By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Today’s resignation of Chris Huhne, the UK Minister for Climate Change, offers the prospect of a belated return to sanity at the former Ministry of Agriculture in Whitehall. Huhne now faces prosecution for an alleged attempt to pervert the course of justice by asking his then wife to say that she was driving at the time when one of Britain’s thousands of speed cameras caught him going faster than the law allows.
Under Huhne, the Climate Change Department has been indistinguishable from a lunatic asylum. I first came across him – or, rather, didn’t come across him – when he and I were due to debate the climate at the annual jamboree of a massive hedge-fund in Spain three years ago. Huhne only found out that I was to be his opponent when he reached Heathrow Airport. He turned straight around and went back to London.
When I visited the House of Lords’ minister, Lord Marland, at the Climate Change Department a couple of years ago, I asked him and the Department’s chief number-cruncher, Professor David Mackay (neither a climate scientist nor an economist, of course) to show me the Department’s calculations detailing just how much “global warming” that might otherwise occur this century would be prevented by the $30 billion per year that the Department was committed to spend between 2011 and 2050 – $1.2 trillion in all.
There was a horrified silence. The birds stopped singing. The Minister adjusted his tie. The Permanent Secretary looked at his watch. Professor Mackay looked as though he wished the plush sofa into which he was disappearing would swallow him up entirely.
Eventually, in a very small voice, the Professor said, “Er, ah, mphm, that is, oof, arghh, we’ve never done any such calculation.” The biggest tax increase in human history had been based not upon a mature scientific assessment followed by a careful economic appraisal, but solely upon blind faith. I said as much. “Well,” said the Professor, “maybe we’ll get around to doing the calculations next October.”
They still haven’t done the calculations – or, rather, I suspect they have done them but have kept the results very quiet indeed. Here’s why.
The UK accounts for 1.5% of global business-as-usual CO2 emissions. At an officially-estimated cost of $1.2 trillion by 2050, or $834 billion after inter-temporal discounting at the minimum market rate of 5%, the Climate Change Act aims to eradicate 80% of these emissions. So just 1.2% of global emissions would be abated even if the policy were to succeed in full.
Business-as-usual CO2 concentration, as the average of all six IPCC emission scenarios, would be 514 ppmv in 2050. A full and successful reduction of UK emissions by 80% over that period would reduce that concentration to – wait for it – 512.5 ppmv. This dizzying reduction of 1.5 ppmv over 40 years would have the effect of abating 0.008 K of the 1.05 K of warming that the IPCC would otherwise have expected to see by 2050.
The UK policy’s mitigation cost-effectiveness – the cost of abating just 1 Kelvin of warming if every nation pursued the UK’s policy with the same cost-ineffectiveness – works out at $108 trillion per Kelvin abated.
The policy’s global abatement cost – the cost of abating all of the 1.05 K warming that would otherwise occur over the policy’s 40-year lifetime – would be $113 trillion, or $16,000 per head of the global population, or almost 7% of global GDP over the period.
To determine how much better it would be to do nothing than to try to abate that warming, it is necessary to agree on how much damage the warming might abate. The Stern Report on the economics of climate change produces some of the most extreme and exaggerated cost estimates, so we shall use it for the sake of being as fair as possible.
Stern agrees with most sources that if there is 3 K warming this century (which the IPCC predicted at the time), it will cost 0-3% of global 21st-century GDP (actually, he says “now and forever”, but that is one exaggeration too many). However, the IPCC’s current central estimate is that the CO2 we emit between 2000 and 2100 will cause little more than 1.5 K of warming. So let us assume that this 1.5 K of CO2-driven warming will cost us 1.5% of global 21st-century GDP.
Yes, I know that anything less than 2 K will probably be beneficial, but we have to bear in mind the already-committed warming of 0.6 K that the IPCC says is already in the pipeline on account of our past sins of emission, and the warming from the non-CO2 greenhouse gases that is not addressed in the UK’s CO2-reduction policy.
However, Stern’s calculations are all based on an inter-temporal discount rate of just 1.4%, which is far lower than the minimum rate of return on capital, which is 5%. Correcting the Stern-based 1.5%-of-GDP cost of taking no action to allow for the minimum market discount rate brings that cost down to 0.3% of GDP.
