Karl Williams has in interesting piece at CapX
Not since Churchill promised victory over Germany in his ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ speech of May 1940 has the UK set itself a more expensive or ambitious policy goal. The initial, official cost estimates for getting to net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050 range from £1.5 to £2.1 trillion. That equates to somewhere between 69% and 97% of pre-Covid GDP – 83% at the midpoint. By way of comparison, World War Two cost Britain about 84% of its 1939 GDP.
Of course, MPs in 1940 probably had a pretty good idea of what they were getting the country into. Like Churchill, many had served in the trenches during the Great War. Likewise they had lived through the social and economic upheavals of its aftermath, not least the 1920 depression, the General Strike and the disastrous return to the gold standard at pre-war parity. ‘Victory at all costs’ was not simply rhetoric: men with skin in the game put serious thought into that vital undertaking.
The same cannot quite be said of Net Zero 2050.
Not since Churchill promised victory over Germany in his ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ speech of May 1940 has the UK set itself a more expensive or ambitious policy goal. The initial, official cost estimates for getting to net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050 range from £1.5 to £2.1 trillion. That equates to somewhere between 69% and 97% of pre-Covid GDP – 83% at the midpoint. By way of comparison, World War Two cost Britain about 84% of its 1939 GDP.
Of course, MPs in 1940 probably had a pretty good idea of what they were getting the country into. Like Churchill, many had served in the trenches during the Great War. Likewise they had lived through the social and economic upheavals of its aftermath, not least the 1920 depression, the General Strike and the disastrous return to the gold standard at pre-war parity. ‘Victory at all costs’ was not simply rhetoric: men with skin in the game put serious thought into that vital undertaking.
The same cannot quite be said of Net Zero 2050.
Worth reading the whole thing, particularly for anyone with no wish to saddle their children or grandchildren with the ludicrously destructive and hopelessly dishonest nonsense that is Net Zero.
2 comments:
I'd quite forgotten that Theresa May saddled us with this. She's got to be the worst PM ever.
I listened to a Radio 4 programme on new heating technology a few weeks ago. All very chirpy and upbeat, and the main point was how we will need creative new solutions with a mix of computer-controlled technologies for small groups of houses. Someone's going to make a pile of money out of all this, and it's not going to be the consumer.
Sam - you are right, unless some major technical advances are made, we consumers will pay through the nose for inferior domestic heating systems and that is far from being the only downside.
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