Climate Change Committee “deceived Parliament and the British people”
By Pail Homewood
London, 21 February – The Government is facing demands to launch an urgent inquiry into the conduct of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), as evidence accumulates that the cost of Net Zero will be trillions of pounds more costly than the Committee has claimed.
The call comes in the wake of comments from Olivier Blanchard, a former chief economist at the IMF, who told the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee that Net Zero will be “much more expensive than people imagine”.
Mr Blanchard’s remarks are just the latest confirmation that the public have been systematically misled over the cost of Net Zero :
* In 2021, it was revealed that the CCC had used spurious weather data in their modelling, thus enabling them to reduce the capacity of electricity generation and storage equipment apparently required.
* It was also revealed that the CCC used spurious figures for the cost of electric vehicles, thus reducing the apparent costs.
* More recently, the CCC admitted that its electricity system modelling is inadequate. The resulting understatement of costs is as much as tens of billions of pounds per year.
* It has also been revealed that the CCC “waves away” most of the cost problem, simply by assuming extraordinary cost reductions in future. With current technology, the cost of Net Zero will be hundreds of billions of pounds higher.
And the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Hammond, has said, quite bluntly that the political establishment has been “systematically dishonest” about the cost of Net Zero.
Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:
“There is no longer any doubt that the Climate Change Committee has deceived Parliament and the British people. The only question is whether Rishi Sunak is going to do anything about it. He has a simple choice – launch an inquiry into the Climate Change Committee and all the other institutions involved in the deception, or go down in history as a party to the fraud.”
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
as evidence accumulates that the cost of Net Zero will be trillions of pounds more costly
Ha ha ha ha! You won’t have trillions.
The only question is whether Rishi Sunak is going to do anything about it.
A rhetorical question.
Oh we will have trillions! Inflation will go through the roof and a loaf of bread will cost ONLY £1 or £2million!
Grid reconstruction £2 trillion, nowhere near enough engineers or raw materials to do the job by 2050.
Storage probably up to £6 trillion, no realistic means of doing it at all (not enough raw materials for Li-ion, Na-ion is old technology, far less efficient, not enough pumped hydro sites, large scale storage of green hydrogen untested, but Germany rules out converting power stations to hydrogen as too expensive).
Clear evidence of warming being overstated by over 40%, figures altered to suit the narrative, based on observational and crude models of climate.
The Labour party has choked on its own plan to find £28 billion, a small fraction even one trillion pounds. All these numbers are leading nowhere.
If Nut Zero were a diet plan … that £28 billion would be the equivalent of buying a “diet free” drink to go with your chips.
But Labour is still committed to ‘carbon-free’ electricity by 2030 which ignores reality starting with a very simple one – all the sub-sea cable laying vessels are fully booked until 2030 already so where will new connections come from. They are also planning on floating windmills – an expensive unproven technology. They are also planning on inefficient and expensive tidal power. The Dark Ages will be returning under Labour, and hardly much brighter under Blue Labour.
It apparently never occurred to Theresa May, her Ministers, or indeed nearly all the MPs, that it might be a good idea to estimate the cost, and indeed feasibility, of reaching net zero by 2050, before signing it into law.
The fact that they all just breezily waved it through without any proper debate constitutes criminal irresponsibility.
I was just reading this at Net Zero Watch. I don’t think that anybody in the real world (i.e. excluding greens and politicians) will be at all surprised by this. I have been observing the Climate Change Committee since it was first set up as the Committee on Climate Change. I exchanged emails with it as soon as it was set up, and from the answers I received, I knew that it was totally biased.
From the outset, it was staffed with true believers and anybody thereafter recruited also had to be a true believer. If we had to have such an abomination, it should have been forced to.always get two analyses, one from the Green side, one from the sceptic side and present both. But of course the Elites have convinced themselves sceptics are fringe nutters.
Created to rubber stamp the Climate Change Act in the same way the IPCC was created for the UNFCCC.
On now
Lord Deben provided a witness statement in support of Friends of the Earth’s case against the government’s decarbonisation plan, which is currently before the court.
The case is one of three separate, but related, challenges being considered by the High Court this week.
