In June 2019, while the British Parliament was preoccupied with finding someone who could get Brexit done, it ‘nodded through’ an amendment to the country’s 2008 Climate Change Act.
‘Nodding through’ requires translation.
If you’ve watched enough British TV, you might be tempted to picture a dozing member of the House of Lords being discretely shaken awake by a his valet, who deferentially reminds him it’s time for his vote. “I believe this one is the ‘Yes’ button, Milord…”
It’s a bit less dramatic than that. A bill gets ‘nodded through’ Parliament when is it is deemed uncontroversial enough not to require much debate.
The amendment had been put forward as a minor update of the numbers already in the 2008 act.
The old version said the UK should by 2050 reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 80%.
The new number would be 100%.
That would allow the UK to get with a vogue then trending among the international policy elite — ‘Net Zero’.
Start to finish, discussion in the House of Commons lasted 88 minutes.
The amendment then went to the House of Lords.
A few of them were, actually, awake and paying attention.
Between naps, apparently, the Lords read The Financial Times.
The FT had gotten hold of a letter to then-Prime Minister Theresa May written by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond.
Hammond, the FT reported, “has warned Theresa May that her plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 will cost the UK over £1tn.”1
The high cost means “less money would be available for schools, police, hospitals and other areas of public spending.”
Hammond also warned that the Net Zero target “would render some industries economically uncompetitive without huge government subsidies.”
Net Zero would thus leave future Parliaments a time bomb.
They would someday be called upon to make the politically unpalatable choice of using public funds for bail-outs, or letting some iconic British industry, such as steel, die on their watch.
The Lords grumbled that the minor update of the 2008 act rather looked more like ‘a substantial change in policy’.
And they were being asked to pass it ‘without the full and proper scrutiny’.
The grumbles of the Lords got brushed aside.
‘Net Zero by 2050’ was written into UK law.
Fast forward to September 2023.
Net Zero, the quasi-religious moral crusade, had collided with economic and scientific reality.
An early symptomatic factoid was reported by the UK itself. The government’s August 2022 auction for new offshore windfarms attracted precisely zero bids.
From the wisdom of 2024, we can identify two factors that explain the rapid uptake of Net Zero in the decade of the 2010s.
First, Net Zero was a free lunch.
The British, when served a free lunch, evidently start with dessert. Their word for it is ‘cakeism’, from ‘having your cake and eating it, too’.
Back to the free lunch.
The subsidies for renewables weren’t the old-school government handouts of the sort given to farmers, arms makers, or anyone else with a well-connected lobby.
Net Zero handouts were investments. They would create growth and raise incomes. Practically pay for themselves.
Someday.
All the government needed to do was borrow the money.
Which, prior to 2022, it could do without paying interest. So why not? What could go wrong?
The second factor that made Net Zero by 2050 an easy sell for politicians can be expressed in six letters: IBGYBG.
To elucidate:
In the run-up to the 2008 financial meltdown, the 20-somethings in the City of London and on Wall Street who were engineering those synthetic mortgage-backed securities strongly suspected their creatures might prove worthless, even dangerous, in the future.
But they could gaze knowingly into their confrères eyes and assure each other that, before the CDOs blew up, their commissions would safely be on deposit in the Caymans. They’d be in their next gig.
"I'll be gone, you'll be gone."
IBGYBG.
After the bubble burst, Net Zero went from a free lunch to a hard choice.
For the British, hard choices were the sort of thing Margaret Thatcher used to talk about so unpleasantly.
In February, Olivier Blanchard, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, told the Lords that while he personally believes a transition to a low-carbon economy is necessary, it will be “much more expensive than people imagine”.2
It will involve a “substantial fiscal cost to achieve anything close to net-zero”.
“The public does not believe,” Blanchard went on, “or has not been made to understand, that is going to be costly for them. It is going to be costly and that message has to be sent out.”
Charles Goodhart, a founding member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, explained to the same Lords committee, “The problem is that net zero is very popular until people get asked to pay for it.”
Rupert Darwall gives credit to UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for breaking the Net Zero omertà, the vow of silence not to discuss cost.3
“We're not going to save the planet by bankrupting the British people.”
In September 2023, Sunak put back, by five years to 2035, a proposed ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars.