Accordingly, the 6.85%-of-GDP cost of taking action to mitigate the warming would give an impressive action/inaction ratio of 22.8. Bottom line: it is almost 23 times more expensive to pursue the policies outlined in the Climate Change Act than to sit back, do nothing, enjoy the sunshine, and adapt in a focused way to the consequences of what little warming the IPCC predicts may occur.
Just one problem with this entire calculation. It depends upon the assumption that the $1.2 billion spent by Mr. Huhne’s former department to 2050 would actually achieve an 80% reduction in Britain’s CO2 emissions. And that may not be a justifiable assumption. Real-world climate-mitigation policies are proving far more costly than government estimates.
The United Kingdom is no longer a democracy. We still have all the trappings, but in reality it no longer matters who we vote for. Five-sixths of our laws, including overall policies on environmental matters, are set by the unelected, unaccountable, unsackable Kommissars (that’s the official German name for our new and hated masters) of the failed European Union. For the seventeenth year in a row, the EU’s own court of auditors has declined to sign off the Kommissars’ annual accounts as a true and fair record of how they have squandered the $3 million an hour we pay them. It is these Kommissars who dictate that we must have carbon trading.
So let us compare the pie-in-the-sky cost estimates in the Climate Change Act with the actual, real-world cost of the EU’s four-times-collapsed carbon trading scam – er, scheme. The calculation is similar to that which we did for the UK alone.
Over the ten-year timeframe of the EU’s scheme, CO2 concentration will have risen to 413 ppmv, or 412.4 ppmv if the scheme is fully successful, abating 0.004 K of “global warming”. The cost of the scheme, according to Bjorn Lomborg, is 2.5 times the cost of the trades actually executed: call it $230 billion a year, or $2.1 trillion after 5% discounting over the ten years.
The mitigation cost-effectiveness of the EU scheme is $535 trillion per Kelvin abated; its global abatement cost over the period 2010-2020 is $117 trillion, or $17,000 per head of global population, or 22% of global GDP over the ten-year period. And that is 72 times more costly than the 0.3%-of-GDP cost of the climate-related damage that the policy is intended to forestall.
This, too, understates the true cost-ineffectiveness of trying to tax, trade, regulate, reduce or replace CO2. For the predicted rate of warming is not occurring. By many methods, the climate literature demonstrates that the models are over-predicting CO2-driven warming at least threefold. If so, then the true cost of the EU’s mad policy, of which Mr. Huhne and his party are such enthusiastic supporters, could be at least 200 times greater than the cost of climate-related damage from doing nothing at all.
Will Mr. Huhne’s successor get the sums done and scrap the Climate Change Act? Will the EU come to its senses? Don’t count on it. Gradually, though, reality is breaking through. Desubsidization of solar and even of fashionable wind energy has now begun in the UK, Denmark, Germany and Spain.
The sheer cost of these pointless, environment-wrecking “alternative” energy sources is so crippling that European governments, already near-bankrupted by their incompetent management of the mickey-mouse Euro, cannot any longer afford these self-indulgent indulgences. The removal of Mr. Huhne from the scene will at least take Britain one step nearer to sanity, scientific reality and economic common sense about climate change.
Interesting question here: http://progcontra.blogspot.com/2012/02/where-should-chris-huhne-serve-his.html
Make sure you get your vote in!
In case anyone missed it Ed Davey’s first speach said something like “I intend to continue the great work started by Chris Huhne”
The windmillmeister is dead. Long live the windmillmeister.
To those who think that Ed Davey would follow the same policies as Chris Huhne I’d like to point out that Davey is nowhere near as competent, combative or determined as Huhne, and certainly nowhere near a match for the Chancellor, George Osborne. So it’s a step in the right direction.
If Huhne is found guilty of preverting the course of justice he will be sentenced to 3 – 6 months in prison. There will be no way back to a ministerial career from that. How good his defence will be will be fascinating to see.
A small note on words: “Kommissar” is not used here in the German sense (that would still be a police officer à la “Lestrade of the Yard”), but in the sense it took on in Russian, after Lenin and his followers appropriated it into their terminology – like “politburo” or “central committee”. So though the word is German, and it is bandied about by German, ahem, politkommissars from the Brussels politburo, the implication are a bit more sinister than a glance into a dictionary might suggest.
@scott says:
‘Is it true that Professor David Mackay is a professor of natural philosophy??’
Yes.
But ‘natural philosophy’ is what Cambridge University calls Physics. Don’t get hung up about it.
