Green activists are dictating how we live

Statist recommendations from the Climate Change Committee are treated as holy writ by Parliament

The UK Climate Change Committee (CCC) this week published a report on the outcome of Cop26, predictably calling for government to “walk the talk” and implement policies that will deliver net zero by 2050. True to form, the CCC is acting like an eco-activist NGO rather than offering balanced and independent advice. And, as usual, its recommendations are being treated as beyond questioning.

To grasp the scale of influence this independent advisory body now holds, look no further than Parliament’s decision in 2019 to wave through the net-zero target without even a Commons vote. In a move that one expert described as a “failure of politics”, our elected representatives bypassed the opportunity to scrutinise the policy, and associated secondary legislation, because they relied on the CCC’s improbable assessment that net zero was “necessary, feasible, costeffective” and “achievable with known technologies”.

The economic analysis in the committee’s 2019 Net Zero Report has been subsequently criticised for a lack of rigour and transparency. Detailed economic analysis on net zero pathways was absent, but the CCC nonetheless concluded the cost of achieving it by 2050 would be 1-2 per cent of GDP. The underlying calculations weren’t published until long after the legally binding target had been legislated. But deference towards bodies like the Climate Change Committee allows government departments to introduce potentially costly or disruptive policies without taking full responsibility for their decisions – or full accountability if things go wrong.

This autumn it became starkly apparent that, with current technology, our small island can either be net zero or have secure and affordable energy. It cannot, at present, have both. In guiding us towards very specific targets rather than planning for a range of outcomes over a lengthy period, the CCC is helping shut down the market discovery process, meaning we may never uncover the most cost-effective solutions to decarbonisation.

In the 13 years since the CCC was established, its scope has expanded enormously to include ever-increasing areas of the economy and our way of life. This latest briefing, for instance, makes pronouncements on foreign aid, insisting we should “restore the commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP”. The report also takes a view on our diets, seeking to cut meat and dairy consumption not just to reduce emissions or pressure on land for deforestation, but also to benefit “public health”. It was F A Hayek who wrote that “the greatest danger to liberty today comes from the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good”.

The committee’s solutions are statist, interventionist and lacking thorough cost-benefit analysis. And, though it was set up to provide quality advice including on the economic and social implications of climate policies, it is monomaniacal about decarbonisation.

What’s more, almost all of its resources are devoted towards mitigation rather than adaptation – a gamble when our contribution to global emissions is so small that meaningful success in the former relies on the kind of international action Cop26 hoped, and failed, to guarantee.

The idea that, if we are to halt climate change, we need to start doing things differently, has become mainstream in a way that eco-warriors from the 1990s only dreamt of. That the climate change challenge is being taken seriously by politicians is a positive development. But if the body advising the Government on climate change does not learn how to make balanced decisions pegged to rigorous cost-benefit analysis, then we will soon find ourselves in deeply troubled waters.