EU leaders brace for clash over astronomical cost of Net Zero plans
By Paul Homewood
After years of assuring voters that renewable energy will make energy cheaper and Europeans better off, EU leaders are now forced to concede that these plans will actually hurt consumers very badly.
The EU Commission is proposing a series of far-reaching measures that will drive up the cost of running a car and heating homes. If it goes ahead, households will have to shoulder not only rising energy costs, but also the rising cost of Europe’s record carbon price in their heating bills and fuel pump prices.
It doesn’t take much to consider the political upheaval and public revolt once the pain of Net Zero is felt by voters.
EU leaders brace for clash on how to implement climate goals
European leaders are on a collision course over the looming impact of radical emission targets on their citizens and businesses as the cost of going green hits home across the EU.
A summit in Brussels on Monday and Tuesday is set to be dominated in part by discussions on how to decarbonise swaths of the European economy so that the bloc can meet its goal of reducing CO2 emissions by 55 per cent by the end of the decade.
In particular, the summit may blow into the open the distributional questions at the heart of the green agenda as it will impact voters’ disposable incomes by driving up household energy bills, pump prices and food costs.
Officials expect a divisive debate that pits richer countries in western Europe against their poorer and more polluting counterparts in the south and east. In a sign of how contentious the debate may prove, ambassadors clashed on Friday over the meeting’s draft environment conclusions.
One EU official said the summit would see leaders “reaffirm their sensitivities, their priorities” on the climate debate, warning that many of the trade-offs would be “very tricky to solve”….
Brussels will propose a series of far-reaching measures, including the potential expansion of the ETS to retail sectors such as cars and heating. If it goes ahead, households will have to shoulder part of the cost of Europe’s record carbon price in their heating bills and fuel pump prices.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Unfortunately the article is firewalled. However, the statement that “householders would have to shoulder part of the costs” is clearly wrong: they would shoulder all of the costs (directly or indirectly).
Yep. On the end all costs and all taxes are played by households. There’s nobody else.
The message that persistently never ever gets through. The only people who have money are PEOPLE!
You should be ashamed of yourself that you seem unwilling to help the planet by shelling out £30,000 to have a colder house, seem reluctant to accept power cuts by not endorsing green energy and I dare say you will come up with some trifling excuse as to why you won’t fork out £30,000 for an electric car?
I suppose you hope to get on an airplane again in order to have a holiday not caring that you are deliberately upsetting Greta?
Replying to climatereason.
You have misunderstood. The purpose of the totally altruistic flying (I hate flying, personally) is precisely that it will upset Greta. And all her ilk!
Meanwhile I am praying that this latest fiasco might … just might …. be the start of politicians beginning to see sense. I’m not holding my breath, you understand, but one day ………
JB – Much or all of the FT article can be seen here…
https://todayuknews.com/economy/eu-leaders-brace-for-clash-on-how-to-implement-climate-goals/
Reports quote $1-5 trillion or more (take your pick) as the global bill, or ‘investment’ as they like to call it. How subsidised tech, that lasts 15-20 years if you’re lucky, can be an investment is not explained, or even explainable.
Gordon Brown was the first (maybe not) to claim expense was investment.
I see Nicola Sturgeon is staying with the same Celtic definition.
Oh no, we can’t have the commoners revolting, we tell them what is best for them and it’s all thrown in out faces.
Probablyhe most expensive exercise in futility ever embarked upon by mankind! This is definitely worth a watch, for some bizarre reason, the second half of the video replicates the first half!
If the “science is settled” where are the numbers?
not climate related, but a nice example of how the BBC are impartial on other topics.
If not that she would have been a member of Hamas.
Read this…from an economist at CNBC…
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/24/war-footing-needed-to-correct-economists-climate-change-failings.html
“As a result, he said, “the only way we can (reverse) this is effectively a war level footing of motive mobilisation to reverse the amount of carbon we’ve put into the atmosphere to drastically reduce our consumption.”
Another political “climatologist” who doesn’t understand that drastically reducing emissions does not lower the CO2 we have already added.
The other issue is that climate action needs to be global.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/02/23/renewable-energy-statistics/
The notion the rural French will stand for it is bonkers, let alone shaky economies such as Italy, Greece and much of Spain. And that’s before they all understand that tourism is going to be halved or worse. The Germans are then going to realise that EVs means car sales reduced by 30-60% and that results in a huge employment problem. And as energy costs inexorably rise, inflation follows. If interest rates thdn rise many EU economies will be in serious trouble. Quite where the money comes from to keep this all going is anybody’s guess. Net Zero will tear Europe apart and lead to some unpleasant and dangerous reactions.
In my part of France most farmers own several plantations of fast growing Sweet Chestnut trees. They are harvested every 20 years and supply enough logs for the fire(s) in the house. If wood fires are banned (as they are in parts of Paris) I would not like to be the authority who tried to enforce the law. Plenty of hunting guns and pitchforks here, not to mention slurry-pits.
Most of rural France is the same. A local woodland has just been undergoing a major thinning (I believe it’s been neglected for the last few years and has changed hands).