Coinciding with the demise of the UK’s ‘climate change’ minister Chris Huhne, Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology publishes report
Climate Variability and Weather February 2012
http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/POST-PN-400.pdf
with this statement:
Natural forms of climate variability are likely to be the main influence on the UK’s climate over the next few decades.
For some months now, a graphical representation of my numerical analysis was available here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-NV.htm
Posted on climate blogs: first on
WUWT
then Climate Etc ,
RealClimate
and it has been picked by more climate orientated blogs.
Since its first appearance on WUWT it has had more than 1000 web-page hits including some from the UK MetOffice and the Exeter area (home of the MetOfffice).
It is nice to know that those in authority eventualy are realising that natural variability is the primary cause of the climate change.
But we do not know what the next man will be like but he is a Liberal D so expect much of the same to placate the Liberal rabble, sorry, elite.
But, Lord Monckton, our annual output of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels is 3% of the total annual CO2 budget the rest, 97% being from natural producers. If the atmospheric CO2 content increases it is due to the natural producers over which we have no control. For us to limit our CO2 production makes no sense and is economic suicide.
The WUWT link:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/03/uah-global-temperature-down-over-half-in-october-from-september/#comment-786818
“The EU is the old Soviet Union dressed in Western clothes”
(President Gorbachev)
Huhne, is a repugnant, meddlesome and mean minded individual, how he came to high office illuminates in a very stark light the paucity of capable ministers and shines a light on just how diminished the British electoral system has become.
In entering politics In Britain, candidates these days; do not do so out of an altruistic urge, or any public spirited desire to, ‘give something back’. Thus, the upshot to this means that most of the current sitting MP’s in the lower house are; gold diggers, self publicists and shysters – ‘on the make’ mountebanks.
It is also a fact, that most of the laws in Britain are made and drafted in Brussels. Parliament, is merely a rubber stamping council and an exercise of inanity but even then [with virtually nothing to do], our MP’s these days fail in their only real duty, that is, to scrutinise the bilge emanating from Brussels.
In Parliament, it is hard to tell which party is which these days, there is not a whit between their main policies of any of the main three [Tory, Lib-dem, Labour]. All worship on bended knee, at the altar before their masters in Brussels and not one of them raises any real opposition to Britain being a member of the Soviet of EU states and how perfect was the great scam to all of them. YES, AGW, a chance to show how much you cared and an opportunity to further burden and tax the bejeepers out of the already stressed taxpayer.
It is also hard to know in actual fact, just who Chris Huhne owed his allegiance to and who he was representing. Was it to his constituents who voted him to power – definitely not. Or, was it to his party and to Parliament – on that, the jury was always out on that. Finally, was it to the people who really matter? The ‘people who really matter’ of course reside in their gilded palace, Berlaymont in Brussels and Huhne has always been a [tribally] fierce defender of the EU’s honour and power.
How
hunky dory for the EUfitting was it then, that Huhne became minister and chief of the department of the Environment and climate change [a man on the inside]?In Chris Huhne’s dreams, emissions regulation, carbon trading, renewable energy, sustainable power, global warming were part of his raison d’etre – EU’s man in place – a marriage made in heaven indeed [bad news for the taxpayers of Britain though].
But oh Glory be! Now that he is gone, you can [maybe] understand how elated many of us feel here in Britain to see the back of this quite awful little man, a man living in Britain but not recognized as being one [British] and certainly no friend of ours.
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
W.S. Churchill.
MarkG says:
February 3, 2012 at 8:38 pm
Huhne, I imagine, will either be reinstated after the CPS decide that prosecution ‘is not in the public interest’, or he’ll move on to a fat-cat job as a EU Commissar.
———————
Now, I’m no expert on the law, but I would have thought that as that he has now been charged that the prosecution will indeed go ahead. The chance for a “not in the public interest” escape has now been excluded. If found guilty then I would expect that he’ll be given a jail sentence, hopefully of sufficient length to prevent him returning to politics, ie. more than one year. I’d be disappointed if he gets less than a 3 to 4 year sentence. Judges usually take ‘perverting the course of justice’ very seriously indeed.
Presumably Ed Davey was chosen as a replacement because he is as brainwashed by the nonsense co2 belief as Huhne and Cameron.
The zealot gas fanboys remain in charge of the asylum. But with every change there is hope that a smidgen of reality may start to creep in to government policy. In any case, time is on our side as ever deepening winters make their impact felt. They can build as many windmills as they like, but it will not prevent the sun from entering it’s long and deep minimum, one which the UK in particular is ill prepared for.
