BY Andrew Montford June 14, 2019
THE £1trillion figure is propaganda, not analysis; you can pluck any number you want.’ So said Adair Turner, the former head of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), according to the Telegraph on Wednesday.
Turner was lambasting Whitehall estimates of the cost of taking the country to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. It’s unclear whether there is any meaningful analysis behind the £1trillion (£1million million, or £1,000,000,000,000) figure, which was put together by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Turner may therefore be correct. But the CCC’s own figure (1 to 2 per cent of GDP in 2050) is just as dubious. Despite having published a raft of papers to support its contention that net zero was a plausible goal, none of these, including the one on the ‘costs and benefits of net zero’, had anything like a breakdown of costs or of benefits. Lord Deben seems to have plucked the 1 to 2 per cent figure, fully formed, from the air, in just the same way Turner had slammed the Treasury for doing.
The question of the costs involved in the net zero project is impenetrable to say the least. The CCC is not advancing a plan for achieving this goal so much as making a sales pitch. So you will look in vain for a definitive picture of how it thinks energy should be provided in 2050, say, or what we might need to spend to get it. There is an example of how the energy system might be constituted, though, and from this you can estimate that we might have to spend a quarter of a trillion pounds on wind turbines. However the CCC has made some astonishingly optimistic assumptions about how much electricity each one of these will provide, so the cost will almost certainly be much higher. Similar figures emerge elsewhere in the CCC’s papers; its own figure for decarbonising housing is close to half a trillion pounds. Refuelling equipment for electric or fuel-cell powered vehicles will be another 0.1 trillion.
I could go on, but you will have grasped my point by now. These sorts of numbers, coming out from just a small fraction of the actions the CCC is demanding, suggest that the Treasury’s £1trillion is not only plausible for the outlays required for reaching net zero emissions, it’s almost certainly a gross underestimate.
Interesting times on the British Isles:
“Vince Cable, Liberal Democrat treasury spokesman, said Lord Turner was right to warn that the City might need to shrink and that “defending London’s competitiveness” was being used as an excuse to defend “business as usual”.
“If you are engaged in behaviour that is dangerous to the wider British economy, it is right some sectors may have to contract,” he said.
But Lord Turner’s backers were drowned out by the City reaction. The British Bankers’ Association was among the most trenchant in its criticism. “If we introduce the wrong kind of regulation or the wrong kind of taxes we could so easily lose that position by driving business abroad …On so many occasions in the past the country has lost chunks of industry through making the wrong decisions. Let’s not do that again.””
https://www.ft.com/content/088514bc-9347-11de-b146-00144feabdc0
And here I thought that CCC stood for “Committee on Climate Crack”.
My bad.
“I could go on, but you will have grasped my point by now. These sorts of numbers, coming out from just a small fraction of the actions the CCC is demanding, suggest that the Treasury’s £1trillion is not only plausible for the outlays required for reaching net zero emissions, it’s almost certainly a gross underestimate.”
If one were to replace “plausible” with “implausible”, in that sentence, the sentence would say what I’m guessing, from context, the author meant to say.
Have they defined what the zero carbon society would be like? Have they quantified what we Brits can do now in terms of function and what we will be able to do in 2050? If it were to be suggested that in 2050 our function count would be the same as today then that would be 30 years with no growth. Who’d vote for that? Will the functioncount of some parts of society be increased whilst the function count of the other part decreased by an equivalent amount? What if we were to assume an approach of fix problems as they occur without a zero carbon option, what would net growth or decrease of function be to achieve our best growth?
There is something to think about tho’ in economics that is worth a minute or two.
If you spend 10¢ to make a bullet, the 10¢ goes to materials, labor, machines, buildings, infrastructure of all kinds. There is a primer, the making of which is a whole ‘nuther industry. With labor, machines, buildings. And there is an underwriting chemical industry to create the heavy metal azides (-N₃ compounds) that convert friction to explosive flame, the miners of copper, tin, lead, bismuth. There are the alloying specialists, the rollers of brass stock, tube, sheet, powder.
The 10¢ bullet is very probably “worth 10¢” more or less. The monies spent on it yield a tangible object — the bullet — which can safely be stockpiled for years, decades … keeping its intrinsic value. But what happens to that bullet when it is loaded in a gun’s chamber, aimed and fired? Where does the 10¢ go?
In the one sense, the 10¢ fired bullet clears a demand-hole for creating another bullet. In another, perhaps a tasty pig is brought down, and the gal doing the ‘unting gets to make bacon and sausage. Perhaps a hole is shot in a distant target, the shooter acquiring shooting skills, likely far in excess in proportion to the 10¢ of the bullet.
THE POINT IS: a trillion or ten trillion dollar super-green-deal plan is like the bullet. The trillions secured and expended definitely ought to “buy stuff”. Not bullets, but green-energy stuff. PV panels, great honking wind turbines. Supports; teams of specialists to install them all; other teams of maintenance people to keep to the upkeep of the panels and windmills.
The trillions are invested in a massive infrastructure reëngineering, the likes of which generate not just millions, but potentially hundreds of millions of whole-career-long jobs, which can keep employed a vast army of (lets admit it, mostly) men with their backhoes, earth movers, cement trucks, rebar fabricators and all the rest in order to secure the “green energy sources” and keel-haul them together to create a huge nominal excess of power … which is vitally needed … to make up for the fact that when a calm night comes, neither wind nor sun will be creating much of any power at all.
I just don’t think though that any truly “green deal” can be done without strategically sizing enough nuclear power to act as the bad-weather / seasonal-demand leveler. We don’t need “batteries” so much as on-demand electable loading (and load shedding) for the most part. A little social planning goes a LONG way in this regard.
Just saying,
GoatGuy ✓
It’s very likely that all the fuss about humans causing the end of the world by using carbon producing energy is a ruse to get everyone behind a global policy to adopt clean nuclear power. Everyone should realise that wind and sunshine won’t be able to muster enough energy to produce and run all those electric cars.
I think these leaders are just frightening people (as usual).
Soon I expect there’ll be a big sell.
But, in a way, I do believe humans effect climate change. In the patent for HAARP, the developer stated that it would be effective in manipulating weather patterns, through the heating up and distortion of the ionosphere.
There are quite a few of these gadgets operating now, and I would expect them to be used to persuade doubters that the climate really is changing fast.
McBryde, currently the fear for nuclear power is still larger than the fear fir global warming.
Then I’ll need to wait awhile longer before I buy junior uranium explorers.
I think it will happen, though.
The cost answer isn’t so hard to answer.
The UK emits about 400 million tonnes of CO2 per year.
Indigo Ag just announced they are establishing a large scale carbon credit market.
Their goal is to eventually sell a trillion tons worth of credits so selling the UK 400 million a year is something they would welcome. Their goal price is $15/ton so it
would cost the UK about $6B per year just to buy offsets for their current emissions
Here’s Indigo Ag’s information:
https://www.indigoag.com/the-terraton-initiative
Net Zero is such weak soup.
UK needs a bold new PM who will demand Net Minus!
And after they count up all their trillions, they can start working on the number of human casualties.
Kind of an on-going Holocaust.
… Adair Turner, the former head of the
Committee on Climate ChangeCrony Capitalist Committee (CCC), according to the Telegraph on Wednesday. ”Fixed it for you.