12/22/2023 0 Comments Case biden optimismSunak’s objection to lockdown was not the policy per se, but wilfully blind way in which decisions were made. The net zero debate has not, yet, been honest about them. But an honest debate would ask how many pensioners we’d push into fuel poverty, how many excess winter deaths we’d tolerate, to send that message – and whether there might be a more cost-effective way of pursuing this important mission. We can set an example, a noble thing to do. If we’re serious about the climate then we cannot commit to an agenda whose costs are not politically deliverable But who are ‘we’? The UK contributes less than 2 per cent of global emissions: this could drop to zero tomorrow and the climate change trajectory dial would not move. The Cop27 debate is quickly sucked into logical fallacies, such as saying: If we do nothing, we fry. And it gives us cause to ask: are we ignoring the progress? Are we sure that this current world-beating trajectory is not enough? And how much pain are we willing to inflict upon households to hit an arbitrary target of net zero by 2050? There many more such signs of ‘bright green’ progress that deserve to be better-known, and considered alongside the ‘dark green’ alarmism of the traditional climate narrative. If we’re thinking about lives in the third world, then consider the below: Deaths from natural disasters unrelated to climate (tsunamis, earthquakes) have stayed flat. due to floods, droughts, wildfire, storms, hurricanes) are down some 90 per cent over a century. You can see how climate-related deaths (i.e. The Emergency Events Database contains a record of who dies from what. But it also means more tech, more flood defences – add it together and it means far fewer people dying of climate-related disasters. There are fewer people in poverty, dying from malnutrition. Global capitalism has spread wealth, especially in the developing world: this is why emissions in India and China are rising so much. To me, the most striking graph is the below: total carbon emissions are down to the horse-and-cart era, with per capita carbon emissions at their lowest since Palmerston was in No. Since then, levels have fallen 98 per cent. In the 1970s we warned in The Spectator about Britain belching so much sulphur dioxide that we were exporting it to Sweden. We’re used to seeing campaigns to highlight dangerous levels of PM2.5 in the air, but no one tells you that there is less of it now than at any time in living memory. It’s a stunning fall which looks set to continue: Since 2000, our GDP is up by 20 per cent while overall emissions from energy use are down by 20 per cent and household energy use is down even further. Then there are the wins in home efficiency and technology in general. For example, no G20 country has been decarbonising faster than Britain, as the below chart shows: Capitalism and tech have combined to bring huge advances in UK fuel efficiency and renewable energy – but it’s not a story told in schools (which perhaps explains why so many young people end up having such bleak views about their future). Britain, by the way, is doing very well on targets. But what would the implications be of the £50 billion-a-year net zero agenda? What impact would it have on the cost of living? Unless governments have this discussion with their electorates – and are sure that taxpayers are willing to foot the bill – then the targets they give each other at Cop summits are meaningless. That every PM needs to level with the public about trade-offs. ‘Our people know that if something is too good to be true,’ he wrote in his resignation letter to Boris Johnson, ‘then it’s not true.’ He quit not from disgust at who did what at the Carlton Club but on a slow-boiling point of principle: the need for candour. I looked at this in my latest Daily Telegraph column. The whole Cop27 agenda is a festival of fiscal cognitive dissonance: a malady that Sunak believes led Britain to its current economic mess. How can he justify a £50 billion-a-year net zero programme without anyone having worked out what difference, if any, the proposed extra taxes and regulations would make? How can a PM jet off to a luxury Egyptian resort and pledge this kind of cash – then fly back to London and constrain NHS and school spending, slash aid money, hike taxes, impose deep real-terms cuts in public pay – all to plug a £35 billion hole? No wonder Sunak said, at first, that he would not attend. Of all the world leaders at the Cop27 summit today, I suspect Rishi Sunak will be one of the least comfortable with the whole jamboree.
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