THE Climate and Nature Bill has its second reading in Parliament on Friday this week, January 24. The Private Member’s Bill poses the biggest threat to the future prosperity of the UK of any Bill ever to have been introduced and already has the public support of 192 MPs.
Yet there seems to have been little or no discussion of it in the mainstream media. (A quick Google search confirms this). Credit then to Bev Turner for her recent GB News video about it, which you can watch here.
Readers may recall that we covered the Bill on TCW a couple of weeks ago.
A quick recap:
The stated aim of the Bill is to ‘tackle the climate crisis and environmental disaster’.It will supposedly do this by:
- reducing the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions in line with ‘the UK’s proportionate share of the remaining global carbon budget for 1.5 deg C’;
- reversing the damage to the natural world by 2030;
- specifically including emissions embedded in imported goods in the UK’s budget.
That final provision is especially pernicious, as imported emissions account for nearly half our total emissions. Currently the Net Zero Act commits the UK only to reducing territorial emissions, i.e. those generated within our own geographical borders. Partly because of climate policies, a lot of manufacturing has been offshored. But because we import the goods instead of making them here, our consumption has not changed. The new Bill would demand that we actually reduce consumption.
The Bill does not specify what annual emissions should be, as it is cumulative emissions between now and 2050 that matter. However its own logic makes it clear that total emissions, including imports, will have to be cut by about two-thirds from today’s levels by 2030, and virtually eliminated in the following ten years.
What would this mean for the UK?
Three years ago, a Government commissioned report by UK FIRES looked in detail at the implications of a 45 per cent cut in territorial emissions by 2030. It concluded that it could be met only with ‘significant restraint’ across all sectors, an understatement if there was ever one. (UK FIRES is a collaboration between the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Nottingham, Bath and Imperial College London.)
The report stated that car use would need to be drastically cut, along with consumption of beef, lamb, milk and cheese. Heavy goods vehicle mileage would have to be cut by half. Almost all UK airports would have to be shut, leaving only Heathrow, Glasgow and Belfast. New gas boilers must be banned by 2028, and the use of construction materials and cement halved.
That was just for a 45 per cent cut.
Another UK FIRES report looked ahead to Net Zero in 2050. By then all consumption of beef and lamb must be phased out, and fertiliser use drastically reduced. All UK airports would shut and all shipping to the UK eliminated. The researchers said that people should wrap up warm in winter and heat rooms only if people are sitting in them.
The use of fossil fuels, of course, would have to be completely phased out. Meanwhile the construction industry would no longer be able to use cement, mortar, steel or plastics, and instead would have to focus on retrofit and adaptation of existing buildings, using recycled materials. The same would naturally apply to any infrastructure project.
But neither of these reports addresses the issue of imported goods, which would also have to be reduced virtually to zero, both because of embedded emissions and the ban on shipping and air travel.
Take food. We currently produce 54 per cent of the food we eat. Quite how we would manage to feed ourselves with half of our food supply gone does not seem to have occurred to the authors of the Bill, who say we can manage instead on ‘low carbon fruit, veg, nuts, pulses and grains’!
Given that the UK livestock and dairy industry will shut down too, with arable farming devastated by the ban on fertilisers, people will literally starve to death.
We will not be able to import cars. Nor will we be able to make them ourselves, as we will not have the high-quality steel needed once our blast furnaces are closed. We won’t be able to import the lithium batteries, rubber, plastics and all sorts of other components required. Forget about driving less, owning a car at all will soon be a thing of the past.
Then there’s important stuff like electrical equipment, industrial machinery, computers, specialist metals and so on. We tend to import much of this because we don’t have the specialised expertise and equipment necessary. In a sane world, countries import what they cannot make as well themselves, and specialise in what they are good at instead. Without access to the best equipment and technology, the UK economy would quickly go downhill.
In addition, raw materials, though less visible, are also of vital importance – chemicals for example. The Bill demands that the production and import of fossil fuels be ended ‘as rapidly as possible’, which invites the question of how we will make all the things that are part of everyday life, but which need fossil fuels for their manufacture.
Even if we had the expertise to make everything we buy from abroad, we would not able to build the factories needed without steel and cement, nor fill them with machinery. Then there are all of the diesel-powered diggers, bulldozers, dumper trucks and other construction equipment needed.
And where will Ed Miliband get his precious solar panels, wind turbines and batteries when we cannot import them from China?
As if that was not bad enough, the Bill insists that any development or activity that threatens nature must prioritise the protection of nature, calling for the UK Government to ‘restore and expand natural ecosystems, and protect and enhance biodiversity’. All activities must prioritise avoidance of the loss of nature.
This requirement is so wide-ranging that any loony judge could ban any development, be it new homes, roads or even wind farms. The clause would almost certainly be used to ‘rewild’ large areas of the country.
Quite apart from the devastating effects on lives, there is the question of how all of this will be imposed on the British public. How long will it be before there are controls on how much food we are allowed to eat, how many miles we can drive and how many goods we can buy? There will certainly have to be draconian import controls as well.
Will we all be allocated a carbon budget, which will be tracked by the Government via our credit cards and bank accounts? When we run out of carbon credits, will our accounts be frozen? It may sound like science fiction, but banks are already offering something similar.
Private Members’ Bills rarely pass into law. But even if this one does not, the ideas contained within it are likely to become public policy sooner or later.
As I wrote two weeks ago:
Net Zero is already doing great harm, but if this Bill becomes law, the country will be unrecognisable in ten years’ time. There will be energy and food shortages, industry will be decimated, private transport and foreign holidays a thing of the past. What we take for granted today will be unaffordable for most. And there will be nothing we can do about it.