One question, Christopher, you mention the government plans to spend £30 billion per year from 2011 to 2050, totaling £1.2 trillion. My information was that the total cost of the climate change act was estimated by government to be £404 billion as the upper figure. Please can you tell me where I might find reference to your higher figure?
Bernd Felsche said:
February 3, 2012 at 8:19 am
According to Fenbeagle (and reproduced by the Tallbloke), Huhne is a former director of a company that introduced speed cameras to Britain.
Hoist by his own petard.
A number of people seem to have got the wrong end of the stick regarding what it is alleged he did. He got his wife to say she was driving the car when it was spotted speeding to avoid losing his licence, presumably because of previous speeding (he has now lost his licence anyway presumably because he doesn’t value the planet and other road users enough to drive economically and legally). He and his former wife are charged with perverting the course of justice, which is an altogether more serious offence, punishable by seriously long prison sentences. This was exposed by his wife when she discovered his extra-marital affair.
I just love how so many of a politicians are fine, moral people who are a shining example to the poor peasants they legislate over (not, in case anybody misunderstands me).
My only worry is that if this millionaire politician gets off, then he will be brought back into government.
Very nice epitaph for Mr Huhne’s career: richly deserved!
I’m prepared to accept Lord Monkton’s calculations and conclusion – Saturday’s my rest day. However, it might be educational to track the money. It doesn’t just disappear into thin (or poluted) air. The natural circulation of money, whether it’s income or debt, involves eventual redistribution from the one hand to another. Once the Kommissars have taken their tithe (more than 10%, I assume) the balance will be distributed hither and thither around the EU and other far away places we about which we know little. Turbine and solar panel manufactures and the like will gain through government-aided production, before paying out taxes, costs and wages etc. The bottom line assumes that the ‘little people’ will be able to benefit from these wages or government handouts and allowances to compensate in some way for the additional taxes and costs that were levied on them in CO2 reduction taxation in the first place. So, assuming it to be a ‘perfect engine’ what is the true cost of this money circulation – only the consumption of natural resources that CO2 reduction was designed to overcome. The fact that it might have all been put to better use is not something that Mr Huhne and his ilk would ever bother about.
Another excellent piece by Christopher Monckton.
When the Climate Change Bill was voted in, nobody knew what it would cost. Months later the government quietly slipped out a figure: 400 billion pounds. An accountancy firm published their own estimate: around 1.2 trillion pounds, three times larger than the government estimate.
But, as Christopher Monckton so clearly shows, they didn’t have a clue what this staggering expenditure what actually achieve, even assuming that the IPCC is right. And, if there’s one certainty, it’s that the IPCC is wrong.
It woud be quite funny if it were not so serious.
.
I was a lifelong Conservative voter, but no longer. I will not vote Conservative again until they return to sanity, both on climate change/energy and also Europe. Still, Cameron’s loss is UKIP’s gain!
.
I regard Huhne’s energy policies as criminal so I hope he ends up behind bars.
When the announcement was made yesterday at 10 am Huhne’s windmills were putting out just 0.7% of the UK’s consumption – and at a time when the UK is freezing cold.
.
Just one small bright note: Monckton mentioned that he spoke to Lord Marland, the Energy Minister. Recently Lord Marland described the solar energy scam as ‘one of the most ridiculous schemes ever dreamed up’.
Hopefully, when sanity starts to return, government ministers will describe Huhne’s windmills in a similar way.
Chris
1DandyTroll says:
February 3, 2012 at 5:34 pm
“The best part is that most of that money seem to go to German, French, and Swedish government owned corporations building wind and nuclear power in Britain, as in the limey pound isn’t staying with the brit for too long.”
German biggies are Siemens and EON and RWE; they’re publically traded companies. EON and RWE were state-owned in the 70ies but some time in the last decades got privatized.
In the UK we have the crime of “Involuntary Manslaughter”
http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/h_to_k/homicide_murder_and_manslaughter/
One aspect that comes under this legisation is
“that caused by the defendant’s gross negligence”.
Given the fact that the policies so rigourously pursued by Huhne’s have directly increased fuel poverty in the UK, he is undoubtedly responsible for deaths from hypothermia in the UK.
He should be charged as such.
Ed Davey does come across as a more personable , less coniving – some might say more naive – advocate than his predecessor. More of the useful idiot perhaps. However, such naivety can be just as dangerous & more powerful. Look where its got us already. Naivety allows for the passion & conviction of the true believer , which can be infectious.
