Craig Mackinlay: The Government is fooling itself if it thinks it can go down the Net Zero path without electoral damage

By Paul Homewood

 

One by one, Conservative MPs are beginning to fight back against Theresa May’s loopy Net Zero Plan.:

 

 

The Government has launched its “greenprint” Transport Decarbonisation plan and adds to what has been trailed before with an extension of the ICE ban to new heavy goods vehicles by 2040, the decarbonisation of public transport and the goal of net zero aviation by 2050.

The ambition to ban the sale of traditional petrol and diesel cars by 2030 remains but there’s no detail as to how the small matter of the £34 billion currently levied on ICE vehicle users will be filled. This is the biggest and most costly undertaking of the British state in history and a strange throwback to the command and control regimes of old – when producing a definitive figure for the annual number of tractors to be built and so many tonnes of grain was all the rage.

We’re yet to hear more as to how the banning of domestic gas boilers will be achieved. Make no mistake, this requires a radical transformation of every part of the economy and our freedoms. Yet no one questions the enormity or cost of the project, and there are no answers to the obvious question – who pays?

Surely we cannot simply be obliged to pay any cost, however high and however painful? Other ambitions in the document, particularly regarding heavy goods vehicles have already been derided by The Road Haulage Association – “So this is blue-sky aspiration ahead of real-life reality”. Quite.

While there is no draft legislation on the table to enforce these bans, just warm words, ambitions and glossy documents, there’ll doubtless be more to come as the Government plays a game of Top Trumps with international partners at COP26 this October.

The only estimates available for the cost of Net Zero come from the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), which is supposed to provide rigorous, independent advice to parliament – and yet its output always recommends further and faster.

The CCC is a significant player in the political debate around Net Zero, often explicitly directing Government policy, while being totally unelected and unaccountable. Mainstream media regurgitates its words sagely with little space offered to those who question its assumptions.

More recently, it has come up with a new estimate for the cost of Net Zero that details £1.4 trillion of capital spending that will be required to meet it. The committee was keen not to publicise this mind-boggling number (over half of UK annual GDP or 35 times the annual defence budget for context), and so discounted it with a range of speculative benefits that may or may not materialise.

The £1.4 trillion figure has finally been brought to public attention after the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) recycled the CCC figures for its fiscal risks report. The revelation that households are each facing a £50,000 bill over the next 30 years has caused, rightly, an awakening in the press. I am worried that the true cost could be much higher still.

The shift to retro-fitted air source heat pumps, additional insulation and larger radiators to make up for their poor heat output brings with it huge cost and significant risks. An independent report put the cost of decarbonising the UK’s social housing sector alone at £103 billion, or £20,000 per household. If such costs are replicated across the entire housing stock, we are looking north of £500 billion just for residential decarbonisation.

There’s no obvious technology to elegantly replace the gas boiler and I’m yet to find a constituent who assented to pay out £20,000 just to be both colder and poorer.

The pain doesn’t stop there. The use of electric cars, which are much more expensive than their ICE equivalents and have obvious limitations of range and charging, are made more expensive if electricity prices rise to accommodate huge demand requirements and upscaling of additional offshore wind, or expanded reliance on interconnectors from the continent supplying coal produced electricity. The taxation black hole will doubtless be filled by new taxes or hairbrained road charging schemes.

There is little government planning to provide the millions of charging points, no thought as to the security or availability of supply of rare metals often mined under unspeakable conditions of human misery to make the batteries and even less thought as to the true CO2 cost of ore extraction, manufacture of the new cars, new batteries nor the nationwide upgrade to the electricity grid to supply them.

The batteries are largely unrecyclable without huge energy input and use of toxic solvents to break down the near impenetrable resins. The safety of these batteries, that can burn uncontrollably releasing a variety of noxious substances, has not been fully investigated and yet the prospect is for many square miles of grid level batteries to smooth notoriously unreliable renewable electricity supply.

This dash for electric cars has also perversely condemned the country, and particularly our congested cities, to more particulate pollution, not less. No engine manufacturer will invest further in the design and production of a better internal combustion engine offering enhanced power, better consumption, cleaner-burning and lower particulates.

The 2019 engine is as good as it’s ever going to get, which is a shame, as the 2030 engine would have been so much better across all measures. Natural market-driven technological improvements have been stopped for reasons that nobody can quantify, explain or justify.

As ever, it will be the poor who suffer most from these elite delusions. Fuel poverty, the reality of “heat or eat”, is the dilemma we are going to put them in, and yet there is somehow an overwhelming Westminster consensus that this is the right thing to do. The lack of almost any interest in the cost of these policies to ordinary people is palpable.

The Government is fooling itself if it thinks we can go down the Net Zero path without electoral damage. We will look, quite rightly, like the privileged few taking the poor back to the lifestyles of the early 20th century. The optics of jetting from one international climate conference to the next to tell other people they should not be flying, driving and eating meat, is not one that will be sustainable when these policies really start to bite.

The growth economies of China, India and Indonesia alone have more coal powered plants planned over the next ten years than the entire output of the current US electrical grid. The current UK output of global CO2, no more than a rounding error in the scheme of things at a mere one per cent, will be reduced to ½ per cent as coal powered growth proliferates globally.

I was never Theresa May’s greatest fan politically, but I’ll conclude with a statement she made on January 11 2018: “In our election manifesto last year we made an important pledge: to make ours the first generation to leave the natural environment in a better state than we found it.”

I agree wholeheartedly with that statement. There is much to be done in protecting habitats and our oceans and weaning the planet off of the scourge of plastic waste. These ambitions are achievable and rooted in common sense while this path to Net Zero is muddled, costly and impractical.

We should pause for breath, inject some rational thinking and consider the alternatives before it’s too late. I am actively discussing these issues with colleagues as we simply cannot watch a financial, societal and political disaster unfold before us.

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