Delingpole: Eco-Loon Boris’s £3 Trillion Net-Zero Scheme Will Bankrupt Britain, Reports Warn
By Paul Homewood
Dellers has a good summary of the new GWPF analysis of Net Zero:
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s net zero policy will cost taxpayers the equivalent of a £100 billion HS2 project every year till 2050. The final bill will surpass £3 trillion – the equivalent of £100,000 per household.
These are the shock findings of a series of reports into the true cost of Boris’s scheme to decarbonise the UK economy by 2050.
The summary, by Andrew Montford of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, finds that no credible attempt has been made by the government to cost its ‘Net Zero by 2050’ scheme, which was bequeathed to it by Theresa May in the dog days of her failing premiership.
But the costs are in fact astronomical – far, far greater than the government’s green advisory body the Committee on Climate Change has been prepared to admit.
There are two main factors — the cost of decarbonising the electricity supply (mainly through the use of expensive, intermittent offshore wind power) and the cost of decarbonising domestic heat through retrofitting of insulation. Each of these issues is covered in a separate report, the first by former grid engineers Colin Gibson and Capell Aris; the second by Professor Michael Kelly.
Decarbonising the electricity supply will cost around £1.4 trillion more than if Britain had stuck to reliable, cheap gas generation. The extra cost per household will be around £50,000. Some of these costs will be borne via more expensive goods and services, some through higher energy prices. Electricity will — as President Obama once infamously put it when he tried to impose a similar eco-fascist scheme on the US economy — necessarily skyrocket.
Retrofitting of insulation in every household will, of course, reduce energy demand. But not nearly enough to offset the dramatic increase in costs created by rising electricity prices. Montford’s report draws on a study by Cambridge engineering professor Michael Kelly, who found that retrofitting insulation is an extremely cost-ineffective way of cutting CO2 emissions.
For example, when the government tried this on social housing, the cost was £85,000 per household but the average reduction in CO2 emissions was only 60 per cent.
Achieving higher emissions reductions would be vastly more expensive, perhaps £135,000 per property for an 80 per cent CO2 reduction – at a total cost of £4 trillion.
Kelly has speculated that as the market developed, costs might fall to £2 trillion – or around £75,000 per home. This is in line with a separate study in 2016 by the Energy Technologies Institute.
But the Committee on Climate Change, under the chairmanship of the egregious Lord ‘Trougher’ Deben, has consistently sought to play down the cost implications.
“We estimate an increased annual resource cost to the UK economy from reaching a net zero [greenhouse gas] target that will rise to 1-2 percent of GDP by 2050”, it said in a summer 2019 report claiming that the costs of Net Zero were ‘manageable’.
Lord Deben has belittled suggestions that the financial aspects of net zero have been ignored, telling the House of Lords:
“I was unhappy to hear those who said that the report was uncosted and unprepared. It has been recognised universally as the most seriously presented, costed effort…”
But this is grossly misleading. As Montford notes in his report:
Despite the report being – in Lord Deben’s words – ‘costed’, the CCC has resisted attempts to have its calculations disclosed under FOI legislation. Even more remarkably, it has admitted that it has not actually calculated a cost for the period 2020–2049; there is only the £50 billion figure for 2050 (see Figure 1). The decision to undertake the decarbonisation of the economy is thus – contrary to what Lord Deben told Parliament – uncosted.
In other words, Boris Johnson’s net zero by 2050 scheme — so far largely unopposed and uncriticised, even by Conservative MPs — is an uncosted, ill-considered, virtue-signalling disaster in which the British economy will be forced to commit unilateral energy suicide to no purpose while the fossil-fuel economies of China, the U.S., India and Brazil continue to grow and grow.
GWPF director Benny Peiser comments:
“Although the Committee on Climate Change claims that net zero can be achieved at modest cost, they have now quietly admitted that they have not actually prepared any detailed costing. Unfortunately, Parliament seems to have taken them at their word, and we are now embarked on a project that risks to bankrupt the country.”
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/02/24/boriss-net-zero-scheme-will-cost-taxpayers-3-trillion/
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
It’s the Economy, stupid!
No, it isn’t: it’s the waste of natural and human resources, to follow an absurd, incorrect political agenda that will create a dysfunctional infrastructure from one that works, and will cause the death of many, and all for nothing.
