Perhaps Net Zero simply isn’t worth doing?
Are there benefits to heading off climate change? Are there costs to heading off climate change? Sure is the answer to both those questions. For there are costs and benefits to everything. So, how much heading off do we do and how much suffering through?
The British Government commissioned a 1,200 page report working through that point from Nick Stern. The answer was some but not all - heading off that is. At one level that’s obvious, closing down fossil fuels by teatime would leave billions dead - rather more than the costs of suffering through. But Stern went further and pointed out how to approach the problem. Work out what those costs are of allowing the climate change to happen. Then do all of those things that are worth doing. That is, where the costs of preventing are less than the costs of suffering through. This is, again, not the same as doing everything.
Which brings us to the latest policy proposal:
Ed Miliband must consider raising taxes or gas bills if the UK is to have any hope of hitting net zero, the Government’s climate change quango has warned.
To ensure his flagship policy succeeds, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) said the Energy Secretary needs to remove green levies from household power costs.
However, to pay for this, it said the levies should be shifted onto gas bills or covered by general taxation. The quango stopped short of saying which one it preferred.
The costs of the Net Zero target are higher than previously assumed - or at least told to us all. The correct response to which is not to demand that those costs must simply be bourne. It is - as that ineluctable logic of the Stern Review points out - to insist upon doing less Net Zero as the cost/benefit calculation has just changed.
There’s a larger point here too. We oppose this idea of devolving major questions to supposed technocrats like the CCC. On the grounds that such organisations never do end up being technocrats doing technocracy - as above, they’re violating the most basic instruction of the Review that started the whole process - and instead become the home of Single Issue Fanatics on whatever the subject. Because if that’s where the power on the subject under discussion is then and therefore that’s where the fanatics upon the subject will go in order to gain power.
Tim Worstall