Sunak also announced a delay in a plan to require British homeowners to install heat pumps — about £10,000 at today’s prices — in lieu of natural gas water heaters. Which the British call ‘boilers’.
The import of Sunak’s policy tweaks depended, as it does in the UK, on which tabloid you read.
Sunak had ‘watered down a number of green measures’ It was ‘major climbdown’. It was a ‘minor retreat’. He was ‘rowing back’. Making a ‘U-turn’.
Whatever he did, Sunak put Net Zero on the back foot, to use an idiom from the largely incomprehensible sport of cricket.
The Oxford American Dictionary provides a helpful translation for English speakers: to be on the defensive, or at a disadvantage.4
Reactions from the climate-concerned were sufficiently hysterical that Sunak’s Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, went on the BBC to explain her boss’s apostasy: “We're not going to save the planet by bankrupting the British people.”
A different Lord bemoaned that Britain had “lost its clear global climate leadership.”
The UK may be leading the race to Net Zero.
The question is, why would anyone want to follow?
In late 2019, a collaboration between the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Nottingham, Bath and Imperial College London, UK FIRES, decided to take up the unanswered question of the Lords and give Net Zero Britain 2050 a little more ‘proper scrutiny’.
The UK Climate Change Act contains two big fat weasel words.
The first is ‘net’.
I’ll get around to the second.
As anyone with a creative accountant knows, ‘net’ is — how best to put this — a flexible concept.
Perhaps because it is funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, UK FIRES took a lamentably hard-line approach to ‘net’ as used in Net Zero accounting.
Those engineering and physical sciences nerds required Britain to reach zero using proven technology.
Hand-waving was not allowed. No miraculous breakthroughs in carbon capture or storage technologies. Just what we have now. Only more of it.
The happy state of CO₂ balance would have to be achieved by reducing emissions, which explains the title of their report, Absolute Zero.5
I may not be around to visit 2050 Britain.
But I may get to see it on the Syfy channel.
In some TV series set in a near-future dystopia.
The proud sea-faring nation that once ruled the waves? No más.
At least no container ships coming in and out of port. “Although there are a few military ships run by nuclear reactors, we currently don’t have any large electric merchant ships.”
Getting to 2050 Britain may be a problem, anyway. No flights.
I don’t mean I’ll have a problem booking one. I mean no aviation.
And I’m reliably informed that the packet ship that took my ancestors from Yorkshire is no longer in service.
“Although there are lots of new ideas about electric planes, they won’t be operating at commercial scales within 30 years, so zero emissions means that for some period, we’ll all stop using airplanes.”
Now, British cuisine has improved a lot since the bad old days. Food rationing in Britain didn’t end until July, 1954, nine years after the end of World War II. Meat was the last item to be de-rationed.
That’ll be back. The Climate Change Act, the authors of Absolute Zero explain, “requires that we stop doing anything that causes emissions regardless of its energy source.”
Grass, those science nerds point out, is an energy source. “This requires that we stop eating beef and lamb.”
Here is 2050 Britain on a grid. The key is the bottom row. No more fossil fuels.
The authors Absolute Zero, by the way, favor Net Zero as a policy, believing “committing to zero emissions creates tremendous opportunities.”
In the September 2023 speech, Sunak said “We’ve stumbled into a consensus about the future of our country that no one seems to be happy with.”
Like the rain, bad economic news in Britain is sufficiently frequent it’s barely noticed.
According to figures released by the UK Office of National Statistics on 15 February 2024, the British economy is once again in recession.
Martin Wolf, the well-known writer for the Financial Times, has summed up the UK’s long-term economic performance in a single — very British — word: ‘dreadful’.
Productivity growth, for one thing, flatlined in the UK after 2007.
As Paul Krugman has said, productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it’s nearly everything.
With no increase in productivity, there’s small hope real wages will rise.
A December 2023 study by the UK Resolution Foundation looked at the ‘fifteen years of economic stagnation’, and found those years have left the average British household £8,300 worse off than those in France or Germany.6
The ‘UK Productivity Paradox’ has, at least, provided full employment for a number of academic economists.
For years, they have searched diligently for something that changed around 2007 that explains the paradox.
One scholar investigated the hypothesis that British workers started spending too much time on iPhones.
