jobs to other countries and not doing anything to change the weather. In fact, we are probably increasing global emissions.
The sad thing is, the Tory Government knew that Rishi was on the right track in 2023 when he began relaxing the targets. It is shameful that they knew about the devastating economic impact of Net Zero but still pressed on anyway. This week’s announcement from Kemi, effectively ditching the Net Zero target, shows they may have begun to see the light. Now the report is out in the open, Energy Secretary Miliband is extremely exposed and must be forced to abandon his Net Zero crusade. Even The Times, normally broadly supportive of what Carbon Brief calls “climate action”, has published an article welcoming the end of the Net Zero consensus.
It is obvious to all now that removing the UK’s 0.8% of global emissions will not make a jot of difference to the climate, particularly as the rest of the world burns record amounts of hydrocarbons to increase their energy use. We should not be committing national economic suicide to achieve the pointless Net Zero mission when adaptation is a far superior strategy. Not before time, the cosy climate consensus has collapsed.
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David,
you say that Net Zero reduces CO2 emissions by 0.8 %, the earlier assumed figure was 1% but both are far too high a figure.
Anthropogenic CO2 emissions are estimated to be between 3 and 5 % of annual global emissions, the rest are natural. Taking the higher figures, acceiving net zero would reduce annual CO2 emissions from the U.K. by 0.05%. Not even measurable I would guess?
Academic really until we actually abandon the renewables push and consign them to the scrap man.
How and at what cost is another matter.
People quote that the UK only produces about 1% of global emissions. But I think it misses the point that emissions from China increases each year by an amount roughly equal to the whole of UK emissions in one year. So the whole of the UK could be switched off completely, no fossil fuels, no cars or aeroplanes no cattle or sheep, nothing and in about a year China has made up the difference as if the UK never existed.