While the more informed have to rely on the powers of deception, which is never quite as convincing.
Another conviction politician (if not quite in the same sense) ?
Yes, Minister?
A tale of Wind and Folly….
http://fenbeagleblog.wordpress.com/2012/02/04/hanging-up-by-the-constables/
Lord Monckton’s carefully calculated article should go straight to the Prime Minister; every member of the UK government; and every civil servant in the Department of Energy and Climate Change (as though the two are linked in some way)…
By the way – I’ve looked at the definitions of ‘liberal’ and ‘democrat’ – and neither of them seem to be remotely connected with the policies of that section of the UK coalition government…
Is it just coincidence that the following BBC headlines are back to back?
Most parts of the UK are due to see heavy snow later, bringing disruption to roads, rail and air travel.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16883674
Chris Huhne’s resignation as energy secretary will be a big loss to the cabinet and the Lib Dems, says his former parliamentary private secretary.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-16885854
We know wind power is not helping with the cold and snow event – so why will his policies and position on AGW be missed? Are Brit’s still afraid they will never see snow again? GK
R. Gates says:
February 3, 2012 at 11:07 am
Your fatuous, knee jerk first post does not become you. I am relieved to see the reasonable and thinking R. Gates shows up in your subsequent post.
R. Gates says:
February 3, 2012 at 11:07 am
“Based on Lord Monckton’s calculations of how much the effect the small greenhouse contribution from the UK is, and how much a waste of money it would be to try to abate any warming that might come from that contribution, and what little difference it would all make anyway…then none of us should pay our taxes…as each of us only makes a very insignificant difference anyway.”
As to what appears to be your [ambiguous?] logic above, Gates, not paying taxes based upon a strikingly negative return calculated from a “cost benefit” analysis of only one tax related goal obviously doesn’t automatically translate into similar action concerning all other tax related purposes, i.e., on the false argumnt that “none of us should pay our taxes” just because “each of us only makes a very insignificant difference anyway” toward accomplishing any of the rest of them.
So it’s good to hear you say, “I actually agree with Lord Monckton on this point,” essentially that no one should be paying taxes or increased prices based upon CO2 reducing goals – but that efficiency of energy use should be the real goal – and also given that you believe CO2 = Catastrophic AGW to be a “Religion” and that China and India’s full bore construction of hundreds of coal fired electricity plants is ~”rational” given the needs of their populations.
Perhaps you are also getting the message that we “rugged individualists” really do like company?
Kakatoa says: “In my rmind electrical energy ratepayers in CA are already paying the tax.”
As much as California has done to improve energy efficiency, you guys still haven’t reduced total emissions, right? Freeman, Sidhu and Poghosyan reported California emitted 427 MMT CO2e in 1990. The way I understand AB32, “business as usual” would have California at 600 MMT of CO2e by 2020. AB32 requires a 30% reduction of the that level by 2020, and a 80% reduction below 1990 levels (427MMT CO2e) by year 2050. According to Air Resources Board of CA, 458 MMT of CO2e was emitted in 2000 and 478 MMT of CO2e was emitted in 2008 (after recession started). This means that since 1990 to 2008 total CO2e emissions have increased by 11.9%. From 2000 to 2008, total emissions have increased by 4.4%. Yet I believe the AB32 goal is 420 MMT of emissions by year 2020. So even though California is getting more efficient, it isn’t likely to make the old AB32 goal without changing the economy in a radical and likely disruptive way. All that work has not decreased total emissions, in fact total emissions have continued to increase, which is my point. It’s so hard to actually reduce total emissions, that its likely to be econmic suicide and therefore, dumb.
Mr Monckton,
You obviously did not learn your arithmetic in the Public Schools of the United States of America. Do you feel good about your numbers? I don’t.
The numbers we make up are far more meaningful in that they provide a necessary sense of urgency about the problem of possibly massive, wide-spread death by global warming. And just as well, our fantastic expenditures and crippling regulation to mitigate the world-wide menace of CO2 waste induces a sense of hopelessness that leads to a calm, fatalistic acceptance.
Cattle are so much easier to slaughter when properly corralled, not because they know their ultimate fate. They feel good, as you know that they should, about where the herders are leading them. They follow one the other up the chutes. You would know this if you had been a cowboy, or grew up watching western movies.
So you see, your numbers just don’t add up.
HH