Clark Not Zero

How an Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (and Won't Even Save the Planet)
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-80075-243-6
Verlag: Forum
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

'Bravely challenging the Establishment consensus ... forensically argued' - Mail on Sunday The British government has embarked on an ambitious and legally-binding climate change target: reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions to Net Zero by 2050. The Net Zero policy was subject to almost no parliamentary or public scrutiny, and is universally approved by our political class. But what will its consequences be? Ross Clark argues that it is a terrible mistake, an impractical hostage to fortune which will have massive downsides. Achieving the target is predicated on the rapid development of technologies that are either non-existent, highly speculative or untested. Clark shows that efforts to achieve the target will inevitably result in a huge hit to living standards, which will clobber the poorest hardest, and gift a massive geopolitical advantage to hostile superpowers such as China and Russia. The unrealistic and rigid timetable it imposes could also result in our committing to technologies which turn out to be ineffective, all while distracting ourselves from the far more important objective of adaptation. This hard-hitting polemic provides a timely critique of a potentially devastating political consensus which could hobble Britain's economy, cost billions and not even be effective.

Ross Clark is a veteran British journalist who regularly writes for The Spectator, The Times, the Telegraph and the Daily Mail. He won a Spectator Young Writer of the Year Award in 1989. He's based in Cambridge, UK.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Clark, Ross

Leseproben

Preface

The morning of 21 July 2023 delivered a political surprise in Britain. It wasn’t that the Conservative Party had heavily lost two by-elections held the day before – the government was deeply unpopular for a variety of reasons, and voters have long been using by-elections in order to record a protest against a sitting government. The shock was that the Conservatives had failed to lose the third by-election held on the same day. Voters in Uxbridge and South Ruislip – the seat of the former Prime Minister Boris Johnson – had narrowly elected the Conservative candidate.

The reason for the non-defeat seemed clear. Voters who might otherwise have protested against the Conservative government had chosen instead to protest against the decision of the Labour Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, to extend his ultra-low emission zone (ULEZ) to outer London. It meant that anyone with a petrol car which failed to conform to Euro 4 emissions level (in practice most cars more than 15 years old) or a diesel car which failed to reach Euro 6 emissions level (most cars more than seven years old) would have to pay a daily charge of £12.50 to drive their car anywhere in London’s 32 boroughs. Some of the poorest motorists who relied on cars or vans to get about (such as nurses, carers on night shifts, or tradespeople who need to carry around a lot of kit) would be hit. And no, few plumbers were impressed by the suggestion of shadow cabinet minister David Lammy that they might care to take the tube to work with their toolboxes, U-bends, blowtorches and all.

The by-election result confirmed a point which had been made in the hardback edition of this book, published in February 2023: that while the public is happy to support green policies in general and net zero policies in particular, support tends to die away very quickly when people are presented with specific policies which threaten to hit them personally, either through extra taxes or charges or through restrictions on their freedom. While ULEZ is not strictly about carbon emissions – the Euro regulations on which it is based cover nitrogen dioxide and particulate emissions from engines – it was a clear marker that politicians cannot take support for green issues for granted.

Yet the reaction to ULEZ seemed to catch both the Labour and Conservative parties by surprise. That Parliament was imposing an open-ended bill on the UK public did not seem to occur to the MPs who, in 2019, nodded through a target for the UK to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, although a growing number of MPs are now daring to question the wisdom of making this legally binding commitment. The two main parties have simply assumed that people were so concerned about climate change that they would accept virtually any measure that was introduced to tackle it. They have been working on the assumption either that untested technologies will automatically fall into place to allow life in net zero Britain to continue as before, minus the carbon emissions – or that the public will willingly pay the costs to replace gas boilers with heat pumps, swap petrol cars for electric ones, as well as travel less and curtail their leisure activities.

The summer of 2023 proved to be something of a watershed in the debate over net zero – not just in Britain but elsewhere. While the weather in Europe and North America provided ample opportunities for those out to exaggerate the effects of climate change, with footage of every heatwave, wildfire and storm tweeted out by an eager body of activists, economic reality has begun to bite. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has forced a rethink of energy policy across Europe. Coal mines have been reopened, facilities to import liquefied natural gas (LNG) hurriedly assembled. While no country that has made a commitment to net zero has yet formally gone back on it, there has been a modest retreat in the more controversial policies. The European Union relaxed a previous decision to ban petrol and diesel cars by 2035 and decided that cars powered by internal combustion engines would still be allowed after that date so long as they could run on synthetic fuels (given that you can make synthetic fuels to any recipe you like it means an effective stay of execution for all petrol and diesel cars).

