Umm, what competition for green investment?

We do grasp that the incentive to invest determines how much is invested.

Labour’s independent energy advisers have warned the party against watering down its £28bn green spending plans in advance of its promise to create a zero carbon electricity system by 2030.

Experts at the climate thinktank Ember, which provided the independent analysis underpinning Labour’s green targets, said growing international competition for low-carbon investment from the US and EU could leave the UK lagging in the global race for low-carbon energy.

But that strikes us as complete nonsense.

Pretty much by definition low-carbon energy is a domestic economic resource. We can’t - or at least don’t - pack it into ships or shovel it down pipelines and even interconnectors are hugely geographically limited. Renewable energy tends to be produced domestically to be consumed domestically. That’s just the way it is.

So, what global race? Sure, it might be a good idea that China gets more windmills than Britain does, might be a bad idea. But it’s not one of any grand importance in the sense that if they get more then we can’t have more.

It’s actually rather the other way around. We’d be perfectly happy if J Foreigner does all the hard development work, the subsidising of the stuff that doesn’t work quite yet, then we install as and when all the kinks are worked out.

Note that our critique here is very limited. We’re not even commenting upon whether green is the way to go, we should or should not have more renewables and so on. Only on this idea that there’s a race on and one in which Britain should subsidise more in order to win.

What damn race?