The challenges, also involving ClientEarth and the Good Law Project, all allege the government’s Carbon Budget Delivery Plan (CBDP) is insufficiently detailed and risks the UK missing its legally-binding targets for reducing emissions.
The CBDP was published in March 2023. This followed a previous High Court ruling that an earlier version was inadequate and must be revised.
The three organisations alleged the updated plan was still inadequate and began fresh legal actions to force the government to provide more details on how emissions targets would be met.
Friends of the Earth’s case centres on an assumption by government that “everything will go right” and fails to account sufficiently for risks of under-delivery.
The “Good Law Project” is Jolyon Foxbane’s shower of shysters, notorious losers so no danger there!
No surprise that he got his snout into this trough. On the other hand, properly handled this report could prove highly embarrassing for Wynnie Gumdrop and his band of troughers.
If the CCC has been lying to the government about the costs (which we know they have) there should be adequate cause to disband that self-serving waste of space in its current form and replaceit with people who genuinely know what they are talking about. Bring it on, I say!
It certainly seems the case that the renewables industry relies on Wright’s Law to make its case.
Are there any other examples of a huge industry that has relied on this law to convince people in the past ?
If this law is true in this area, wouldn’t it also apply to nuclear power ? Or to any other civil engineering project ? By Wright’s Law, HS2 should’ve been built for pocket money, but it turned out so expensive it had to be cancelled. Similarly, nuclear power is far from showing a reduction in cost.
But renewables will follow the same cost trajectory as electronic gadgets ? This is what their whole case rests upon, and I think it needs highlighting.
I think it manifests itself by China making higher profits.
Product pricing is dependent in part on what people will pay. China becoming more efficient has no effect on what people will pay.
Wright’s Law applies to manufacturing costs. HS2 is largely an engineering project and those have a pretty poor history of getting costs right, as each one is essentially unique. And of course traffic projections have an even worse teak record! I have seen claims that nuclear is so expensive because of regulation and the vastness of regulation makes that believable. I believe that ghe CCC should not have assumed any significant reduction in costs in its work, not least because the more we transition, the higher costs we get across the board.
Funny how all the cost overruns are on government backed projects where you can’t help but feel the initial costs supplied at the approval stage were false in order to get sign off. The 2012 Olympics were over-budget as the initial cost doubled almost immediately and were spun out as the original one at the end.
A privately financed and managed project delivered on time, on budget and worked bar a tiny baggage hiccup at the start was Heathrow Terminal 5 but this was in the British-owned BAA days.
When your remit is to “support a scam” it is very difficult indeed to avoid what has happened. The lack of objectivity on display indicates the basis upon which they all got jobs.
They simply pulled numbers out of the air. His is the Emperors clothes on acid.
Will there be consequences for any of them? No of course not because “all lies and deceptions were done to support the cause comrade”.
Again and again the lack of evidence to support why their exist is more than made up for by flannel and BS which ALL political parties and that bought media have parroted unquestioningly.
I do apologise!
When your remit is to “support a scam” it is very difficult indeed to avoid what has happened. The lack of objectivity on display indicates the basis upon which they all got their jobs.
They simply pulled numbers out of the air. This is the Emperors clothes on acid.
Will there be consequences for any of them? No of course not because “all lies and deceptions were done to support the cause comrade”.
Again and again the lack of evidence to support why they exist is more than made up for by flannel and BS which ALL political parties and the bought media have parroted unquestioningly.
Ask Truss and Kwarteng what happens when the government proposes borrowing on the grand scale for uncosted projects.
Truss proposed borrowing in the short term to fund tax cuts which would rapidly pay for themselves via higher growth. The bond market turmoil was caused by higher interest rates triggering a pension fund sell off thanks to their stupid derivative positions, not a small proposed increase in the existing vast amount of borrowing. Truss was knobbled because she wanted to cut taxes, and that cannot be allowed.
What really spooked the markets was the uncapped energy support, feared by some to cost £200 billion, and the Bank of England deciding to take actions the week beforehand that caused the LDI problem. The tax cuts were trivial, but the media fastened on them because they wanted Truss out.