The woodstacks visible from the road will keep our village supplied for a generation, and I don’t exaggerate! The idea that we are going to be weaned off woodburners is pure fantasy.
“They [the fast growing Sweet Chestnut trees] are harvested every 20 years and supply enough logs for the fire(s) in the house.”
That’s definitely the wrong sort of Renewable!!!
🙂 🙂
Eucalyptus is your best bet for fast growing – if you don’t mind creating an eco-desert in your woodland. The two shoots on my one tree have grown big enough to be worth harvesting in just 4 years.
If the target for NZC emissions is 55% then I assume that TPTB figure the other 45% will be lost in the process that is nature’s own carbon cycle. Ergo: NZC.
Well, in fact, Roy Spencer in a post at WUWT reckoned that Mother Nature removes around 50% of CO2 emissions, both natural and human. So, I assume that TPTB (IPCC?) are content to set a target for NZC at around 50% to achieve their ‘Nett’ decarbonisation. Nature will do the rest and the base (Gross) level of CO2 in the atmosphere will remain at 440 ppm (thereabouts).
It’s curious though that if Mother Nature has been removing CO2 from the atmosphere in the Carbon Cycle – and – including any and all human emissions (up to a point), she must have been doing a great job if the base level hasn’t risen that much over the 30 years or so since the argument has raged (when I started to get active with CC Blogs it was as little as 295).
If the plan is to now remove 50% of emissions then that will be Nett + because Mother Nature seems to be doing such a god job anyway.
Spencer’s post is here: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/02/05/nature-has-been-removing-excess-co2-4x-faster-than-ipcc-models/
Harry… “If the plan is to now remove 50% of emissions then that will be Nett + because Mother Nature seems to be doing such a god job anyway.”
50% of current emissions is now about 20 billion tons a year, little or none of which has fully equilibrated with the Earth’s atmosphere, hydrosphere or biosphere. We humans cannot permanently remove enough CO2 to make a difference to the climate. CCS DAC cannot even store geologically one part-per-million. A hopeless and very expensive gamble. And yet, we are adding to the subsidy. Pretty silly. Rep. Kennedy is right to ask why.
Thanks BL. I knew I could rely on you to add weight to the argument – if you take my drift. I am with you in your arguments but of course, what these lunatics are thinking of, as well as CCS, is to not generate so much in emissions in the first place and then, removing the excess above Base. I guess that when we’re all destitute living a third-world experience emissions will be quite a bit lower. As will be life expectancy.
However, I worry about the actual claim for NZC. Being Nett it surely must mean that they want to stabilise the base level to a number. 350 ppm is a nonsense being purely political but, as you will tell us, even trying just to get rid of 50 ppm to achieve 400 ppm will be near impossible, if not futile.
According to their own models (assuming they are correct), it would have to stabilize at the current level of around 415-420 ppm to not exceed their “well below 1.5 degrees” target, provided that other emissions like methane and fluorocarbons are also brought to zero in the next couple decades. That means ACTUAL zero technological emissions, EXCLUDING any natural absorption, as soon as possible. The recent IEA report claims it can be achieved by reducing all anthropogenic emissions to zero in the next 30 years (with some residual emissions being balanced out by BECCS/DAC). No need to explain how mad this is. For the “2 degrees” target it would need to be 450-465 ppm. This is a lot more realistic, could be achieved if emissions were slowly declining to zero over the next 100 years. Still unlikely to be done though. The IEA’s baseline scenario predicts 2.7 degrees, so probably something like 550 ppm.
Harry. The important mega herd of elephants in the climate disaster room is their convenient inability to count when it matters.
The Carbon Cycle is severely depleted in respect of the total amount of available CO2 and has been on a negative trajectory for 160 million years and counting. That is the kind of timescale that tells us that we really do not to pay attention to this issue. Put simply, Mother Earth is gasping for CO2 and is greedily sucking up a large part of what we have liberated during this short period of time and the results are there for all to see, a greening planet and record year on year crop production. Exactly what is there not to like about that when there has been a 27% increase in the World human population in only the last 20 years?
I did work out the numbers some time ago for what the level of CO2 in the atmosphere would be if this gas was inert and just floating around not used by anything but sadly my filing system is letting me down.
Interesting do you not think that those who wish to play the fear game harp on about and focus only on the very recent CO2 history only to pretend that 410ppm is “unprecedented” ( no it most definitely is not), never ever putting it into its correct geological context. Rarely do I see papers on the Carbon Cycle consider anything except what is happening today as if the budget is in stasis rather than in a long term deficit which is the case. This is quite shocking as the atmosphere is just one more part of the Earth’s geological history and that history must be considered to be able to make sense of any phenomenon occurring today. Are so many Carbon Cycle scholars so myopic regarding the important need to balance any consideration of what exists in the Cycle today with without considering it in it’s correct geological context or is it that there is a collective and deliberate intention to avoid looking at all those pachyderms?
Anyway, the main cause of this depletion in the available CO2 budget, something I have previously mentioned has been the evolution of marine organisms which sequester CO2 to combine with Calcium to produce hard protectives shells ( CaCO3). Upon death a large portion of that shelly material does not get degraded and the CO2 returned to the Carbon Cycle but ends up being added to the huge quantities of organic carbonaceous limestones which exist around the world, currently the largest reservoir of CO2 by several orders of magnitude.