Who cares the price of a warm room when warmth is not available to save you from a slow agonising death from the cold, and our freedoms given away.
And once we are so cold and ‘power’less we shall be powerless to resist the subservience of our country to far-eastern powers. If Deben gets his way, the West, as we know it, is finished. The only upside to this is that both he and I will also be finished by then. But my grandson will know who to blame…
Far eastern powers? Hah! Denmark will take you over in a generation. UK’s unilateral destruction of its economy will leave you defenseless.
Is our only hope Boris dumping her and humping a sceptic instead? Given his leftwing liberal politics that is a very long shot. Because of his dumb decision to hold COP26 here, the City of London is now rushing to put together a plan top combat the ‘climate emergency’.
When ICE vehicles have disappeared, will petrol/diesel be available for electric generators?
Of course not! Not for the plebs, anyway.
Could we go back to not having refrigerators and freezers, in homes, shops and food processing plants?
If we don’t have a reliable electricity supply, we might as well go without them.
According to the IPCC (if you believe them, I have a bridge to sell you), if the UK achieves net zero by 2050, the planet would be 0.05degC cooler than if we carry on as normal. To offset against the £3trillion+ cost, the extra warmth that we have prevented would have resulted in fewer extreme weather events, a longer growing season, a greener planet and fewer excess winter deaths. Net zero is complete madness. The gullible idiots are really in charge.
Without wishing to be personal, and with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek, in the above picture of Boris’ latest squeeze does she not have a more than passing resemblance to a ‘Klingon’? Might this loony, suicidal eco-zeal of our leaders be because they’ve been nobbled by Spock like aliens from another planet softening us up for an eventual invasion? Look, I’ve seen Star Trek and I’ve read the IPCC reports and if the latter are true then my money’s on the Klingon conspiracy all day long. Back in the real world, I wish they”d spend just a fraction of the loot they’re wasting on barmy climate policies on something useful …like developing vaccines for viruses that might really cause humanity a problem. I hear there’s a nasty one doing the rounds at the moment.
Vulcan.
Them too. They’re all at it!
Up to now I was a supporter of Boris, I would have thought he would torpedo the leftist Armageddon garbage, not support it! The true costs indicate putting mouth into gear before brain.
It can’t cost you £3 trillion: you won’t have £3 trillion.
Your economy will be on par with Angola. (No offense to Angolans.)
Do the math: There is a goal (NASA, James Hansen) of returning the climate to its 1987 value (350 ppm) by capturing and storing ~65 ppm of CO2. That is the equivalent of ~500 billion metric tons of CO2. Multiply that figure by any reasonable estimate for per-ton storage and you get a very large cost in any currency for net-zero ‘decarbonization’. Totally stupid.
It seems that it is not only the UK where the figures for zero emissions are huge.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/05/06/the-reason-renewables-cant-power-modern-civilization-is-because-they-were-never-meant-to/#1e0542c3ea2b
And that’s just the start of it. By 2042 the write off of non repayment of student loans will be costing the exchequer billions of pounds recurring every year. What fun – glad I won’t be around by then and I am sorry to say that the younger generations have brought it all on themselves by falling for this nonsense.
~…the cost of decarbonising domestic heat through retrofitting of insulation.” In a world of rising temperature why would one want to insulate your house? It would become like an oven and A/C would not be possible because of the lack of electricity.
“no credible attempt has been made by the government to cost its ‘Net Zero by 2050’ scheme.”
No credible attempt has been made by the government to carry out due diligence before foisting this inconvenience, impracticality and vast cost upon us. It is not a scheme. That implies a costed, working plan; it is just a virtue-signalling wish and an arbitrary date. Would you not think someone somewhere would say, hang on a minute, let’s just check the facts here?
Oh look. CO2 is well above the point at which it ceases to add to warming, so cutting it is useless, but it IS greening the planet; all the better to feed the world’s growing population. We need more, not less.
Oh look. There isn’t actually a runaway temperature increase anyway. There is some natural warming, but it has levelled off, and with sun spots heading for Maunder Minimum levels we are likely to see significant cooling over the next 20 years.
Um, could I have a word Prime Minister?
But no. It’s all misdirection; keep the fools looking in the wrong place, and for Heaven’s sake don’t let them know the true cost, and hardship it will cause.
The Chines and Indians are laughing all the way to the bank.