Charles MOORE
Westminster groupthink is a recipe for poor policies that will harm consumers and do little for the planet
This week, Boris Johnson promised a “Green Industrial Revolution” and an end to new petrol cars by 2030. He is not the first. In the Labour manifesto at the last election, on which his party went crashing to defeat, Jeremy Corbyn promised a “Green Industrial Revolution” and an end to new petrol cars by 2030.
In current mainstream politics, everyone is Green, with the Left setting the pace. The only competition is to be Greener than thou. Obviously, this is a better situation than if all parties agreed they couldn’t care less about the future of the planet, but not as much better as you might imagine. The problem when all parties agree is that they stop thinking. The public suffers.
I am just old enough to remember this happening about inflation, which took off in Britain in the late Sixties. Both parties decided that inflation could be defeated only by “prices-andincomes policies”. This meant the Government settling with trade unions and employers what people should be paid and what things should cost. The consequences were lower productivity and more strikes, as union leaders used their industrial muscle to win higher pay settlements. Inflation kept jerking upwards. The whole thing collapsed in the Winter of Discontent in 1979, helping bring Margaret Thatcher to power, which she held until she announced her resignation 30 years ago tomorrow.
About 90 per cent of the political class agreed with prices-and-incomes control at the time, but the policy did not survive contact with reality. Hardly anyone supports it now.
Obviously climate change will not similarly vanish. It is a huge issue, probably a growing one. But it is also one framed by politicians of all parties in the language of emergency and catastrophe. This drives a bad policy consensus.
Even firm believers in the dangers of climate change admit they cannot know what will happen. A global increase of 1.5C over pre-industrial temperatures by the end of the century would be manageable – even, in some respects, benign – whereas one of 4C would be extremely perilous. They cannot say which it will be, yet they act as if they know disaster is on its way.
So our over-excited leaders have a timetable which they constantly try to bring forward. Announcing his 10-point-plan, Boris invoked the COP26 conference, which Britain is hosting in Glasgow next year as a reason for hurrying. But that meeting and timetable (delayed because of Covid) are mere by-products of another date arbitrarily chosen – Net Zero greenhouse gases by 2050. Such plans and announcements also have political motivations unrelated to what is allegedly happening to the climate.
“Although this year has taken a very different path to the one we expected,” says Boris, for once deploying understatement, “I haven’t lost sight of our ambitious plans to level up across the country.”
He is careful to remind people that the main places where the new “Green jobs” will be found are in the North East, Yorkshire, Humber, the West Midlands, Scotland and Wales – the “Red Wall” and what people used to call the Celtic fringe. It is understandable that politicians wish to protect their parliamentary majorities, but it is nothing whatever to do with the future of the planet.
Such political calculation also operates on a completely different timescale. Boris is currently 56 years old. So he will be 86 when we do (or don’t) achieve Net Zero. It is even highly unlikely that he will still be Prime Minister in 2030, so he will be gone when it turns out that the promised quadrupling of offshore wind capacity has proved punitively expensive, or has not worked, or both. (At present, according to Andrew Montford of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, “the overall cost of a megawatt hour of wind energy has steadily risen, so that now it is perhaps four times that from a gas turbine.”) Boris talks of the future of the earth for 30 years and far beyond, but he thinks of the 2024 general election.
If you challenge the need for the rush and the truly vast financial outlays the Government is demanding, the zealots’ answer is to invoke the “precautionary principle”. The perils are so great, they say, that we must err on the safe side with technology that avoids fossil fuels. Yet no such precautionary principle is applied to the economic effects of the drastic policies proposed in the 10-point-plan.
Critics have already observed that the compulsory switch to electric cars will be an expensive purchase for the consumer and a physical problem for the millions of motorists who lack the space to install a convenient charging point where they live. It will also vastly increase the demand for electricity. In recent years, energy prices have not shot up, because shale has reduced the price of oil and gas. If those options are phased out, green energy becomes nakedly expensive, and consumers have no way out of it. “Fuel poverty” is one of the great political horrors that politicians seek to avoid. We now have policies which will impose it.
I inhabit an old, detached house in the country with elderly gas boilers. I am consulting our wise boiler expert, Jeremy, about what we should do to replace them.
Well, he says, we could buy airsource heat pumps, but they cost four or more times as much as replacement boilers (between £10,000 and £20,000). They do not produce nearly such high temperatures as gas. The pieces of kit have to be located outside the house. Air-source heat pumps demand so much more electricity that we might need a new feed of supply from the road. Jeremy adds that Britain is anyway in“an electricity-impoverished state ”, so the supply might not even be there in 10 years.
Or we could install ground-source heat pumps, but they have even lower temperature yield than air-source ones. To put the required underfloor heating in a house like ours would create “carnage”, or we could “grossly oversize” all the radiators.
There is also a looming doubt about what will actually happen when an entire country fairly quickly discards gas boilers. There is currently gas central heating in more than 22 million homes. Can we believe that a government-inspired replacement technology will be available for all when we all need it – or will it be “world-beating”, like Test and Trace?
None of the above impugns the need to search for low-carbon energy. The problem is government, urged on by pseudo-religious fanaticism. In the Middle Ages, it was common for rulers to summon up crusades to the Holy Land to prove their piety. Always these were bloody and time-consuming. (Richard the Lionheart spent more of his reign fighting them than ruling in England.) Frequently they were futile. But they could raise a king’s reputation. Climate change is the 21st-century equivalent, and so Boris wants, as reporters put it, to “burnish his Green credentials”. Given that two thirds of the world are not even trying to follow the rules towards Net Zero, his sacrifice of our money is futile.
This is governmental vanity. The Prime Minister wants a Green Industrial Revolution. Look at the real Industrial Revolution – the one which made Britain rich. It was not started by a politician in 1760 or thereabouts saying, “Let’s have an industrial revolution” and taxing everyone to make it happen. It started for almost the opposite reason – that inventive people were free to get on inventing, and government kept its distance.