Net-zero: errors versus fantasy

By Richard North - September 30, 2023

There are undoubtedly far more interesting things to write about than the ongoing saga of net-zero, especially when the makings of a public debate are mired in misinformation, obfuscation and, occasionally, downright lies.

Despite this, though, net-zero, along with immigration, are probably to two most important political issues of they day so, touching virtually every aspect of our lives. Come what may, therefore, both should be at the centre of public discourse.

As regards net-zero, the latest in the misinformation stakes is a botched report from the think-tank Civitas (office pictured), seeking to assess the economic impact of net zero.

This was done badly and dishonestly by the Climate Change Committee (CCC), in December 2020 but the ultimate flaw in the assessment is that it was attempting something which simply cannot be done.

Given that net-zero is the code for the deindustrialisation of the UK, but also involving massive societal change, down to the individual level, there are far too many imponderables and knock-on effects. Any attempt is not so much a ROM, a rough order of magnitude, as a WAG – a wild-arsed guess.

To my mind, though, seeking to calculate the total cost is fruitless because, by any rational analysis, net-zero in unachievable and will never come to pass. Effort, in my view, is far better directed at pointing this out, and on illustrating the destructive effects of trying to implement the policy.

Nevertheless, despite a less than stellar performance on other issues, Civitas has commissioned Ewen Stewart, the sole director of Walbrook Economics, to attempt the impossible. His self-declared aim is to establish “the realistic central case for the estimated costs of the current government’s net-zero policy for each household in the UK”.

The paper, Stewart says, is intended to provoke discussion and inform debate on the likely costs of net-zero, an aim that was at least partially successful. It has triggered multiple newspaper articles and, latterly, some heated rebuttals from the warmist tendency, thereby provoking some limited discussion.

One of the first articles out of the stocks was published in The Times, written by Tim Knox, the former director of the Centre for Policy Studies, who now describes himself as a policy analyst.

Knox’s piece is headed: “Yes, we really need a debate about the full cost of net zero” and it conveys the headline figure of the Civitas study, which tells us that the cost of recommendations by the climate change committee will be “at least £4.5 trillion” by 2050.

This figure is three times that which Stewart says is claimed by the CCC, and while the sheer scale of that number, Knox acknowledges, makes it “meaningless”, it is broken down to “more than £6,000 a year for every household in the UK”, for every year until 2050.

That figure too is almost certainly meaningless, even as an average. If one takes a substantial part of the household cost of net-zero as the purchase of electric vehicles, so prohibitive are the up-front costs that many low-income households will simply be unable to afford personal mobility. The real cost, therefore, will not be measured in cash terms but in the curtailment of lifestyle options.

Much the same goes for flying as a means of transport, which will become so prohibitively expensive that only the rich will be able to afford it, while the consumption of real meat and dairy products – also caught by net-zero, where lab-grown meat is the favoured option – will also become an unaffordable luxury.

I don’t know where we go with heat pumps, though. For many homes, the add-on cost of insulation is so great that this form of heating is not a practical proposition, and Sunak has already committed to exemptions which will take this into account.

The CCC estimates the cost of decarbonising commercial and residential properties at £360 billion – on the basis that heat pump costs will drop 40 percent by 2050. Stewart makes it £750 billion, arguing that the CCC’s estimates are “far too low”.

However, the point that Knox makes later in his article is that the various government measures proposed to reach net zero represent the UK’s biggest ever infrastructure undertaking. Putting the cost at about 100 times the original budget of HS2, he asks: “What chance that all this will be delivered on time, on budget and actually work?”.

And that really is the point. The government is embarking on a mad scheme, for which there is no public consents when it comes to the detail of implementation, and which has no chance of fruition. That point cannot be made often enough.

Needless to say, the warmist critics of the Civitas paper do not broach this issue. The temple of warmism, DeSmog International runs a piece headed: “‘Embarrassingly Wrong’ Tufton Street Net Zero Report Gets Widespread Coverage”, with author Sam Bright complaining about inaccuracies picked up by “several prominent climate academics and journalists”.

In fact, these errors are not significant – confusing MW with MWh when it comes to estimating the capital costs of offshore wind turbines, which Stewart puts at an (uncorrected) £1.3 million per MW. Sloppy writing and editing, though, give the naysayers their entré, enabling them to discount the figure given of £810 billion.

Laughably, Bright then makes his own gaffe, calculating that the capital input of offshore wind comes to £50-70 per MWh, when claims of the reducing cost of wind-generated electricity rely on the Round 5 strike price set by government as £37.50/MWh.

Somebody, though, should have looked at the CCC report which, in 2020, forecast that the 2035 costs of offshore wind will be down to £43/MWh – when developers have just rejected a strike price of £44/MWh in the 2023 CfD auction. And it gets even more surreal. The CCC predicts that, by 2050, the cost of offshore wind generated electricity could have fallen to £23/MWh.

The very existence of the Civitas paper, however, gives Bright the opportunity to write his piece, and thus entertain the lie direct. The Office for Budget Responsibility, he writes, has said that, “the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero”.

Yet, with the UK producing less than 1 percent of global emissions, the UK meeting all of its net-zero targets would have absolutely no effect on climate change – even accepting that emissions reduction has any effect at all. Net-zero for the UK is all pain and no gain.

Unabashed by this obvious lacuna, the Guardian gives pride of place to Simon Evans, senior policy editor at Carbon Brief, to write a piece headed: “How a thinktank got the cost of net zero for the UK wildly wrong”.

Quick to point out the many errors in the Civitas report, Evans himself ignores the central flaw of the CCC report which asserts that the cost of implementation would be offset by “substantial fuel savings, as cleaner, more-efficient technologies replace their fossil-fuelled predecessors”.

In time, the CCC argues, these savings cancel out the “investment” costs entirely, allowing it to come up with the fiction that costs will be below 1 percent of GDP throughout the next 30 years, a net cost that Evans puts at £0.3 trillion.

Here, one can see clearly how much the warmists are relying on cheaper energy costs from renewables to sustain their net-zero fantasy, enabling them to discount the huge – but largely unquantifiable – cost. But, even if the Civitas report contains errors, it does not get near the fantasy maths of the warmists.

In conclusion to his piece, Evans bitterly complains that the “uncritical” media coverage of the Civitas report remains with the errors uncorrected, but he makes no attempt to correct the CCC’s wildly optimistic assertions.

His truth is the only side of the argument permitted, and the debate has barely started.