Climate Apocalypse Now Demands a Cost/Benefit Analysis

“The doomsters’ favourite subject today is climate change… Since no plan to alter climate could be considered on anything but a global scale, it provides a marvellous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism.”

In Statecraft (2002), Margaret Thatcher warns us about “apocalyptic hyperbole”, before she sets out her approach to tackling what PM Starmer – that Chicken Licken of No.10 – considers an “existential” threat.

In July 2023, UN Secretary General Gutteras declared “The era of global boiling has arrived.” Ed Miliband was similarly alarmist last month, telling the Energy Security and Net Zero Select Committee, “The biggest threat to the countryside is the climate crisis.” But how will this manifest?

Is rural Britain going to become a Mad Max-style dystopia? Will Los Angeles’-level wildfires rage through the New Forest? As novelist Philip Pullman conjured up, will Oxford be under water?

Gloucestershire reduced to the Gobi… But Britain’s senior politicians and officials still cling to their private jet/helicopter habit. It hardly suggests any urgency to give the moral leadership required for Climate Apocalypse Now.

Britain’s taxpayers must be given some climate-related cost/benefit analysis. A reckoning is needed, not least with the United States’ withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Agreement. This legitimised carbon dioxide Net Zero, that alleged silver bullet to combat climate change.

Washington’s stance also underlines the half-hearted support for the Agreement from another signatory, China. The world’s largest CO2 emitter has no intention of going down the NZ path until later this decade. If ever.

As Statecraft outlined, altering climate (if that is possible) is a collective global endeavour, or it is meaningless.

As other governments and, as importantly, United States’ Big Finance become increasingly tepid about NZ, UK policymakers carry on bleating about Britain taking a global lead. Read the Straits Times, the South China Morning Post, or the Times of India: Europe, let alone Britain, hardly features.

Despite the pandemic, in November 2020 the Johnson government somehow had the capacity to launch its “Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution”. It was linked to “building back better”, which in today’s battered Britain seems as Comical Ali as the promised “V-shaped recovery.”

Both the 2020 Plan and the 2021 Net Zero Strategy: Build Back Greener offered a decarbonated paradise powered by renewables: new jobs, cheap energy and prosperity. Targets were set; decrees decreed. A ban on gas boilers in new homes in 2025 (!); all new gas boilers banned by 2035; new petrol and diesel cars banned in 2030 and the installation of 600,000 heat-pumps by 2028.

Costing the UK taxpayer billions so far, many of Britain’s national targets linked to combatting climate change are too often liable arbitrary change themselves.

In 2023, the Sunak government pushed back the petrol and diesel ban to 2035. Labour is now set to reinstate the 2030 ban. The 2035 gas boiler ban was also lifted, which Labour’s Net Zero zealots have failed to challenge. This is possibly linked to a reality check about heat pumps: in the year to September 2024, 38,305 were installed, funded by an Energy Department scheme.

Heat pumps highlight ministers’ magical thinking in connection with renewable energy. Those 40,000 units cost surely taxpayers about £300 million in subsidies. Replacing Britain’s 23 million domestic gas boilers will run to trillions, better spent fast-tracking nuclear power stations. Or investing in climate-related mitigation measures like flood defences.

Since Net Zero was written into law in 2019, a bureaucracy of climate-related policy infrastructure has bloomed. Nationally Determined Contributions. Targets. Carbon Budgets. Contracts for Difference. All this keeps civil servants and consultants busy. Although the targets go unmet or are changed, the lucrative green bandwagon rolls on.

Meanwhile, domestic energy bills went up in January and are set to rise again in April. Millions are now in fuel poverty – although not MPs and ministers with second homes, whose energy bills are picked up by the taxpayer. Why? Surely scrapping pensioners’ Winter Fuel Allowance gives Labour MPs a nice warm feeling, especially those who also wish death upon their constituents.

Green ideology is not just expensive but dishonest. Fracking is banned in Britain, but fracked American LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) accounts for about 20 per cent of the gas Britain currently imports. The government greenwashes the heavily subsidised, wood-burning Drax. Greenpeace brands the power station’s green credentials a “scam”. Why is Britain buying China’s wind turbines and solar panels – which might compromise national security – manufactured thanks to coal?

In its 2024 election manifesto, Labour said that the expansion of renewable energy would create 650,000 jobs across the UK by 2030. By then, £300 was to come off our energy bills and “clean power” (i.e. new pylons) come on stream. The expansion of Britain’s airports was not part of the plan.

Rachel Reeves’ make-it-up-as-she-goes-along airports scheme surely puts a stake through the heart of Net Zero policy. The Chancellor might as well join President Trump in withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. Sustainable aviation fuel is a pathetic political cover for such a 180-degree turn.

A decade on from Paris, it is time to take stock. The Conservative Party should be compiling an honest Net Zero assessment. It should consider that, with Britain accounting for less than one per cent of global carbon emissions, should we fail to meet the NZ target, would it matter?

Last May, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change produced Polling the Politics of Net Zero. A must-read, it found climate change is a fifth-order issue in the UK: voters’ priority is the cost of living.