Patrick Moore in one lecture I have seen understands the seriousness of this problem and is advocating burning limestone when we either through cost or as increasingly is becoming apparent wilful stupidity, stop burning fossil fuels.
Spot on, PMFB! (Hope your filing system gets better) 🙂
Politics aside, we are entering a truly bountiful period awarded us by a trace gas that is CO2.
That said, because of politics the world is ignoring POLLUTION – because there is no political gain from that. Catastrophists need us – ok, the easily led – to be scared.
more bbc bull. .Start The Week … monday R4 09.00 https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000wcc1
item 1 “Once-indomitable glaciers – from high up in the Himalayas to the polar regions – are today in grave peril, as our climate warms at an accelerating rate”
Item 2 “Record ice loss last year and the effect of climate change are also having an impact on geopolitics and international relations.”
item 3 “…uncovers many of the lifesaving secrets of the natural world which impact directly on humans, from medicines to pollution control, carbon sequestration to spiritual health.”
To Harry Passfield… “what these lunatics are thinking of, as well as CCS, is to not generate so much in emissions in the first place and then, removing the excess above Base.”
Yes, that’s their plan. Not generating is the same as trying to lower, reduce the CO2 emissions, especially from transportation fuels. Why they haven’t been able to see what has happened economically and socially when the travel lockdowns take place is beyond any understanding. Removing the excess??? They are clueless, although many have been clued-in as to the impossibility of doing that in the huge amounts needed.
My comment to PMFB above is point. Thanks.
Scientifically, they are Clueless, but Politically they are not: it depends what their objectives are.
“Removing the excess???”
That implies that there is an agreed level, a level that is ‘safe’, a level that, beyond which, is ‘detrimental to Society, to the community at large’, and anyone exceeding it, or even attempting to do so, will be ‘Cancelled’!
And, boys and girls, we all know what that means!!! 🙂
So once you get past all the virtue signaling it comes down to where the rubber meets the road …… economics that control lifestyle. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand the implications of removing fossil fuels from economies and all the promises of “cheap renewable energy” have already been squandered.
Just imagine what TRILLIONS of dollars would do if invested in real, clean, energy generation – rather than being spent trying to close down supposedly dirty energy.
Early signs of hope: the “i”s most gullible climate-reporter, Madeleine Cuff, has an article today worrying about the low wind periods and their implications: her first doubts perhaps???? She normally publishes any claim of climate damage without checking it.
We all know we are on the right side of the argument when the CBI who, in recent years have backed the wrong horse on just about every major policy stance by HMG, have just announced that the race for net zero is a ‘planetary imperative’ and that they should be in the driving seat. Memories of ‘kamikazes’ and Zero fighters fuelled for one way trips only spring to mind!
Net Zero depends on how large you spread the net.
IMHO lead by example!
All UK & EU politicians, everyone in the renewable industries, and all people employed in energy distribution industries must (ASAP) be assessed for their household’s ‘carbon pollution’, then their individual households are mandated to cut their net ‘carbon pollution’ by at least 80% within 3 months and reduce to 100% (of their assessed value) by the year’s end. Failure to perform such reductions on punishment of loss of employment, jail, or both!
The bottom line is that the UK & EU fools promulgating the ‘climate change’ and ‘climate crisis’ believe that humans are apart from nature and not a part of nature. From this very basic stupidity these fools believe that whatever happen with the weather and the climate is fundamentally caused by human actions.
This is the gross error.
Nature and the chaotic changes that happen, are what nature requires to ensure maximal life on the planet. Virtually nothing we do will change this, as humans are not the major lifeforms on the planet, insects and microbes easily outnumber us. If we are stupid enough to exile ourselves to a pathway to extinction then so be it, nature will adjust and survive.
Is it not just us in the West that are on this course to self-destruction? The rest of humanity should be fine – and, I hope, learn from our lesson in stupidity.
Regards,
John.
You have forgotten the reporters who spread the hysteria. Put a batch of them in a remote village in some ecohouses and let them live net zero for a year. With families if course, old and sick parents, children that need education and society. No foreign holidays, just long walks to the shop, homebrew beer and cowslip wine, roafkill meat.
. On second thoughts maybe not. Hairshirt Greens would probably enjoy it.
JF
Absolutely. Politicians need to have some personal skin in the game and lead by example. Then see how long their enthusiasm lasts.
You have forgotten the reporters who spread the hysteria. Put a batch of them in a remote village in some ecohouses and let them live net zero for a year. With families if course, old and sick parents, children that need education and society. No foreign holidays, just long walks to the shop, homebrew beer and cowslip wine, roafkill meat.
. On second thoughts maybe not. Hairshirt Greens would probably enjoy it.
JF
You are the carbon they want to reduce.
It seems that the idea to fine anyone who refuses to remove their gas boiler has been dropped as they fear a backlash. Really? Who’d have thought? You do wonder given that politicians are untrustworthy if this wasn’t one of those ‘leak something very bad and then retreat back to something less hated which was your intended idea in the first place’ type things.