“Truss was knobbled because she wanted to cut taxes, and that cannot be allowed.”
Lowering taxes can’t be allowed? Who decided that exactly?
Its a shame she left so quickly if I was her I would forced a policy of taxation transparency to expose stealth taxes/levies in particularly with electricity so the raw price without all of the existing levies and taxes (including any green or carbon taxes paid by a power station) is broken down like the way VAT is shown on the bill.
I would also require all “100% renewable electricity ” tariffs to engage in ½ hourly balancing via smart meters and either disconnect their customers or gain their acknowledgement each month that their electricity has had to come from fossil fuels.
Also imported electricity would be presumed to be utilising the exporting nations grid by order of highest CO2 fuel on the grid (or that of any grid they are imports from Norway could be greenwashing for German lignite) at that time e.g. we import from France when it generating more than it own demand we will presume all the coal, oil, gas generation is due to our import demand.
The WEF-compliant Bank of England started cutting back quantative easing just as the mini-budget was announced and neglected to mention this to the government…..
Truss blamed the BoE for torpedoing her and many observers now agree she is correct. Couldn’t have a conservative running the Conservative Party could they.
pr
Problem is the entire establishment is complicit and naturally watching each other’s backs. Only reality will eventually force a reappraisal but not until much damage has been done.
Labour’s decision to step back from the £28 billion spending pledge is a welcome dose of reality but the bigger picture is damning, as it’s an admission that government simply cannot fund the ‘most essential challenge of our lifetime’.
How on earth do they expect to cover a bill running to ‘trillions’ if they can’t get the ball rolling with a comparatively modest £28 billion per year, roughly £150 billion per 5 year term of government?
As for the clear deceit practised by the CCC, when do the prosecutions* start? *Laughs dryly. Fat chance.
Deceiving Parliament and the entire pile of political excrement is child’s play, particularly when it wants to be deceived to justify its quest for power, control, plunder.
Next we’ll be hearing it was deceived over CoVid, the faux-vaccine, Ukraine, immigration.
It’s a bit rich for Philip Hammond to say that the political establishment has been “systematically dishonest” about the cost of Net Zero when he was one of the worst offenders while in office. Or is there a genuine pullback going on?
The cost of Nut Zero is so high, that so much “money” is tied up in the policy that there isn’t any economy left. Which makes the idea of “money” pretty meaningless. It’s beyond the point at which “cost” makes any sense.
Chief deceiver is interfering in the lawfare case against the government.
https://www.businessgreen.com/news/4176737/damning-indictment-lord-deben-intervenes-court-legal-challenge-government-climate-plans
“Lord Deben has today made a dramatic intervention in the on-going High Court hearing on a series of legal challenges alleging the government’s decarbonisation plans are inadequate and in breach of the UK’s Climate Change Act.
The Conservative peer, former Environment Secretary, and former chair of the Climate Change Committee (CCC) submitted a witness statement in support of the legal challenge from campaign group Friends of the Earth, which is one of three separate but related challenges being considered by the High Court this week in a ‘rolled up’ hearing.
The challenges from Friends of the Earth, ClientEarth, and The Good Law Project all allege the government’s Carbon Budget Delivery Plan (CBDP), which was released last March, is insufficiently detailed and risks the UK missing its legally binding emissions targets.”
With any luck this is because some MPs read their inboxes.
I sent a critique of the CCC report to all MPs, detailing its many errors. Including their using gigawatts for storage capacity instead of gigawatt-hours. The whole paper was a cut-n-paste from internet pages, by teenagers with no idea about science or industry. But the CCC were not the only idiots.
The Royal Society Report claimed the total cost of Net Zero by 2050 would be £410 billion, whereas my costing was £4,200 billion.
And the Oxford Report made no mention or provision for stored backup energy. Note that the government want to close all gas-fired power stations by 2035, so alternate backup sources ARE required.
Personally I think the problem here was the Labour Party closing down all the Grammar schools, a programme that was started in the 1970s. So all the best schools in the country were closed down, leaving industry and the civil service with two generations of utterly incompetent fools. (I have had to deal with them.) Then in the 90s, John Prescott opposed Blair’s plan for ‘Academies’, which were new back-door grammar schools.