Other suspects include the switch toward a service economy; the Conservative Party’s pre-occupation with austerity in the early 2010s; work-life balance (and more recently work-from-home); the deficiency of non-elite education; and the Equality Act of 2010, which limited the ability of employers to hire and fire as they see fit.
The Paradox is, no doubt, as the French would say, over-determined.
Two other things suspiciously coincide with the Paradox years.
One is the depletion of easy-to-get-at North Sea oil and gas, which around 2005 turned the UK from an energy exporter to an energy importer.
The UK imports not only oil and gas but electricity, that mainly from (nuclear-powered) France and (hydro-powered) Norway. UK electricity imports increased 154.4% between 2005 and 2019.
That despite, or perhaps because of, the windmills.
Now, there’s a bit more oil and gas that can be squeezed out of the North Sea.
In September, Sunak approving drilling in Rosebank, the largest undeveloped oil and gas field in the North Sea. The Rosebank field is majority-owned by the Norwegian state-owned energy company Equinor. It’s northwest of the Shetlands:
Prior to Sunak’s action, which he justified on the grounds of energy security, the government’s faith in Net Zero was so unshakeable that oil and gas were generally written off as doomed industries. There was little point in investing or supporting them.
The Rosebank licenses are likely to be challenged in court under the Climate Act.
History footnote: The UK once had oil derricks in Sherwood Forest, during World War II. As of a few years ago, a few nodding donkeys were still there:
And then there’s fracking.
The UK tried fracking once or twice, but didn’t like it.
As a child might say about broccoli.
Tiny tremors resulted from two experimental fracks, both near Blackpool in Lancashire. One was in 2011, the other in 2018.
In California or Japan, public reaction to tremors equally small would be a shrug.
Only the second one, which lasted all of 3 seconds, could be felt by people standing on the ground. The other tremors were recorded only by instruments.
They measured peak ground motion at 8.2 mm/second.
Which is considerably below the 15 mm/second limit the UK put on vibrations caused in the course of ordinary construction.
But after amplification by the alarmed and the media, the tremors were strong enough put fracking on indefinite hold.
The second suspicious coincidence is that the era of flat productivity coincides uncomfortably with the quest for Net Zero.
The reasoning here is straightforward: When your investment is going into wind turbines, it may not be going into much else, like machine tools.
In December, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) finally started estimating the drag Net Zero has had, and presumably will have, on economic growth.
The OECD’s estimate, which I suspect is low, is that Net Zero will leave the world economy 3.7% smaller in 2050 than it otherwise would have been.
Aside: What I find astonishing is that, after the breaking of the Net Zero omertà about costs, there has yet to be a call to recheck, objectively this time, the IPCC’s math about the putative benefits of CO₂ reduction. That remains the article of faith on which the entire edifice of Net Zero is constructed.
Mainstream reporting on Net Zero resembles sports writing: it’s a race.
There’s even a leaderboard with the international standings.
The UK has earned a third-place bronze and a place on the podium.
And Bhutan and Suriname, being impoverished nations consisting largely of trees, were hardly playing fair. Both have already achieved their Net Zero goals.
Sadly, the high marks awarded the UK also rely on an accounting trick.
This one is considerably more consequential than trees.
The second weasel word in the UK Climate Change Act is ‘territorial’.
As Ross Clark of The Spectator explains succinctly, territorial emissions are those “those physically spewed out within the United Kingdom.”
In the 19th century, Britain famously exported its manufactured goods.
In the 21st century, Britain is busy exporting its manufacturing base.
Consider steel, one of those industries that no doubt bothered the Chancellor of the Exchequer back in 2019.
In January this year, the last two legacy blast furnaces in the UK were shut down at the Port Talbot Steelworks in Wales.
2,800 workers lost their jobs, effective immediately.
According to UK Steel, an industry group, carbon and climate levies add up to £175 per ton to the cost of steel made in the UK, about a 30% mark-up.
So the UK now imports the majority of the steel it uses from China and India.
Where it is made in one of the above-mentioned legacy blast furnaces burning coking coal.
Tata, the Indian conglomerate that owns Port Talbot, is in fact opening a new coke-burning blast furnace at its Kalinganagar industrial complex.
In India.
But emissions there don’t count against the UK’s score.