In Britain, the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, travelled to Aberdeen in July 2023 to announce that the government would grant over a hundred new licences for oil and gas extraction in the North Sea. Previously, the government had been happy to allow the industry to run down, in the belief that the future lay in renewable energy. Fossil fuels would still be supplying a quarter of the country’s energy even after 2050, Sunak suggested – with Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) used to mop up carbon emissions. The government department which handled energy matters was renamed the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, marking a sharp change in emphasis.

In September 2023 Sunak announced that some deadlines would be relaxed. The date for banning sales of new petrol and diesel cars was put back from 2030 to 2035, and sales of new oil and gas boilers can continue until the same date. Homeowners will no longer be put under pressure to upgrade their homes to an Energy Performance Certificate rating of C or above – something which could cost tens of thousands of pounds in many cases.

It is not the end for Britain’s legally binding net zero target; in August 2023 Sunak ruled out dropping it or holding a referendum on the subject. Nevertheless, an air of realism has begun to creep into the debate, if not among Sunak’s critics, many of whom are within his own party. The year 2050 is still sufficiently far off – it lies beyond the expected careers of those currently in government – that the serious practical problems presented by the target do not yet loom as large as they will come to do in the coming years.

The debate has moved on in several ways since the first edition of this book was completed in November 2022. It has become clearer that the sharp downward trend in the price of renewable energy has, for now, come to a halt. In the summer of 2022 it became fashionable to quote an assertion by the website Carbon Brief that wind energy was ‘nine times cheaper’ than gas-powered electricity. As explained later on, this was never a realistic figure – it was based on comparing the long-term guaranteed prices offered to the owners of wind farms with the ‘day-ahead’ prices which have to be paid to the owners of gas-fired power stations to persuade them to fire them up for a few hours when wind and solar energy are scarce. What has changed since 2022, though, is that wind farm companies are no longer prepared to accept the low prices that they were then. The ‘nine times’ claim was made on the back of an auction won by Swedish wind farm operator Vattenfall, which agreed to supply electricity from its proposed Boreas wind farm in the North Sea for the equivalent of £37.35 per MWh at 2012 prices (now closer to £45 per MWh). But in July 2023 the company pulled the plug on the project saying that it was no longer viable to supply power at that price thanks to a 40 percent surge in the cost of constructing a wind farm.1 Advocates of renewables, such as Labour’s climate change secretary Ed Miliband, who a year earlier had been championing the apparent low cost of wind energy, sharply changed tack and complained that the sector is not sufficiently subsidised.

It becomes increasingly hard to see how Britain, or any other country which has made such a commitment, can reach net zero by 2050. Targets are already slipping. According to WindEurope, a trade body for the wind industry, orders for new turbines across Europe fell by 47 percent in 2022 compared with 2021, as higher installation costs ate into future revenues.2 Electric car sales have settled at around one sixth of the UK market, and with subsidies and tax advantages being withdrawn it is becoming clear that electric cars are not going to sell themselves on the back of their virtues – if the technology does not improve to bring prices down they will have to be forced on the public. The government is struggling to give away vouchers for new heat pumps. Under its Boiler Upgrade Scheme £450 million worth of £5,000 grants – i.e. a total of 90,000 – have been made available to fund heat pump installations between 2022 and 2023. But by June 2023, already 13 months into the scheme, only 19,000 applications had been made.3

None of these technologies, it needs to be emphasised, take us to net zero in themselves. To achieve that, the government will have to find carbon-neutral ways of storing large quantities of intermittent energy, the manufacture of electric vehicles must be decarbonised, steel, plastics and all, and the electricity to power the heat pumps must also be fully decarbonised. Persuading people to switch to these devices is merely the first stage in a long process of decarbonising those sectors.

Meanwhile, there is little sign of the boom in ‘green jobs’ that we were promised as a result of the net zero commitment – not in Europe at least. On the contrary, green jobs are draining away from Britain and the rest of Europe to China and the United States. China, reports the Global Wind Energy...