THE POTTIEST AND COSTLIEST MISTAKE OF OUR TIMES

Forget his tax and spend plans. Red Ed’s climate change law in the Brown years will cost £50,000 per home, says CHRISTOPHER BOOKER

ONE astonishing fact not getting a mention in this bizarrely unreal election campaign is that Ed Miliband can already claim to have been by far the most expensive politician in Britain’s history.

This is because it was he more than anyone else who in 2008 was responsible for pushing through the final version of the Climate Change Act — on official figures easily the most costly law passed by Parliament.

Thanks entirely to a lastminute amendment by Miliband, this Act commits us within 35 years to cutting Britain’s emissions of carbon dioxide, or CO2, by a staggering 80 per cent — to a level so low it hadn’t been seen since the early 19th century.

Even on figures sneaked out by the Government a few months later, the cost of this law was then estimated as high as £734 billion, or £18 billion every year until 2050.

But more recent estimates made by the EU and the International Energy Agency suggest that the cost of meeting Mr Miliband’s target will be even higher, at £1.3 trillion — almost equivalent to our entire current national debt, or more than £50,000 for every household in the country.

Hysteria

The story behind how this unprecedentedly far-reaching law came to be passed almost unanimously is itself one of the weirdest political episodes in our history.

The idea for it originated with a young climate activist, Bryony Worthington, when she was the campaign director on climate change for the green lobby group Friends Of The Earth.

In 2007, when hysteria over global warming was at its height — thanks not least to Al Gore’s Oscar- winning film An Inconvenient Truth — Ms Worthington was co-opted by then-Environment Secretary David Miliband to join his department’s staff.

As she described in a talk which can still be seen by googling ‘Bryony Worthington YouTube’, she was put in charge of a small group tasked with drafting a Bill to make Britain the only country in the world committed by law to slashing its ‘carbon emissions’ by 60 per cent.

But in 2008, when the Bill was already well on its way through Parliament, David Miliband was promoted by Gordon Brown to become Foreign Secretary. A new ministry was created, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), to be headed by his brother, Ed. It was Ed Miliband who decided, following pressure from green lobby groups, to up the emissions reduction target from 60 per cent to an even more mind-boggling 80 per cent. This alone, on his department’s figures, nearly doubled its cost.

What seems barely credible, if one reads through the lengthy debates in Parliament on this Bill, is that scarcely a single MP showed the slightest interest in how the new target could in practice be met — any more than did Mr Miliband himself.

The CO2 emitted by fossil fuels, such as coal, gas, oil and petrol, is inseparable from pretty well every activity which keeps our economy functioning, from the way we make 70 per cent of our electricity to virtually our entire transport system.

As for electricity alone, we no longer use this just for lighting, heating and refrigeration, as we did in those far- off ‘three- day week’ days of the Seventies.

In the age of the computer, we are now dependent on it for everything from our work and mobile phones to shop and supermarket tills, the cashpoints where we collect our money and the signalling and traffic lights which keep our trains and roads running.

Yet thanks to Mr Miliband, and those MPs who mindlessly voted for his Bill, we are committed to cutting back on what currently makes this possible by such a colossal amount, it is impossible to see how it could be realistically achieved without closing down virtually all our economy.

What our ministers and officials fondly imagine — as we can see from their speeches and policy papers — is that we can somehow meet Mr Miliband’s target by closing down all those old ‘CO2 polluting’ coal and gasfired power stations, to replace them with tens of thousands of wind turbines and a fleet of ‘zero carbon’ new nuclear reactors (though it looks increasingly unlikely we will get even one of those in the next decade).

The fossil fuel plants we still rely on for more than two-thirds of the electricity we need will be allowed to survive only if they are fitted with ‘carbon capture and storage’, to pipe away their ‘carbon emissions’ to be buried in holes under the sea — a hugely expensive technology which is pure wishful thinking, since it has never yet been made to work commercially, and would treble the cost of electricity even if it was viable.

Lesson

The drive to ‘decarbonise’ our economy by piling on ‘green taxes’ and building ever more hugely subsidised windfarms has already added hundreds of pounds a year to individual electricity bills, helping to drive millions more households into fuel poverty. But even now we are scarcely scratching the surface of meeting our legal commitments.

The one lesson above all we might have learned from Ed Miliband’s brief spell in charge of our ‘ energy and climate change’ policy is that he is quite astonishingly out of touch with any practical reality.

So lost was he in his green fantasy world that his only concern was the ‘climate change’ part of his job title. He showed no interest in the other half of the job he was paid for, the ‘energy’ bit, i.e. how to keep our lights on.

Informed observers at the time noted how the only people Secretary Miliband seemed to want to talk to were green lobby groups, such as Friends Of The Earth, Greenpeace and the canny chancers making millions out of windfarms and the ‘renewables’ subsidy bonanza.

The ‘Big Six’ energy giants — who, whatever we think of them, were actually keeping the lights on — he treated with disdain or outright hostility, as ‘polluting’ capitalists, interested only in making ‘obscene profits’ (unlike those green, clean developers of the wind farms which were increasingly disfiguring our countryside).

Many may recall their shock in September 2013 when Mr Miliband, by then Labour leader, announced one of his first acts on becoming PM would be to ‘freeze energy prices’ for three years ( instantly knocking £3 billion off the share value of the big energy companies).

But what made this even more ludicrous was that no one had done more to push up Britain’s fast-rising energy bills than Mr Miliband himself.

Lacklustre

It was he who had set in train the policy which made this inevitable, with his Climate Change Act.

And it was this same policy which was then so enthusiastically carried on after 2010 by his Lib Dem successors at DECC: first Chris Huhne (until he had to resign before being jailed for lying), and now that lacklustre green zealot Ed Davey, so dim that he has shown no more practical grasp of the technicalities of electricity production than Mr Miliband himself.

All this alone should raise a huge black question mark over the man now aspiring to become leader of our country next week. It shows he is so obsessively blinkered by woolly ideology that he has no practical judgment at all — about money or anything else.

We should remember that, in an earlier time, he and Ed Balls were the most intimate Treasury advisers of Gordon Brown when, in 1998, our formerly ‘prudent’ Chancellor took the reckless gamble of announcing he intended to double Britain’s public spending in ten years.

This was what happened, leading of course to the most disastrous public spending deficit our country has ever known: a catastrophe from which we shall be struggling to recover for years to come.

Ed Miliband was right behind that gamble. It should show us it is not only his stupidity over the Climate Change Act which made him our ‘most expensive politician’ in history. Worse still, his lack of judgment also marks him out as easily the most dangerous man who has ever come within touching distance of becoming our Prime Minister.