The British government, in its wisdom, has handed Tata £500m to install electric arc furnaces at Port Talbot.
These are used for scrap metal, which evidently the UK still knows how to manufacture.
But they also require inputs of raw pig iron, which will have to be imported.
Jingye, the Chinese company that owns ‘British’ Steel, would like to get the same deal out of the government, for its Scunthorpe plant in North Lincolnshire.
But the fulfillment of Jingye’s dream has gotten complicated.
The company has been told that if it wants enough electricity to run one big arc furnace, it will have to wait until 2034 to get a grid connection.
In January, the New York Times profiled a British tech start-up, Paragraf, which makes makes sensors used to measure magnetic fields.
Paragraf shelled out £1 million to jump a queue so it could get a grid connection in Huntingdon, near Cambridge.
It also, by the way, also considered relocating to the U.S.
The problems of a British manufacturing firm don’t end when it gets a grid connection.
In the UK, industrial electricity rates are more than double those in the US and among the top 5 in Europe:
When Tata gets its electric arc furnace, in addition to paying for raw electricity, it will pay a Climate Change Levy, a Renewables Obligation, and payments under the Emissions Trading Scheme.
Much of the steel used in Britain’s wind turbines, by the way, came from Port Talbot.
As for cars, the UK still makes them, even if many of the iconic brands are foreign-owned.
Jaguar, for example, is owned by the above-mentioned Tata. Rolls-Royce Motor Cars is owned by BMW. Aston Martin is a London-listed company whose largest shareholders are Chinese and Saudi.
A few years back, in 2015, the statistic was that 2 million internal combustion engines were manufactured in the UK.
That was then.
Last year, the German car industry, seeing disaster looming in its future, lobbied successfully against the proposed ban on petrol and diesel cars in the EU.
Those clever Germans came up with an escape clause that allows them to keep making internal combustion engines.
Those are now pardoned if they are capable of being run on synthetic ‘e-fuels’ manufactured from hydrogen and carbon dioxide.
Sunak’s ‘U-turn’ on petrol cars, in fact, merely lined up the UK deadline with that of the EU.
None of which stopped UK politicians from passing a ‘ZEV’ mandate last year.
In 2024, manufacturers must guarantee that 22% of cars they sell in Britain are pure electric.
By 2030, 80% of new cars and 70% of new vans sold in Britain are supposed to be zero emission. The percentage increases to 100% in 2035.
The UK government will also outlaw sales of hybrids after 2035.
Of course, the manufacture of ‘zero emissions’ cars is anything but.
Batteries account for nearly half the cost of manufacturing a new EV.
90% of those batteries come from China, where they are made using coal-fired electricity.
But that won’t count against the UK’s ‘territorial’ score on the leaderboard.
UK household electricity consumption is the lowest it has been since 1989.
Which is little cause for celebration, since it stems from high prices.
In 2023, the price for residential electricity in the UK, per kilowatt-hour, was three times the average in the US.
In a November 2023 survey, 38% percent of Britons called their utility bills ‘challenging’.
Some 6.5 million of 28.4 million UK households were, according to the government, in fuel poverty, defined as ‘satisfactory heating’ taking more than 10% of their income.
British residential utility ratepayers have proved convenient source of government funds. Collectively, about £9 billion each year gets added onto their bills in VAT (a sales tax) and for fees that support various social and environmental programs.
The UK's electricity industry, once nationalized in 1947, was privatized in 1990. A government watchdog, Ofgem, was created to protect consumers from price gouging by the newly-created private utilities.
Ofgem’s mission has gotten very creepy in the era of Net Zero.
Aside: Similar to that of the EPA, which now seems to be in charge of industrial policy in the US.
The first creep dates back to 2010.
That creep really does have to be admired for its legal ingenuity and sheer brazenness.
In the Labour government’s Energy Act of 2010, the language was changed to expand Ofgem’s consumer protection mission to existing and future customers.
That is to say, the unborn. Alabama, take note.
In 2023, the government gave Ofgem an explicit statutory duty to promote Net Zero.
The ‘Big Six’ utility companies are still private and nominally operating in a market.
But Ofgem, the regulator, now effectively administers prices.
Ofgem also appears suspiciously willing in future to fiddle with rate structures to nudge British households off natural gas and onto time-of-day and congestion electricity pricing.
