OUR successive governments have clearly had no idea what they were doing when in 2008 they firstly devised the Net-Zero-Emissions policy, then continued it without the least understanding of what it would mean to our daily life. They couldn’t be bothered to think it through before making their policy legal so they asked ‘experts’, the Climate Change Committee, to tell them how to get there.
The committee has produced a report: The Seventh Carbon Budget, and it seems that ‘getting there’ will be difficult, painful and costly. It has taken 393 pages and 142,691 words to explain how we will move into that far-off Net-Zero Nirvana. (That’s twice as long as the first Harry Potter book.) The Executive Summary alone runs to around 5,000 words.
There are one or two throwaway lines with which it is possible to disagree. ‘In many key areas, the best way forward is now clear,’ and ‘Net Zero will increase economic security against fossil fuel price shocks.’ Nothing we have heard yet about Net Zero is reassuring about economic security.
Briefly dealing with the parts that might have the most impact:
Energy, of course, will be renewable, nearly all from wind turbines and solar panels. ‘Electricity . . . replaces oil and gas across most of the economy, including EVs, buildings, and much of industry. This requires twice as much electricity as today by 2040.’
You might have got the impression that most of the world except for the USA is with us in this worry about climate doom, that most of the world has agreed that emissions must fall, therefore burning coal to make electricity must be stopped either now or next week. Well no, out there in the real world life is not like that.
‘The Philippines,’ for instance, ‘has a vast potential for coal resources just awaiting full exploration and development to contribute to the attainment of the country’s energy self- sufficiency programme.’ There is nothing about coal in the Report; I just thought we needed some occasional reference to reality.
There’s a stern comment about our houses. ‘UK homes are predominantly designed around gas heating and will need a one-off improvement to be suitable for heat pumps in many cases. This is a sizeable element of the total cost of Net Zero.’ It certainly is. They reckon £15,000 will set you up with a heat pump and an improvement in home energy efficiency, meaning, presumably, bigger radiators and thicker insulation.
Paying for an electric car we didn’t want then having to find another £15,000 for a heat pump system we didn’t ask for means a bribe will be essential. There are 28million UK households and 73 per cent use gas. The arithmetic is simple: the government will have to fork out 28million x 0.73 x £15,000 which is £306billion. Not likely, is it? Even less likely is the Report’s conclusion that heat pump teams will have to install 450,000 every year by 2030 and 1.5million every year by 2035. They’ll have to get used to working 20-hour days and seven-day weeks, besides recruiting a couple of million of the currently unemployed.
More about coal. ‘Indonesia has the world’s fifth-largest operating coal-fired power capacity of 52.31GW, with about 9.81GW more under construction.’
Every now and again the Report talks about a ‘Balanced Pathway’. One of them reaches to 2040, by which time ‘three-quarters of cars and vans and nearly two-thirds of heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) on the road being electric.’ The authors see this as beneficial because ‘savings on driving will support household budgets and be similar in magnitude to any additional costs from home energy over the period from 2025 to 2050 as a whole.’
Really? We’ll save so much buying an electric car that it will pay for higher energy prices? But aren’t energy prices supposed to be much lower when we go to ‘free’ wind and sun?
India is ‘building 30,000 MW of new coal-fired capacity, which will preserve coal’s status as India’s primary power source even after the construction boom.’ Just thought you ought to know.
There are many other necessities. We must go for less meat and dairy. Farmers will have to ‘diversify their income streams’. Good luck with that, added to their Inheritance Tax worries.
Somewhere deep in the interior of this huge tome (page 303 if you want to look) we stumble on the Citizens’ Advice Panel, which consisted of ‘26 members of the public (reflective of the UK population) from Birmingham and the surrounding area’. They were asked their opinion about the Report, but only after having ‘significant inputs from specialists on the subject of climate change, Net Zero and household choices’. You will not be surprised to hear that they were supportive.
‘Coal still supplies just over a third of global electricity generation even though it is the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel . . . Global coal use has rebounded strongly after plummeting at the height of the pandemic. It rose to an estimated 8.77billion tonnes in 2024, a record.’
The Report is clearly the result of very hard work, much detailed research and careful presentation by a dedicated team. It’s all there – what the government need to be doing and how they should do it, stage by stage. But when you look away from our little island, it is apparent that other nations are more concerned with providing their people with cheap energy.
One more example. China ‘began building 94.5 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-power capacity and resumed 3.3GW of suspended projects in 2024, the highest level of construction in the past 10 years . . . there is a risk that renewable energy will be treated as a supplementary power source “layered on top” of coal’.
The Climate Change Committee are doing what governments have requested: providing guidance for the UK moving to a Net Zero economy along with the other 196 nations who signed up to the Paris Agreement in 2015.
But all they have provided is an instruction book for a mythical world.
