In the energetic pursuit of net zero, billions of pounds could be squandered needlessly. That’s the lesson from countries as diverse as Italy, the US and UK, where the rush to subsidise green projects suggests vast sums are at risk. Worse, they could be lining the pockets of multinational businesses and City financiers.
Stamping feet, demanding that everything be done right now, squealing that we’re going to Violet Elizabeth Bott ourselves blue in the face unless net zero happens yesterday is going to be a very expensive way of trying to deal with the problem.
This will, as Phillip Inman then goes on to point out, lead to a possible rejection of even dealing with climate change at all - facing the vast cost of doing it all right, right, now people might well prefer to do nothing about it.
This is - as we’ve pointed out a number of times - something warned about in the Stern Review of 2006. Humans do more of less expensive things, less of more. So, our method of dealing with any problem - and for the purposes of this argument, right now, we’ll assume climate change is one of those - has to be the most efficient one possible. For it’s that very efficiency which means that we’ll do more solving of the problem given the resources available to be devoted to such a solution.
As Stern, again, points out pure and nothing but free markets don’t deal with externalities - they’re external to market processes, see? But the most efficient method is to crowbar the externalities into market prices - markets are more efficient than planning and bureaucracy.
Therefore the correct method of dealing with climate change - again assuming the existence of the problem - is to internalise the externalities into prices through a carbon tax. Because that way more dealing with climate change will be done.
None of this is any mystery, it’s all in the Ur documentation on the subject, IPCC reports, that Stern Review, the Nobel winning work by Nordhaus. The only possible mystery about it is why the political process doesn’t adopt it.
But then it’s always possible that people go into politics in order to be able to boss people about rather than actually solve problems.