In 1644, English jurist Sir Edward Coke famously ruled, "A man's house is his castle."
That castle will evidently soon come with a smart meter remote-controlled by Ofgem.
In his September speech, Sunak said “It cannot be right for Westminster to impose such significant costs on working people, and to interfere so much in people’s lives, without a properly informed national debate.”
That debate is unlikely to happen before the next general election, expected in the fall.
Although a few weeks ago, the gadfly Reform UK party did pipe up and say it thinks there should be a national referendum on Net Zero.
A more modest proposal might be to amend the Climate Change Act so that Net Zero is aspirational target, not a legally binding commitment.
As the law stands now, any UK activist group can take the government to court and claim that something — by their reasoning, at least — is not consistent with the 2050 net zero target.
The proposed third runway at Heathrow airport, for example, narrowly survived a court challenge only because the Airports National Policy Statement predated the 2019 amendment to the Climate Change Act.
Reform UK recently hit a polling high of 14%.
But Reform UK’s poll numbers must be interpreted in light of the profound desire of the British people to vote for anyone other than the Tories.
The Conservatives have been in power 14 years.
As Oliver Cromwell observed to a different Parliament, that feels like enough.
No less than eight in ten Britons, 83%, say they are dissatisfied with the way the Government is running the country.
Labour is the first party that comes to mind with the virtue of being other than the Tories.
In a February 2024 Ipsos poll, 47% of Britons who say they intend to vote also say they intend vote for a Labour candidate for Parliament.7
The polls show less conviction that Labour represents the change the voters want.
Britons feel the most important issues facing their country are, in order: the economy, the NHS, inflation, immigration, and housing.
‘Climate change’ no longer makes the list, as it once did. Unless we consider it rolled into ‘the economy’ and ‘inflation’.
A Labour victory would presumably be good news for the Net Zero crusade.
The Labour Party gets the credit, or the blame, for the original 2008 Climate Change Act. Although Friends of the Earth helpfully drafted the preliminary legislation.
Labour’s 2024 party platform says it wants to ‘Make Britain a Clean Energy Superpower’.
It calls for the UK to quadruple offshore wind; double onshore wind; and triple solar. All by 2030.
The Labour platform’s most arresting bit is a pledge to stop using any natural gas for generating electricity by 2030.
The UK’s first carbon capture and storage (CCS) project isn’t scheduled to come online until 2035.
The Labour platform is silent about how — or whether — it intends to back up the renewables until then.
Hard choices are not the stuff of political campaigns.
No democratic majority, it would seem, will tolerate the cutbacks in their quality of life necessary to maintain the headlong dash to carbon neutrality in 27 years’ time.
Which goes a long way to explaining why the specter currently haunting Europe is the specter of populism. In many countries, proportional voting pushes up protest parties like daisies.
Britain’s ‘first past the post’ system, or better or worse, works to maintain a two-party duopoly.
I would suggest that the UK’s time-honored class divisions are giving way to the newer US two-class model.
There’s the elite, which has a monopoly on money, education and power.
And everybody else.
As we know from the history of anti-populism in the United States8, the default response of the learned and virtuous elite to a challenge is usually a paroxysm of scolding.
In particular, populists must be castigated as people who foolishly refuse the future.
At some point, the British voters might actually to be asked if they want energy system dominated by renewables. Or something else.
Like prosperity.
It’s pretty clear they can’t have both.
But the hard choice should be theirs to make.
The Financial Times, 5 June 2029, "UK net zero emissions target will ‘cost more than £1tn’". Link$.
For the history, see Darwall’s excellent 76-page “The Folly of Climate Leadership,” published in December 2023 by the RealClear Foundation. PDF.
A cricket bat is shaped like a long flat paddle. If the ball is bowled — pitched — too close to the batter, the bat can be used defensively. The batter holds the bat more-or-less straight down; shifts his or her weight onto the back foot; and hits the ball with a upward, scooping motion. A few skillful batters actually like to hit off the back foot. The closest thing in American baseball is perhaps a bunt.
Resolution Foundation & Centre for Economic Performance, LSE, Ending Stagnation: A New Economic Strategy for Britain, Resolution Foundation, December 2023.
See anything by one of my favorite authors, Thomas Frank, most recently The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism (2020).