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P.S. Do you know why Prescott was so anti grammar schools? As a teenager he tried to woo a grammar school girl, but she sent his love letter back with all the punctuation and spelling amended. And because of that, he was determined to destroy the British education system forever.
Having succeeded, he them moaned that social mobility had decreased precipitously. No shiite, Sherlock. Prescott et al presided over the destruction of grammar schools, the very schools that used to take the children of street-cleaners and propel them into Oxbridge. And then they wonder why social mobility reduced. Geeezzz.
There really should be an entrance exam to Parliament. We don’t expect commercial aircraft to be flown by people with no qualifications, so why do we think that these uneducated dunderheads should run the country?
Ralph
It was Antony Crosland as Minister for Education who, according to his wife, said “if it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland.”
A fairly typical stance in my experience taken by those on the left (though he was considered as being on the Labour right) who had benefited from a grammar school education but for reasons unknown wished to deprive others of the same opportunity.
Perhaps if we hadn’t replaced so many grammar schools with comprehensives and subsequently tried to get 50% of children into universities thereby dumbing down tertiary education as well we wouldn’t be being led by the nose by the likes of Deben and his cronies.
Yes, most of these anti-grammar schoolers were from grammar schools. They benefitted from a good education, and then pulled up the ladder behind them.
R
Woy Jenkins is a major culprit in destroying our education system.
(Crossland)
Labour peer Peggy summed up their hypocrisy.
Question: Peggy, if you are against private schools, why do your kids go to private schools?
Answer: Oh dahrling, one does not experiment with one’s own children.
Ralph
I would warrant Lord Deben and his cohorts knew they were vastly understating the costs but got away with it because the greenies drove everything.
20 years ago I coined the term #enviROI, whereby a project to save the planet might seem ‘green’ and noble in ambition, but actually turn out worse for it.
It came from my Civ.Eng days, where the unofficial motto was ‘an engineer can do for shilling what anyone else needs a pound to complete’.
Resources need to be weighed against outcomes.
In green terms, if the enviROI is poor, that means money is diverted away from something that can offer a better result. For too long, if it is painted green there is appalling lax due diligence.
I saw it at a political level with our county’s citizen’s climate assembly, initiated by a very ‘green’ executive installed after another Westminster Conservative foul up saw a reasonable local admin booted by the XR crowd howling in the media.
The ideas pitched by the ‘experts’ were idiotic, with no grasp of reality. Especially on what it cost to do something that would achieve something daft for a few tick boxes at a COP. Several members were trying to point this out, but were sidelined, and the results were rigged anyway.
The admin last one term and has tainted the whole shebang in this neck of the shires for a while, though a few dags cling on and get supported by Whitehall #NetZero clowns.
These are the same politicians who walked out of the Chamber, when Andrew Bridgen dared to mention excess deaths.
More people have died of excess deaths in the last two years, mostly due cardiac problems, than died of Covid in the last four years.
And these disgusting politicians will not even talk about it.
History will judge them harshly.
Ralph
Funny how the ONS has suddenly decided that excess deaths were overstated.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/causesofdeath/articles/estimatingexcessdeathsintheukmethodologychanges/february2024
I noted that.
I am waiting for John Campbell’s take on this.
The Institute of Actuaries have a different view. If they can’t even agree on this, what hope for climate models? Perhaps those in agreement with the climate change mantra should read “100 Authors against Einstein” published in 1931.
I am sure Sunak would rather face going down as a party to fraud than challenge the Net Zero blob. He just dare not do it.
“The only question is whether Rishi Sunak is going to do anything about it”
Well the answer is YES, Sunak the Snake, once safely ensconced in his new job advising banks and investment funds in America, will be arranging the loans to pay for his and the CONsocialist folly – if you think £2trillion (and rising) is a big number, Nett Zero will at a minimum cost an additional £15trillion – current debt interest payments are about £4billion, however, once NZ gets into full swing, debt repayments will quickly hit the £25 to 35billion mark and continue rising as the economy fails with no industrial base to boost earnings.